Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on a decade of change and huge growth
Washington: Satya Nadella completed his tenth year as CEO of Microsoft on Sunday, capping a decade of astonishing growth as he transformed the slow-moving software giant to focus on cloud computing and artificial intelligence. inspired.
Microsoft’s stock has surged more than 1,000% since Indian-born Nadella took the helm in 2014, while the broader S&P 500 has soared 185%. Microsoft’s market value is now $3 trillion – more than any other publicly traded American company. The company, which also includes its longtime rival Apple.
“Nadella has led the biggest transformation I’ve ever seen at a tech company,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives. “The only one that could rival it was (Steve) Jobs coming back to Apple and changing it with the iPhone.”
Microsoft has generated $2.8 trillion in shareholder wealth over the past decade, meaning an investor who bought a $10,000 stake in Microsoft when Nadella took over and did nothing with those shares now has $2.8 trillion in shareholder wealth. It will be approximately $113,000.
“Our industry doesn’t respect tradition, it only respects innovation,” Nadella told employees in an inaugural memo 10 years ago. Microsoft declined interview requests.
Now a Wall Street hero, some were at first skeptical that such a change could come from an insider who had already spent 22 years at the Redmond, Washington company. He is only the third Microsoft CEO, after Steve Ballmer, who served for 14 years, and Bill Gates, who co-founded the company in 1975 and took it public in 1986.
Major changes took place rapidly under Nadella’s leadership. He used resources to create the Azure cloud computing platform, a shift in priorities from the company’s longtime reliance on its flagship Windows operating system and the royalties it receives for each PC sold with it. And he largely put the brakes on Microsoft’s ill-fated attempts to take over the smartphone market, marked by his predecessor Ballmer’s $7.3 billion acquisition of Nokia’s phone business.
But some of the biggest changes were in the company’s culture, a shift away from Microsoft’s brutal external reputation and internal infighting toward a more collaborative approach, which Nadella has modeled on his own collegial personality and engineer’s mindset.
“Microsoft is known for rallying troops with competitive fire,” Nadella said in his 2017 autobiography. “The press likes it, but it’s not me.”
Raimo Lenschow, a Barclays stock analyst who covers 36 tech companies, said much of Nadella’s strength is how he seems different from the typical “very strong ego CEO.” Rather than making bold declarations, Nadella takes a more measured approach to explaining. “He thinks about where the future is going.”
And “Whether it’s the person cooking in the cafeteria, an engineer, a finance executive, a customer, he treats everyone the same way, with respect,” Ives said. It’s not just Wall Street analysts who think so.
A small startup from Zeeland, Michigan, which was running a booth at January’s CES gadget show in Las Vegas, noticed Nadella’s curiosity when he came over, shook founder Tim Murphy’s hand and asked for a demo. The product, Audio Radar, visualizes sounds in video games for deaf and hard-of-hearing players.
“He’s a very humble guy,” said Murphy, who was there with a small entourage, including his teenage son. ‘I pitched him, played a few games and he said, what you’re doing is amazing.’ To be honest, I don’t really remember much of what he said because I was kind of shocked.
Nadella has long prioritized access to technology, part of which is informed by his experience raising his son, who was visually impaired, quadriplegic and suffered from cerebral palsy. Zain Nadella died in 2022.
What has propelled Microsoft to its latest heights is its emergence as an artificial intelligence leader, setting the agenda on how AI tools can be used in work and society. While Nadella has been pushing for AI during most of his tenure, its role was not guaranteed and it took years of careful planning that led to a close partnership with ChatGPIT-maker OpenAI. (OpenAI pays an undisclosed fee to the Associated Press to license its collection of news stories).
“Historically, if you were a good startup that was doing something amazing, Microsoft wasn’t really your first choice,” Lenschow said. “So the fact that they got OpenAI for Azure was an amazing masterstroke… It gives them a huge, competitive advantage over Google and Amazon.”
