IAS officer's son tipped to become Microsoft CEO - Times of India ~ Electronic Gadgets

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, the storied software company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, according to a raft of business outlets citing sources familiar with deliberations on the matter.

Nadella, 46, is a 22-year Microsoft insider who now heads the company's 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 top-ranked CEO of Indian-origin, comfortably overtaking Indra Nooyi of Pepsico, which is the world's 44th ranked company in terms of market value. An announcement is expected as early as Friday.

Microsoft is currently the fourth largest company by market cap ($308 billion) after Apple ($450 billion), Exxon Mobil ($442 billion) and Google ($379 billion).

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. 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.

He worked briefly with Sun Microsystems, before joining Microsoft in 1992. At Microsoft, he has worked in a variety of businesses, from core enterpri se 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 5000 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 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 Bal lmer 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 bringing in.

The company is now making moves away from its roots as a software maker to focus on hardware and internet-based 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 s pace. 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 it has lost to Apple and Google.

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