Satya Nadella

CEO of Microsoft

• Born: 1967
• Place of Birth: Hyderabad, India

CEO of Microsoft

Education: Manipal Institute of Technology; University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; University of Chicago

Background

CEO of Microsoft. Bukkapuram Nadella Satyanarayana was born in Hyderabad, India, in 1967 to Prabhavati Nadella and Bukkapuram Nadella Yugandhar. His father was a civil servant in the elite Indian Administrative Service. Nadella spent his early years in the Bukkapuram village in the Anantapur district in Rayala Seema, where his paternal grandparents lived. He then attended Hyderabad Public School, a prestigious boarding school in the Begumpet neighborhood of Hyderabad, from 1978 to 1984.

In secondary school, Nadella was an above-average student who engaged in many extracurricular activities, including his school's cricket, football, and debating teams. As an adult, Nadella remained passionate about cricket and credited the skills he learned as part of the cricket team with being instrumental in shaping his leadership and teamwork skills.

After being denied admission to his first-choice school due to an average entrance test score, Nadella enrolled in the Manipal Institute of Technology, then part of Mangalore University and now part of Manipal University. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1988. Nadella then traveled to the United States and completed a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He would later earn a master's degree in business administration from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

Engineering, Technology, and Leadership

Nadella began his career working on the technology side of Sun Microsystems. He joined Microsoft in 1992 as a program manager in the Windows developer relations group, where he helped develop many client-server platforms. He was soon promoted to general manager for the commerce platforms group. Over the next few years, he played significant roles in developing the Microsoft Commerce Server, the BizTalk Server, and the technology behind interactive television and digital rights management.

Nadella became vice president of the Microsoft bCentral online service for small businesses in 1999. Two years later, he was named corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions, where he helped create software such as the Microsoft Office Small Business products and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In 2007, he advanced to senior vice president of research and development for the online services division. His work included developing the MSN, Live Search, and advertising platforms.

In 2011, Nadella became president of the server and tools division, where he led the move from client-server software to Windows Azure (later Microsoft Azure), Microsoft's cloud computing platform and services. In 2013, he took on the role of executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, a position he held until February 4, 2014, when he was chosen to become the new CEO of Microsoft.

Nadella was instrumental in building and growing many of Microsoft's successful offerings, including its computing platforms, developer tools, Xbox gaming system, Bing search engine, Surface line of tablets, and cloud infrastructure and service. After becoming CEO, he said that he would continue to focus on growing these areas of the company.

As just the third CEO of Microsoft, a major multinational company, Nadella stepped into a challenging situation. Between 2000 and 2014, Microsoft underwent significant struggles, losing ground to competitors such as Apple and Google, which forced the company to quickly shift its focus to mobile and cloud computing in order to keep up with a changing market. Microsoft founder and former CEO Bill Gates believed Nadella to be up to the task, citing his engineering and computer skills, business vision, leadership, and people skills. One of Nadella's early actions as CEO was to ask Gates to stay on as a technology adviser, which Gates accepted.

Within weeks of taking over as CEO, Nadella formally announced Microsoft's acquisition of smartphone manufacturer Nokia, a deal initiated under previous CEO Steve Ballmer. However, Nadella, who had opposed the deal before taking over the helm of the company, soon initiated layoffs that focused heavily on the Nokia division. While he initially suggested he and Microsoft remained committed to the smartphone business, it soon became apparent that Nadella was seeking to pivot away from a sector in which he felt the company was not competitive. His view seemed to be supported by underwhelming sales and margins of the Windows phone line by 2015; over the next few years, few new models or updates were released, and in early 2019 Microsoft announced it would phase out all support for its Windows 10 Mobile platform. Nadella also oversaw cancellations or phaseouts of other products such as a smartwatch, the Groove music streaming service, and a hardware form of its Cortana artificial intelligence assistant.

Other projects early in Nadella's CEO tenure were much more successful. One of his main initiatives was to move away from the traditional model of closely bundling hardware and software, instead emphasizing cross-platform compatibility and collaboration. Notably, he released a version of the popular Microsoft Office software suite for Apple's iPad tablet computer, a major rival of Microsoft's own Surface, and expressed support for the Linux open-source operating system, a traditional Microsoft enemy. Meanwhile, Azure and other cloud services saw major growth. Attention to improving the business-focused Office 365 software suite also proved highly successful and highlighted a shift toward a subscription software sales model rather than traditional licensing agreements.

Nadella also oversaw a number of successful acquisitions in his first few years running Microsoft, many of which made headlines for their high sales prices. In 2014 he oversaw the purchase of the Swedish company behind the highly popular cross-platform computer game Minecraft for a reported $2.5 billion. In 2016 he acquired another company focused on cross-platform applications, the software startup Xamarin, and made a $26.2 billion deal for the career social network LinkedIn. In 2018 he announced Microsoft's purchase of the source code host service GitHub for $7.5 billion. Nadella proved to be a successful CEO, tripling Microsoft’s stock price by 2018.

In 2023, Nadella announced Microsoft was looking into expanding its activities in the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with hopes of challenging Google’s dominance. Microsoft increased its AI ventures on a global scale in early 2024, including a ten-year partnership with the tech company Vodafone to expand into European and African markets and a reported $1.5 billion investment in the United Arab Emirates-based AI firm G42 to further advance the global growth and development of Microsoft AI technologies.

Under Nadella's leadership, in January 2024, Microsoft reached a market capitalization of $2.89 trillion and surpassed Apple as the most valuable publicly traded firm in the world. By Nadella's ten-year mark as Microsoft's CEO in February 2024, the company's stock had skyrocketed by over 1,000 percent since 2014.

Impact

Satya Nadella was the first CEO of Microsoft who is not a founder or original employee. He also had the distinction of being tasked with moving Microsoft away from its roots into areas that founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen could never have envisioned when they started the company in 1975. Nadella took on this challenge primarily by pivoting away from hardware and emphasizing cloud-based services and cross-platform compatibility, grounded in a fundamental shift in the company's culture. This direction, helped along by several major strategic acquisitions, proved quite successful: Microsoft's market value increased by 130 percent from 2014, when Nadella was appointed CEO, to 2018. Microsoft's resurgent stock price, improved image among consumers, and leading investments in AI led Time magazine to include Nadella on its list of the world's most influential people in 2018 and 2024.

In addition to working at Microsoft, Nadella served on the board of many companies. For example, he served as the director of supply-management software company BravoSolutions US and a member of the advisory board of financial software company Nirvaha, among others.

Bibliography

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