SATYA NADELLA’S FIRST FIVE YEARS AS THE THIRD CEO OF MICROSOFT HAS BROUGHT PAIN TO FANS OF MICROSOFT'S CONSUMER TECH BUT DELIGHT TO INVESTORS.
Originally from Hyderabad, Nadella lives in Bellevue, Washington. He had joined Microsoft in 1992 and he quickly became known as a leader who could span a breadth of technologies and businesses to transform some of Microsoft’s biggest product offerings. Nadella earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Mangalore University, a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago. Before being named CEO in February 2014, Nadella held leadership roles in both enterprise and consumer businesses across the company. Recently, Nadella was executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group. In this role he led the transformation to the cloud infrastructure and services business, which outperformed the market and took share from competition. Previously, Nadella led R&D for the Online Services Division and was vice president of the Microsoft Business Division. Before joining Microsoft, Nadella was a member of the technology staff at Sun Microsystems. The CEO serves on the board of trustees to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as well as the Starbucks Board of Directors. He is married and has three children.
“Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don’t learn. So the last part to me is the key, especially if you have had some initial success. It becomes even more critical that you have the learning ‘bit’ always switched on.” —Satya Nadella
From a young age, Satya Nadella showed great interest in building things and enhancing the lives of people through technological developments; hence, he decided to pursue his Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MBA from the prestigious University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Hard work and determination never go unnoticed and this is evident in Satya Nadella’s career graph. In the last few years, Satya Nadella has held a number of positions, including that of the Senior VicePresident of the Research and Development group for the Online Services Division, VicePresident of the Microsoft Business Division, and the President of the Server and Tools Division.
Satya Nadella’s educational background, coupled with the leadership skills that he honed during his MBA studies, helped him to lead large groups in Sun Microsystems and Microsoft and enhance the capabilities of these organizations.
He worked in Sun Microsystems for a brief period and then moved to the Silicon-valley giant ‘Microsoft’, in 1992.
Nadella started climbing the corporate ladder steadily while working at ‘Microsoft’. He then went on to make important decisions in the interest of the firm.
He was one of the few employees who suggested the concept of cloud computing to the firm. Eventually the company dedicated lot of its time and resources to the development of this technology. The result was the germination of one of the world’s largest cloud based entities, named ‘Microsoft Azure’.
Satya was later given the responsibility to control the ‘Research & Development’ department, which belonged to the ‘Online Service Division’ and was even appointed as the senior vice-president of the same. He joined this department in 2007 and continued being a part of it for the next four years.
Nadella then moved to the Systems and Tools division of Microsoft and was even appointed its president. The annual turnover of Microsoft contributed by this segment of business alone is said to be around $20 Billion today.
He also guided ‘Microsoft’ to move many of their other projects such as the ‘Microsoft SQL Server’ and a few other tools to ‘Azure’.
After working in the firm for a period of twenty two years, Nadella was promoted to the designation of the CEO of ‘Microsoft’ in 2014.
In 2017, Satya Nadella came out with his book ‘Hit Refresh’. The book talks about his life, Microsoft and how technology is changing the world.
One of Nadella’s greatest accomplishments was pioneering the ‘Cloud computing’ division of ‘Microsoft’. The annual turnover contributed by this division of the business was $16.6 Billion in 2011, when he was just appointed its head. In a matter of three years, the turnover saw a significant increase to around $20.6 Billion.
Satya Nadella has mentioned his love for cricket on several occasions. While this may seem like a minor insight into his private life, his talk of leadership vibes with his reputation inside the company. He believes in collaboration, but he doesn’t believe a team effort requires layers upon layers of management. Nadella, who’s inheriting a company from Steve Ballmer in need of reorganization, is likely to execute it without hesitation
“In the post-Snowden world, you need to enable others to build their own cloud and have mobility of applications. That’s both because of the physicality of computing– where the speed of light still matters–and because of geopolitics.”
This quote from an interview with Forbes says a lot about Nadella’s attitude. Microsoft has seen no shortage of criticism over the information Snowden released, so a defensive response or a smoke-screen of platitudes could have been expected. Instead, he tackles the problem, and explains what it means for the company. He recognizes that not everyone is comfortable handing data over to a third party and promises to build products for those who’d rather not. This bodes well for Microsoft’s stance on privacy, and indicates that the company will be more sensitive to customer needs during his tenure.
