Who Is This Satya Nadella, The New CEO Of Microsoft?
Did you know Microsoft's new CEO, Satya Nadella, has served the software giant for 22 years? Read more about the Hyderabad-born electronics engineer and why Microsoft chose him as CEO.
By Sadho Ram — 05 Feb 2014, 03:09 PM — Updated almost 11 years ago
First things first, who is Satya Nadella?
46-year-old Satya Nadella was born in Hyderabad, India. The native of Hyderabad, India's tech centre dubbed "Cyberabad", is said to be an affable team builder with consensus inside Microsoft for the top spot.
firstbiz.com
Nadella has previously headed Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise group and is only the third CEO in Microsoft's 39-year history, following co-founder Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer
According to PC World, apart from being associated with Microsoft for a long time and heading the cloud unit, Nadella is credited with transforming Windows Live Search into Bing, which now provides the informational backbone to a wide range of Microsoft services.
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Nadella has helped Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure, become a more serious competitor to Amazon's cloud. Before becoming head of cloud and enterprise engineering, Nadella led Microsoft's server and tools division.
npr.orgAccording to the Wall Street Journal, Nadella will have a base salary of $1.2 million, which is more than 70% higher than the base pay Steve Ballmer was making
Nadella's pay package includes his participation in the company's executive incentive program.
The annual cash award target under the plan will be 300% of his salary earned as CEO for the remainder of 2014 and all of 2015.
businessinsider.in
A company man, Nadella is also a hyper-educated guy
Nadella knows Microsoft and its culture — he's been working there since 1992. Before taking up the job at Microsoft, Satya was a part of Oracle-owned Sun Microsystems. His education started in his native India, where he attended Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, and earned his bachelor's degree in electronics and communication engineering from Manipal University.
npr.org
In the U.S., he picked up a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, before earning an MBA from the University of Chicago.
npr.orgNadella sees the future of Microsoft in devices and services, not software. In a December interview with Quartz about his vision, Nadella said:
"I think reconceptualizing Microsoft as a devices and services company is absolutely what our vision is all about. Office 365 and Azure on the services side are representative of it. Does that mean we won't have our software available for other people to build on? No. Windows is available outside of our devices. Windows server is available outside of our data centers.
qz.com
We think that's important because there will always be distributed computing. But at the same time, there is also the customer expectations that we should complete the scenario. That means running a cloud platform, running a cloud service. So we're conceptualizing the future of Microsoft along those pivots."
qz.com
According to Bill Gates Nadella's "vision for how technology will be used and experienced around the world is exactly what Microsoft needs"
In contrast to Ballmer, known as a rowdy basketball fan and pickup game player with aggressive elbows, Nadella is a bookish and soft-spoken type, with hobbies of cricket and poetry. Nadella speaks of the "humbling" and "incredible honour" to take the lead at Microsoft along with a passion to continue to educate himself through classes and books.
Speaking about himself, Nadella says he's "a learner”
“I think the thing that I realized is, what excites me is that I'm learning something. I can learn something about some area. I can learn something from people. I can learn something from doing things differently."
firstbiz.com
After Nadella was announced the new CEO, he wrote a lengthy email to employees telling them who he is and why he is here. You can read the full letter below.
Today is a very humbling day for me. It reminds me of my very first day at Microsoft, 22 years ago. Like you, I had a choice about where to come to work. I came here because I believed Microsoft was the best company in the world. Read Nadella's full email here:
