Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella faces daunting task of steering a ship past its ... - Economic Times ~ Electronic Gadgets

Satya Nadella, 46, the newly anointed CEO of the $78-billion Microsoft faces a daunting task of fitting into oversized shoes of the two previous chiefs, Steve Ballmer and founder Bill Gates, and steer a ship that's past its prime. After all, Microsoft dominates a market in decline.

While Windows is the preferred operating system for traditional personal computers (PCs), it runs less than 15% of new devices, including new PCs, smartphones and tablets, according to research and analyst firm Gartner.

Yet, Nadella has proven himself before in multiple divisions of Microsoft and that's what makes him cut out for the challenging job. He has overseen some of Microsoft's fastest-growing and most profitable businesses, including its Office, server and tools arms.

In three years as server and tools president, he helped grow that business into one with $20 billion in annual revenue — about a quarter of Microsoft's total revenue in the most recent fiscal year. In the past one year, Nadella was the executive vice-president who led Microsoft's cloud computing offerings. Under Nadella, cloud enterprise group more than doubled customers in the latest quarter, although it remains a small part of Microsoft's current business.

Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella faces daunting task of steering a ship past its prime

"Going forward, it's a mobile-first, cloud-first world," Nadella said on Tuesday in a video accompanying the announcement. Now with Bill Gates as technology adviser, can Nadella take on new and old challengers, including Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Apple, IBM, HP, Oracle?

For instance, Salesforce. com has taken a bold step with its new platform launched in November 2013, Salesforce1 to merge business applications and social collaboration in a mobile environment. Microsoft needs to answer with the entirety of its offering (Dynamics CRM software) across all devices.

An Insider Helps

Says Staten James, analyst at Forrester Research: "Being an insider, Nadella understands the culture. He has proven success — both in online and cloud and enterprise groups he has delivered on his strategy and business goals." Nadella's elevation also boosts employee morale. "There's lot of benefit to the employee base when they see that one of them can rise to the top," adds James.

While the 100,000-odd Microsofties may feel happy, the company that Nadella inherits is vastly different from what Ballmer ran, when he took over back in 2000. At that time, iPod wasn't launched, Facebook had not started, YouTube didn't exist, Google was just a search engine figuring out how to make money and Amazon was only selling books.

Today, the company that Nadella inherits has all these as challengers. Microsoft, once the most influential technology company, let them literally run away with one new business after another. So how relevant is Nadella, the insider? Says Mary Jo Foley, editor of ZDNet's All about Microsoft blog and who has tracked Microsoft for the past 25 years: "Nadella was the strongest internal candidate in terms of his multi-divisional experience and technical chops. Nadella has made it clear that they need to be both in consumer and enterprise, hardware and software. I think he will rely on other executive vice-presidents for consumer expertise."

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