Later at The LeWeb conference in Paris Nadella was asked where he thought technology was headed. His response was perhaps to be expected, but it goes well beyond the mundane when he said, “Over the next 10 years, we’ll reach a point where nearly everything has become digitized.” He explained, for example, that even farmers are using connected devices to monitor production on a large scale in real-time. This is the future he hopes Microsoft can thrive in, and it indicates that the term “enterprise market” means more to him than the IT department at your local bank or call center. If his vision is successful, Microsoft could become much like IBM or Cisco, a silent giant making big bucks with products most people don’t even know about.
In addition to his love of cricket, he also has a passion for poetry. He has avoided the narrow-minded focus on technology that plagues some engineers in the tech industry, and ultimately alienates them from the people using the products they develop. Nadella understands there is more to the world than features, spec sheets and code, which means that he should be a good judge when it comes to deciding when products should be released when he said, “You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.”
“Nadella's strategic leadership, including his efforts to strengthen trust with customers, drive for a company-wide culture change, and successful entry and expansion into new technologies and markets,” Microsoft's independent directors said in a proxy statement released recently. “For fiscal year 2019, the annual total compensation for the median employee of the Company (other than our CEO) was $172,512,” the company announced. It further said “The past fiscal year offered another record year for financial performance, and Microsoft delivered strong results for our shareholders, including a return of $30.9 billion in the form of share repurchases and dividends.” Nadella wrote off $7.6 billion from Ballmer’s purchase of Nokia Corp., cutting 7,800 jobs in 2015, a clear sign he was giving up on an ambition to compete directly with Google and Apple Inc. in mobile. His first product announcement was an Office version optimized for Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Microsoft had resisted such a move for years out of concern that its productivity software running on iPhones and iPads would speed the decline of Windows PC sales.
The new share repurchase programme, which has no expiration date, may be terminated at any time. The dividend is payable on December 12 to shareholders of record on November 21, 2019. The ex-dividend date will be November 20, 2019. For its entire fiscal year 2019, Microsoft reported revenue of $125.8 billion which increased 14 per cent and $39.2 billion net income -- setting a new record fiscal year for the company. Microsoft that continues to be valued as a $1 trillion company returned $7.7 billion to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2019.
“Believe me, my journey has not been a simple journey of progress. There have been many ups and downs, and it is the choices that I made at each of those times that have helped shape what I have achieved. -Satya Nadella”
No list would be complete without mentioning Ballmer’s last hurrah – the Nokia purchase. Even with the acquisition completing mere weeks after Nadella took over from the besweated one, the new CEO was quick to wield the axe.
12,500 Nokia staffers were given their papers in July 2014 before the final Lumias put in a belated appearance in 2016.
The rest, alas, is history.
The Microsoft Band was the software giant’s pitch at the wearables market, arriving in 2014 and surviving long enough to see a second, curvier, version put in an appearance in 2015 before Nadella once again swung his axe in 2016.
Like Microsoft’s phone efforts, the Band was blessed with a thoughtful interface and some innovative thinking in the hardware but, alas, also like the phone, hardware innovation was not enough to stave off an axeman cursed with limited patience when it comes to consumer tech.
If a music service that hardly anyone listens to is axed, would anyone notice?
Nadella clearly thought not as 2017 saw the CEO snuff out Groove Music. The last vestige of Redmond’s pitch at an iPod killer, Zune, lost the ability to stream music by the end of the year, with users directed to former rival Spotify.
The Groove app itself still lingers on, a shadow of its former self.
The fate of the Surface Mini (and other shrunken Surface devices that get the fans so excited) is cited as another example of Nadella’s ruthlessness.
While the Surface line has thrived under the CEO’s stewardship, the Mini was a throwback to the Windows RT era – unable to run Win32 apps and lacking the library of the iPad to which it would be compared.
The thing never made it past a limited early production run before the axe was once again wielded.
Microsoft would, of course, have another crack at a diminutive Surface in the form of the Go four years later.
Nadella’s latest bit of chopping has been at the neck of Cortana, specifically plans to turn it into a standalone AI assistant appliance, reflecting the CEO’s focus on services rather than hardware.
Cortana itself will live on as a software addon, but as hardware? Nadella reckoned that with Microsoft trailing some way behind the likes of Amazon and Google, trying for a third platform was pointless and thus his blade once again swung into action.
Of course, Cortana itself will live on, but as a service for other platforms and, significantly, a service lurking within Microsoft’s increasingly important cloud product lines.