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Reports Say Satya Nadella Is Microsoft's Next CEO

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the of-insiders-expressing-an-opinion dept.

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."

13 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. here's a suggestion by etash · · Score: 3, Funny

    let B.G. become CEO again. founders are a better choice (as a rule, which means it also has exceptions ofc)

    1. Re:here's a suggestion by Zynder · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I know this is just some good old fashion racist bullshit but I just had to respond because I've heard this kind of rant many times. I also have a history of feeding those poor starving trolls of any nationality. It takes less than a penny a day! I know stupidity and racism go hand in hand but I'm going to analyze your argument for our readership. Please follow along:

      If we just let all the Africans starve, maybe they wouldn't keep having hundreds of kids they don't have food and water for.

      This is blaringly obviously NOT EFFECTIVE. Those people are so poor that fucking is about the only thing they can do. It is free and because they have little education, they evidently can't figure out that is what gets you pregnant until it's too late. I'm middle aged, so my history on the plight of Africa doesn't go back very far, but I recall the plight of Africa gaining mainstream attention probably around the mid 80s with that whole Sally Struthers campaign. Since that time a lot of charity and aid has been sent and I think overall analysis concludes that their situation has been getting better- at least Jimmy Carter thinks so. Well what did we do before we starting sending all this aid? I'm guessing we used your proposed method which was ignore them, let them fend for themselves, and if they die, they die. Firstly that proposal is morally reprehensible to me. I don't just let people die if I can help them. But morals aside, just ignoring the situation made the problem worse. With nothing better to do they just keep pumping kids out regardless of if they can feed them or not. It has been shown historically time and time again when a nation becomes wealthy, birthrates plummet and mortality increases. Being a callous bastard as you propose would get us nowhere. The person you replied to had a better solution though I can't tell if they were joking or not (my sarcasm meter is on the fritz).

      I think he's too busy designing ultra-thin condoms for Africa

      THIS is a much better solution! If the desired outcome is to reduce the number of children who will die of starvation or disease, and because of political reasons just throwing food and vaccines at them isn't working, then the next best approach is preventing the pregnancies in the first place. A condom is a fine way to do this. Throw a good helping of Nature's best medicine -education- on top of that and progress will be made. It actually can be a win-win for all concerned. We stop the suffering of others (especially the children!), we reduce or eliminate the problem of having kids one cannot support, overall health and quality of life will go up, and to appease you racist fuckers there will be fewer brown people around since instead of having 20 kids they only have 2 or 3. You can have a heart full of hate or a heart full of love and nothing I wrote above sounds bad. It's good for everyone.

      I will also point out that the solution to your problem, the hateful racism eating away at your being, is also EXACTLY the same! Contraceptives and education. We reduce the chances for you to spread your malformed genes and with education, you can stop fearing the unknown and passing that message onto the kids you do have. A WIN-WIN AGAIN!

    2. Re:here's a suggestion by mcswell · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't know anything about that church, but I know our church (in Maryland) does exactly that during the winter, along with a number of other churches in the area--each church takes a week. They drive the homeless to and from where ever they are during the day (some of the churches are out in the country), and provide breakfast.

    3. Re:here's a suggestion by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Funny

      Could the second coming of Bill Gates be as monumentally transformative for MS as the second coming of Steve Jobs was for Apple? Or would it epically fail like most of Gates's attempts to be like Jobs? I doubt Gates would want to take that risk.

      Why funny you should ask that.

      As I will be the second in command I look forward to exciting times at Microsoft!

      First things first yes I am better and my ego needs to be fed. I will do so by executing the following. Back in the good old days things worked best when I made them as proprietary as possible. I started making Xenix as non compatible as possible with Unix so the users can blame all the other unix vendors and programmers rather than me. I also had pure joy almost to an orgasmic sense with IE and using Word and Excel file formats as well to make them not work with anything else.

      Balmer fucked up! First off IE works too well with standards recently. Before we know it we will have the communist and socialist unAmerican elements of the W3C tell us how to develop web pages!! Full alarm! Windows 7 just works and besides the gui in Windows 8 it is light and fast and can run on even a crappy ARM qualcomm very efficiently :-(

      The next phase will introduce the following:
      1. Documents will overwrite by default with autosave after each character. Grandma will appreciate this and we want to make this easy
      2. No desktop. Multitasking is sooo 1990s. Multitasking in Metro will mean you need to go full screen and lose whatever you have in front of you and go closed door syndrome after ribbon. Since users only do one task at a time we will make Windows 9 have buttons where each ribbon should be and using rote memory will take up the whole screen and cover the document for each option etc.
      3. IE will need to invent their own standards and stop supporting conditional statements for different browsers. :-( Webmasters how dare you write for other browsers! If you only wrote to our own DRM specificed CSS and XML (html is too opened) completed with binary encodings you will not have this problem. Webmasters you have a chose. 90% of all desktop users or socialist freeware browsers? I think you know which one you will choose. ... and they tell me people use this foxfire thingie since I left CEO?!
      4. Make word documents and our new language which is called C++ but will be totally different to encourage high cost and rewrites for porting mac and linux apps (sucks to be them hahah) used to make xml with binary encodings for internet pages. I mean executing code as administrator on all sites from God knows whom?? What could possible go wrong!!!
      5. Man Windows was such as fine elegantly engineered and gorgeous product compared to the Mac back in the 1980s I could not possible see why no one would want to switch to this. I mean look at marketshare. I am sure the same truths hold sway today as people are gobling up Windows Phones and tablets because the brand is so well known.
      6. Windows 9 certification will require signed operating systems and DRM executables to run. I can permit Linux apps if they are signed with the Windows Store and run as an applet in the new Metro 2.0 interface with HyperV. All the geeks on slashdot will be cheering and moaning my name for this. Just you see.

      Thanks for your interest.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
  2. I'll vote for him by jfdavis668 · · Score: 3, Funny

    If he brings back the start button.

    1. Re:I'll vote for him by gigaherz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ... the start button has been in 8.1 since it was released some months ago. I'd prefer if he brought back also the start MENU, and Aero. My computer is not a tablet, it does not need features designed for touch-screen, or removed to "improve battery life", so I will not install an OS that treats it like one.

  3. Moving away from consumer products by metlin · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Moving away from consumer products by zifferent · · Score: 3, Informative

      Seriously, if you think MySQL is anywhere near as scalable as MS SQL, you are delusional. I've used all of the database softwares out there and only MS SQL is standard, scalable and fast, Oracle is scalable and fast but not standard by a long shot, killing productivity. MySQL is neither fast, scalable nor standard. I really don't understand what anyone sees in that piece of shit when at the very least they can have PostgreSQL which excels on all accounts and is open sourced. I blame popularity contests.

      --
      cat sig > /dev/null
    2. Re:Moving away from consumer products by Nivag064 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Since 2004, I have done 4 extensive searches on the Internet to look for valid comparisons between MySQL & PostgreSQL.

      Each, and every time, PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) came out ahead, in all areas that concern me - such as:
      (1) Performance
      (2) Reliability
      (3) Scalability in terms of the database size
      (4) Ease of installation & configuration
      (5) Ease of developing SQL queries

      And of course, it runs well on Linux!

      I have a client that uses MySQL, and I did some DBA work & development on a major Java project that used MySQL.

      So I would recommend PostgreSQL as being suitable for many projects. However, you should always check what a particular project needs, rather than assume one particular DB is best for it!

  4. They should move away from consumer products by mbkennel · · Score: 4, Insightful


    "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.

  5. John Thompson as Chairman? by darylb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Let's Hear It For More of the Same! by organgtool · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Why not Elop? by Aggrajag · · Score: 3, Funny

    Elop did a fantastic job managing Nokia.