October 2, 2025
BlogKnow Your Microsoft Execs: Meet Judson Althoff
He’s not a household name like Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer or Satya Nadella. But Judson Althoff — Microsoft’s latest exec to get a “CEO” title — now runs the entirety of Microsoft’s Commercial business. And that business comprises most of the company (about $220 billion of the company’s $282 billion in revenues in fiscal 2025).
Althoff has been at Microsoft for almost 13 years. Before that, he was with Oracle, heading up worldwide alliances, channels and embedded sales for 11 years.
In 2021, Microsoft already had begun moving Althoff up the org chart. At that time giving then-Executive Vice President Althoff the reins of Microsoft unified Global Sales and Marketing with its Worldwide Commercial Business. With that move, Microsoft was doing what a number of its competitors were: Flattening the hierarchy (a bit) and consolidating leadership.
Different company watchers have different takes on the significance of Althoff’s latest promotion, announced on Oct. 1.
Some are saying they see the move as a succession set-up play. As far as I know, there hasn’t been much, if any, public chatter about Nadella being ready to cede the CEO crown after 11 years in that role. But by giving Althoff the expanded role of leading commercial sales, marketing, operations, and engineering globally, Microsoft might be giving him a test-run as the next CEO of the company, some speculate.
In his memo about Althoff’s promotion, Nadella said the reorg will “allow our engineering leaders and me” to focus on technical work “across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation.” Maybe this transition is the precursor to Nadella making a long, slow exit, similar to the way Gates became Chief Software Architect, relinquishing the CEO title to Ballmer back in 2000 (and only finally giving up his day-to-day duties in 2007)? Or maybe Nadella and Althoff will be co-CEOs at some point, with Nadella remaining the board chair?
Nadella in (Non-Founder) Founder Mode?
GeekWire had an interesting take, postulating that Nadella will now be freed up to take on more of a “Founder Mode” position, meaning he will be able to have more of a hands-on approach to areas (AI, AI, and more AI) in which he’s most interested.
“Nadella’s always been more engineering-focused. It’s one of the things people talked about when he succeeded Ballmer,” said Directions on Microsoft analyst Jim Gaynor. “Meanwhile, Althoff has success in sales and commercial business. It really can just be a matter of placing Althoff where he’s strong so Nadella can focus on his own strengths and passions where they benefit Microsoft.”
Althoff is not the only exec at Microsoft besides Nadella to have been granted a CEO title. Phil Spencer, CEO of Gaming, Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn, and Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, are part of that club, as well.
Althoff’s promotion comes on the heels of his two-month sabbatical following the latest round of Microsoft layoffs of an estimated 9,000 people, many of them in Althoff’s sales organization.
