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Reports Say Satya Nadella Is Microsoft's Next CEO
Nerval's Lobster writes "Microsoft's next CEO will be Satya Nadella, if current reports prove accurate. According to Re/code, which drew its information from "numerous sources close to Microsoft," Nadella could officially assume the role in early February. Meanwhile, anonymous sources speaking to Bloomberg suggested that co-founder Bill Gates could be forced to give up his longtime chairman role. Nadella (again, if confirmed) seems a logical choice for Microsoft. He's been with the company for more than twenty years, eventually becoming executive vice president of its Cloud and Enterprise division. The enterprise remains a key—perhaps the key — customer segment for Microsoft, especially as its mobile and consumer efforts (excluding the Xbox) have floundered in recent years; in order to retain those business clients, Nadella and his team embarked on the creation of 'Cloud OS,' the platform that powers Microsoft's large-scale cloud services such as SkyDrive, Azure, and Office 365. Under his guidance, Microsoft's revenue from cloud services has grown by several billion over the past few years, so he's shown that he can expand a business. In addition, his technical background could afford him a measure of respect from Microsoft's legions of engineers and developers. But if he's ultimately tapped for the CEO seat, Nadella faces one of the toughest jobs in the technology industry: not only does he need to craft a plan that will allow Microsoft to grow and prosper in an integrated, holistic manner—he'll need to do it while guiding the company through the massive internal reorganization initiated by his predecessor, Steve Ballmer."
let B.G. become CEO again. founders are a better choice (as a rule, which means it also has exceptions ofc)
If he brings back the start button.
Who cares? I'm more interested in the rumors that they are scheming to oust Bill Gates as Chairman...
I thought Microsoft was trying to re-brand itself as a devices and services player. So, what does it mean when they bring on board a technical, enterprise guy as the CEO?
To me, it would seem that they're ignoring everything Apple has taught the industry -- usability, good design, and marketing.
Instead, they'll become the next IBM and be a large behemoth who just does enterprise tech "stuff".
Quite sad. And I'm pretty sure eventually they'll eventually spin off their Xbox division.
Seems like tech companies are trending towards ultraslim CEOs. Like literally dudes who look like they just stepped out of a concentration camp. I blame Apple :)
Give the users what they want on the desktop. Give them what they loved about Windows 7 back and give it them for free. Maybe go so far as to offer a free copy of the previous version of Office to everyone who suffered through Windows 8.1 or 8.0.
Look how profitable they were last quarter. Mighty fine corpse, eh?
"pivot to Devices and Services" -- That's Ballmerese for "doubling down on your core incompetencies"
Why is Microsoft trying so hard to compete against highly capable Apple and Google? It's a symptom of 15 years of typical Ballmerist "ooh, shiny.. gimme! I want one too!!!"?
They just aren't institutionally set up to do so.
Plan for incoming Microsoft CEO:
0) Assume your predecessor was wrong about everything until proven otherwise.
1) Halt the re-org until you know what you're doing.
2) in addition to "Devices and Services", how about, uh, ***Business Software***???? Now that I work in a mid-large company there is all sorts of ugly and junky application software whose capabilities and quality makes Microsoft Office seem like, oh, a properly-working HAL 9000.
Instead of throwing themselves up in a pathetic siege against highly capable, wealthy and motivated, Apple and Google, why not shoot for a much softer target: Oracle (other than the relational database). People hate them more than Microsoft and their products are poor.
Microsoft's primary focus should be "Diversified Business Software": there is a large range of software across many areas with much lower existing standard capability and quality than in the consumer market. MS has the scale to attack this heavily, could actually be good here, and make money consistently.
3) Windows. Oy vey. Microsoft will remain a primary business software company forever. Deal with it. So, a plan.
* Release Windows 7.5, backporting all the internal improvements of the Win 8 series which can fit, keeping the Win 7 interface. Expect all your business to upgrade to this, and skip Win 8. It will be the new XP, and you'll support it for at least a decade. Deal with it.
* Release Windows 8.5 with slightly-less bogosity, and lower your expectations.
* Much more seriously, go to the Research group and academia and work exceptionally hard to make a truly great, innovative, non-touch desktop interface, possibly including other physical input modalities (alternate mice, hardware, who knows?) Make Windows 9 (or 10) a really big deal. Not different for merely the sake of difference, but unmistakably GOOD. Recognize the physical realities of the world and humans.
Microsoft can Do The Needful.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Who cares?
Well you would care if you lost your job due to the H1B scam. After all, we have a shortage of skilled programmers in the americas right? Oh we don't...
Om, nomnomnom...
The enterprise remains a keyâ"perhaps the key â" customer segment for Microsoft
Really. Microsoft abandoned the enterprise market when they released Windows 7.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Microsoft's revenue from cloud services has grown by several billion over the past few years, so he's shown that he can expand a business.
This only proves the person was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Sure there is some skill and intelligence involved. but sitting in a chair and filing important sounding decisions while your market and revenue grow do not always imply competence.By that logic, in some respects Ballmer is a god.
From wikipedia:
Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's annual revenue has surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income has increased 215 percent to $23 billion, and its gross profit of 75 cents on every dollar in sales is double that of Google or International Business Machines Corp.[20] In terms of leading the company's total annual profit growth, Ballmer's tenure at Microsoft (16.4 percent) has surpassed the performances of other well-known CEOs such as General Electric's Jack Welch (11.2 percent) and IBM's Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. (2 percent).[18]
Silence is a state of mime.
