Washington/Bangalore/New Delhi/Hyderabad: Hyderabad -born Satya Nadella, son of an IAS officer who was secretary to former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, is being tipped strongly to become chief executive of Microsoft, according to several news outlets citing sources familiar with deliberations on the matter.
Nadella, 46, is a 22-year Microsoft insider who now heads the company’s $20-billion cloud and enterprise group. If the Microsoft board, which has been searching for a successor to current CEO Steve Ballmer for nearly five months, goes through with his appointment, he will be the topranked chief executive of Indian-origin, comfortably overtaking Indra Nooyi of Pepsico. An announcement is expected as early as Friday.
Microsoft is currently the world’s fourth-largest company by market cap ($312 billion) after Apple ($450bn), Exxon Mobil ($405bn) and Google ($394bn); Pepsico’s is way behind at $124bn.
Nadella grew up in Hyderabad. His father, B N Yugandhar, went on to become a Planning Commission member, and friends recollect him as “a jholawala, a man with an NGO mindset.”
Nadella studied at the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, the alma mater of other global business bigwigs like Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems, and Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings, who’s known as Canada’s Warren Buffet. He did his engineering from Manipal University between 1984 and 1988, and then went to the US where he received a degree in computer science and an MBA.
WINDOWS OPEN FOR SATYA NADELLA
Born in 1967 in Hyderabad, studied at Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet
Engineering in electronics and communication from Manipal University
MS in computer science from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
MBA from University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business
Started his tech career at Sun Microsystems, joined Microsoft Corporation in February 1992
First MS assignment was as program manager for Windows Developer Relations Group
Now, executive VP, cloud and enterprise, a $20-billion business at the $78-billion Microsoft Nadella’s strength is the variety of roles he’s played in MS, his weakness is in consumer space
Satya Nadella worked briefly with Sun Microsystems, before joining Microsoft in 1992. At Microsoft, he has worked in a variety of businesses, from core enterprise products to online services including Bing, MSN and the cloud platform Azure.
He is part of a large contingent of Indians, numbering in the thousands, who joined Microsoft in the 1990s, leading former honcho Bill Gates to look at India as both a research hub and a market after he recognized the country's potential on both counts. Microsoft’s Hyderabad campus is now the company's largest non-US-base. The company has nearly 5,000 employees in India out of its 100,000-strong workforce.
The variety of roles Nadella has played is now proving to be his strength. Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg BusinessWeek writes that Nadella is one of the most impressive members of the new bunch of senior executives he has seen at Microsoft. “Crucially, he’s more or less Microsoft’s cloud master and has a firm handle on what it takes to run Bing, Office365, Skype, and Xbox Live. Nadella is also well-liked and respected throughout the industry. And he’s enough of a different character from Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates to inject some new life into the company,” he says.
That’s something Microsoft desperately needs. Once the undisputed king of the computing world, the company has lost a lot of ground over the past decade to companies like Google and Apple on account of its failure to anticipate the revolutionary changes that the internet and mobile devices have been ringing in.
The company is now making moves away from its roots as a software maker to focus on hardware and internetbased services. In some areas it has made good progress, such as the cloud platform Azure and to a lesser extent the cloud-based office productivity tools. But in the crucial area of mobile devices, Nadella has a huge task on his hands, and it’s not an area he has much experience with. Less than 2% of smartphones are Windows-based.
Microsoft acquired Nokia’s mobile business recently to try and do a leapfrog in this space. Patrick Moorhead, president at Moor Insights & Strategy and a veteran of the computer industry, says Nadella may face a challenging time in fixing Microsoft's problems in the consumer space.
“Nadella has a lot of experience, but not as much as someone who typically runs a company of the size of Microsoft. He has spent most of his time in the enterprise space, so I think he would need a very strong lieutenant who gets the consumer market,” Moorhead told TOI.
Vance appears to agree: “What Nadella is not is the radical agent of change or the inspirational visionary that some investors and outsiders have been hoping for. He seems likely to keep pushing on Microsoft’s data center-focused cloud journey and unlikely to take any drastic measures around consumer products.”
If indeed Nadella is the chosen one, everybody would be keenly watching to see the steps he takes to get back the consumer mindshare that Microsoft has lost to Apple and Google.
No comments:
Post a Comment