Microsoft Names New Chief as Gates Steps Down

[Capt. Obvious]

Source: New York Times

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that Satya Nadella would be its next leader, betting on a longtime engineering executive to help the company keep better pace with changes in technology.

The selection of Mr. Nadella to replace Steven A. Ballmer, which was widely expected, was accompanied by news that Bill Gates, a company founder, would step down from his role as chairman and become a technology adviser to Mr. Nadella.

John W. Thompson, 64, a member of the Microsoft board who oversaw its search for a new chief executive, will become the company’s chairman, replacing Mr. Gates.

....

In Mr. Nadella, Microsoft’s directors selected both a company insider and an engineer, suggesting that they viewed technical skill and intimacy with Microsoft’s sprawling businesses as critical for its next leader. It has often been noted that Microsoft was more successful under the leadership of Mr. Gates, a programmer and its first chief executive, than it was under Mr. Ballmer, who had a background in sales. Mr. Ballmer, 57, said in August that he was stepping down.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/technology/microsoft-names-engineering-executive-as-new-chief.html

[cosmicone]

1. India and Indian hating posts to commence in 3...2....1.. n/t

[Xithras]

2. Microsoft needs its own Steve Jobs

It needs someone with vision to plot a new and more relevant course for the company, and the personality to fire everyone up and re-motivate their base. Microsoft has had this aura of being an "old-world" tech company that has been increasingly irrelevant for most of the last decade. No hot young programmer graduates from college and says "I want to go to work for Microsoft!" If Microsoft can't change that, they're dead.

Satya Nadella is a great engineer, and as a software engineer myself it's nice to see a company like MS selecting an engineer for the post over the Wall Street business management types and the sales guys (*cough*ballmer*cough*) that tend to dominate corporate leadership nowadays. But Nadella has a very droning personality and his focus is heavily in the enterprise backend, ERP, CRM, and cloud service segments. He may be the right choice to keep the company relevant and profitable in the business sector, but he's no Steve Jobs, and he certainly won't be leading to any sort of renaissance in Microsoft's public image or in the perceptions about their relevance in the modern consumer-centric world of computing. That's unfortunate.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I have to go finish migrating a bunch of old web applications off of a clients IIS servers onto their new NGINX platform. "Old world" Microsoft is losing another customer.

[jsr]

3. They chose a cloud-loving guy to fix the cloud-centric Win 8 crap that people hate

[Xithras]

4. It's doubtful that Nadella cares much about Windows 8, or what consumers think of it.

Nadella's career has been heavily focused on the business marketplace and enterprise customers in general. Consumer products like Windows are of interest only inasmuch as they feed corporate sales. Nadella is more interested in CloudOS for datacenter virtualization than in legacy Windows OS for desktop users. From a business standpoint he's 100% correct in that call...datacenter virtualization and enterprise cloud computing are exploding markets that are transforming IT departments around the world, and the possibilities (and profit) in that market are endless. For consumers running desktop products like Windows, it's not such a great thing, because it means that their concerns aren't going to get the kind of attention that most people want. Microsoft is not a consumer-centric company, and Nadella isn't the person to change that. He has no interest in competing with Apple or Google to control the desktop market. He just wants to dominate the datacenters that actually make everything work.

With the proper leadership, MS has the resources to do both. Nadella isn't that leadership.

[snooper2]

5. good insight you have..most folks only know MS from their little PC

Microsoft is looking to dominate the unified communications market..


If I hear "Lync Integration" one more time I may just off myself!

Looks like Google is going to win the WebRTC battle. Microsoft's proposed alternative spec got laughed at

[Xithras]

6. Yep.

The Internet as we know it is going to change dramatically over the coming years. Cloud applications have already started changing the way people work, store, and share their data, but upcoming changes to the underlying technologies like SPDY and WebRTC (among others) are going to blur the lines between "local program" and "web application", while drastically improving security and privacy and accelerating web performance. Microsoft knows that, a decade from now, the web will be THE application platform that everyone is running, and that the desktop operating system will be little more than a glorified thin client that puts a pretty UI onto everything and provides a handful of local apps. That's why they are investing so much of their time and money into things like Azure and CloudOS. For them, it's the future. Nadella is a champion of those technologies, and that line of thinking.

Windows is a legacy platform for them. They keep it because they have to, and because they really would prefer that your thin client UI be Microsoft branded. But they're certainly not investing a lot of development resources in Windows anymore. It has no future, and it makes them no money.