Thoughts on all of this:
1. John Thompson (former Symantec CEO) as Chairman? Oh no. Symantec produced more steaming piles of crap called "software" than any company really has a right to. This wouldn't bode well.
2. People can say what they want about consumer devices, but enterprise software is worth LOTS of money. Having a guy like Nadella that understands a lot of the enterprise angle running things is a good idea. Yeah, you can sell people a phone (with a final cost of some $500), and a bunch of $1 and $2 applications, and some fraction of a $50 monthly cell bill. OR, you can sell them an OS for each computer in the place at a cost of $30-$50, an indispensable office suite for $150 per seat, client licenses for file servers, active directory, databases, web servers, and the like, PLUS the costly licenses for the server software, PLUS annual maintenance. It's easy to see where the cash is, and it's not in consumer devices.
3. I can see why people might prefer Windows 7 to Windows 8, but most of the time people are speaking from ignorance, never having used Windows 8 (or having used it only with a mouse). It's a different beast entirely with a touch screen. As for usability, Apple is on a downward slide, IMHO. We're getting nothing but gratuitous changes in every release now, and Mavericks positively ruined an otherwise serviceable 5-year-old MacBook by destroying its performance. Windows Phone 8 is really nice, especially in the way it emphasizes the productivity uses of the phone over games and glitz. It's a lot tighter resource-wise than Android for sure.
4. Microsoft spends like four times as much on R&D as Apple does. Apple's a rather minor player in this regard.
I think Microsoft could be positioned for a real resurgence with the right leadership.
Find me this mythical person if he exists. We need to cut him open and find out the part of his brain that doesn't exist or has atrophied in the rest of the electorate's brains.
Three Microsoft things I hear about the least, SkyDrive, Azure, and Office 365. Does Microsoft's "Cloud and Enterprise division" equate to Hyper-V?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
For a little while, I was afraid that Microsoft would choose someone from outside of their own toxic corporate culture and regain at least a little bit of the dominance they once had. Now that it seems likely they will choose someone who has been drinking the Microsoft KoolAid for several decades, I am suddenly much less worried. Then again, these "leaks" could just be schemes from the board to get the press, business writers, and public at large to critique each candidate for them like one giant focus group.
Just posting agian to complain about Slashdot/dice posting links to Buisness Intelligence. Terrible. Horrible. Absolutely hate it with all my being. Stop actually trying to write terrible articles and focus on your core strengths: editing story summaries terribly.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
They United States is a fork of England, and thus must be equivalent, yes?
MS SQL left Sybase in its dust a *long* time ago.
I have to wonder what will happen to their outsourcing efforts if a person from India is made CEO? Microsoft already has well over 10,000 jobs outsourced to India as it is now? That being said their enterprise division generally seems to be run much more competently than their other divisions and he may well be the best candidate for the job.
Back in the days, a few microsofties who worked with/for this guy would chime in with some interesting observation.
Now? It's all bullshit comments, including this one by me.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Nadella used to run Bing. Bing had a leadership vacuum after he left (and still does), but it didn't do all that great while he was there.
Microsoft's approach to Bing upper management is very strange. Microsoft sends people there, but you never hear about them while they're there. You hear about them after they're promoted to better parts of Microsoft. Mark Penn was brought in to turn around Bing, and accomplished little there. Now he heads Microsoft Advertising. Qi Lu ran Bing for a while, and now he's head of Applications and Services. So failing to turn Bing around doesn't seem to hurt executive careers at Microsoft.
Who would have guessed that Billg lacks the balls to bring in an outsider and instead will name yet another tired old insider retread to the job. Here is hoping that the fail is massive, even eclipsing Ballmer.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Come to think of it, besides being the titular guy in charge of it, how do we know that Nadella understands enterprise?
I'm just being too lazy to look, but shouldn't there be signs that he's not just a figurehead? You know, memos, presentations, letters to the public or to the staff. Anything?
Have a nice time.
They just haven't been forgotten yet.
Well, zombies were all the rage a few years ago, so it would make sense that MS is going zombie after everyone else...
Be seeing you...
Elop did a fantastic job managing Nokia.
You realize that at a company like Microsoft, where salaries are managed from the top down... H1Bs not only tend to make the same as natural born American employees.. but can actually cost more as it is usually the sponsoring company who pays for the lawyers & paperwork & fees to get an H1B visa for the eventual employee, right?
The above being said by a white, natural born American who works at a high tech company who is one of those who is attacked for using H1Bs, and who detests racists like you who constantly scream "Dey turk err jurbs!"
That's never happened to me, not even once.
Ok, I believe you. So? All it means is that Win 8 fails erratically.
Also, I never use the bulit-in photo viewer.
So your argument in favor of Win 8 is that if you purchase enough software and replace enough of it it can be made not to suck. That's an endorsement.
You realize that at a company like Microsoft, where salaries are managed from the top down... H1Bs not only tend to make the same as natural born American employees.. but can actually cost more as it is usually the sponsoring company who pays for the lawyers & paperwork & fees to get an H1B visa for the eventual employee, right?
You are thinking small scale. It's not about the cost to a small company or department. H1Bs threaten to lower wages across the board due to plentiful competition, less ability to move to another company, and allowing company HR to threaten someone else taking your job. Some of the savings then go to board members of large corporations, to political lobbying, and to shareholder profits.
Their goal should be: "How do we make a fantastic interface for a desktop operating system made for business software". And actually implement it. (I personally have some ideas with alternate mice). And write and sell that business software.
Just saying, some of the comments on here are frankly disgusting and, surprisingly, not all just AC.