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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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Skydrive (soon to be OneDrive, after their settlement with Sky Network) is more than a Dropbox knockoff. It's more similar to Google Drive. Namely, it's an online storage area for documents that aren't tied to a particular computer. Edit that Word document on your Windows Phone? Save it to Skydrive, and it'll magically appear on your tablet or desktop.
Office 365 is just following in the steps (or alongside of) Adobe in offering a continual-pricing model. You get all the upgrades, and the up-front price is cheaper than a perpetual license. But you'll pay the annual fee perpetually. It DOES cover up to 5 machines. Whether it's what any given person wants is up to them. Being the family dad, I can see the appeal of having the software available for everyone in the house to use, on whatever machine. I don't like the recurring cost, though.
Active Directory has displaced pretty much all the other directory services. There's some suckage with it, but less suckage than their former competitors.
Exchange! Microsoft was the one company that, over time, figured out how email-contacts-calendar-todo-scheduling should really work in an in-house environment. (Google's suite in the cloud works well, but companies won't want a cloud solution for corporate-wide use.) I hated Outlook forever. DESPISED IT. In the end, the Outlook-Exchange combo does a lot of very valuable things. As you note, Lotus is hardly a competitor, and POP3/IMAP solutions are stone knives and bearskins compared to Exchange/Outlook.
The rumors of Microsoft's demise are premature. They need some fresh leadership, to be sure. But there's lots of talent and lots of research at Microsoft, backed up by their entrenchment in a lot of companies' infrastructure. It'll be a long time replacing all of that.
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.