Satya Nadella named
Microsoft’s new CEO
Microsoft’s Board of Directors has named a 22-year company veteran as its next chief executive officer.
Satya Nadella, 46, was appointed on Feb. 4 as its third CEO in Microsoft’s 39- year history. He succeeds founder Bill Gates and most recently Steve Ballmer.
Nadella, who colleagues characterize as a soft-spoken consensus builder, was born in India but moved in his youth to the U. S. He earned a computer science degree at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a masters in business administration at the University of Chicago.
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Nadella has been in charge of Microsoft’s enterprise and cloud businesses for much of his extensive career at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.
Bill Gates has stepped aside from his role as chairman of the board to work directly with Nadella as his special advisor. Director John Thompson, who led the CEO recruitment process, will replace Gates as Board chairman.
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Nadella realizes that he is taking on a very challenging assignment. The Board expects him to remold the world’s largest software company into the hardware world of designing and selling mobile computers, smartphones, and touch tablets.
Microsoft is currently in second place in the public cloud/sync/archive electronic market, behind Amazon’s WebServices. They recently came out with Windows 8 software for the touch computer/tablet market.
With Microsoft’s recent purchase of Nokia and its Lumia smartphone line, Nadella will have to decide whether the company should remain in the volatile and highly competitive smartphone business.
“Nadella needs to start from scratch and think about what the company should be,” Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen said. He has squared off against Microsoft in the past during the Internet Explorer browser wars of the late 1990’s.
And Matt McIlwain, an investment analyst at Madrona Venture Group, Seattle, agrees. “Nadella needs to take a step back and take a fresh view of where Microsoft can win,” he believes.
