Nadella Named CEO

In Feb. 2014, Microsoft’s board of directors named Satya Nadella, a Microsoft veteran, as its third Chief Executive Officer (CEO), immediately replacing Steve Ballmer. The appointment of a Microsoft executive along with Gates’s new role as an advisor to the CEO, indicates Nadella will likely continue to execute on the devices and services strategy formalized by Ballmer’s reorganization of the company’s businesses in 2013. However, the appointment of John Thompson, a former independent director, as chairman of the board, and the pending addition of another independent director from ValueAct Capital signal the board will be closely watching Nadella’s execution of the strategy.

Nadella New CEO

Nadella has been at Microsoft for 22 years and has worked in a variety of roles, where he has influenced several products and services. Most recently, Nadella led the Cloud and Services division (formerly Server and Tools) after Bob Muglia left the company in 2011.

Previous roles for Nadella included overseeing engineering for the Bing search platform, Microsoft’s ad platform, e-commerce technologies, and the MSN Portal. He joined the company’s Online Services division in 2007 after holding a variety of positions in the Dynamics division, beginning with its 2001 formation as Microsoft Business Solutions, including head of the bCentral small business Web service, chief of research and development, and division head (for roughly six months). Notably, Nadella oversaw the Project Green technology consolidation effort, which originally aimed to produce a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) product, but subsequently scaled back to building user interface and other platform components now shared by the company’s four major ERP products. He first joined Microsoft in 1992 from Sun Microsystems.