Welcome, Guest: Register On Nairaland / LOGIN! / Trending / Recent / New
Stats: 3,158,174 members, 7,835,920 topics. Date: Tuesday, 21 May 2024 at 05:32 PM

Microsoft: What Went Right Under Satya Nadella? - Science/Technology - Nairaland

Nairaland Forum / Science/Technology / Microsoft: What Went Right Under Satya Nadella? (327 Views)

Brilliant Inventions That Went Nowhere / Watch The Moment A Weird Snake Went Crazy And Commited Suicide / The Tech World’s Best CEO? Microsoft’s Nadella, Hands Down. (2) (3) (4)

(1) (Reply)

Microsoft: What Went Right Under Satya Nadella? by okolojay: 4:08pm On Feb 04, 2019
On Monday, it will be five years since Satya Nadella was announced as Microsoft's chief executive.
Since taking charge he has turned the tech firm's fortunes around, making it the most valuable company in the world for the first time since 2002.
Go on, admit it.
You thought Microsoft was so last century, didn't you? In the late 80s and 90s, the company's Windows operating system ruled the world.
Catching the wave
But where Bill Gates - chief executive from 1975 to 2000 - caught the wave of personal computing, so Steve Ballmer - 2000 to 2014 - failed to do likewise with mobiles.
Although the Surface tablet is a modest success, Microsoft's smartphones have flopped despite the firm paying more than 5.4bn euros ($6.2bn; £4.7bn) for Nokia's handset business. Apple's iPhone, and then Google's Android left Microsoft in the dust.

Satya Nadella was announced as Microsoft's chief executive on 4 February 2014
The company has undergone the same stages of evolution experienced by many successful tech names.
The nimble start-up with a new idea
The fast-growing one-to-watch that's changing the world, slaying the old guard in its path
The omniprescence we can't live without
The uncomfortably big monopoly that buys out or subdues its smaller rivals
The Evil Empire that has too much power, and knows too much
The unwieldy supertanker that can't change course fast enough to catch the next big wave

"Some of those waves we've missed, but we're nothing if not persistent," Steve Clayton tells me.
He's Microsoft's chief storyteller - and before I get too sniffy about his job title, I have to remember that's technically my job too on Click.
Part of the reason Mr Nadella was picked for the top job was his determination not to miss the next big wave - cloud computing.

"[Cloud is] the ability for us to have software anywhere on any device," says Mr Clayton.
Forget the company's ill-founded attempt to have its own brand of smartphones - the more devices on which it can run its now subscription-based Office suite, the more money it makes

Microsoft ended up writing off the cost of its Nokia takeover and sold off many of the related assets it had purchased under Steve Ballmer
And subscriptions make up nearly two-thirds of its revenue these days.
Couple that with Azure, its cloud computing platform and data centres, and you can start to understand why Microsoft's share price has tripled since Nadella took over.
In November 2018, it became the most valuable company on the planet for the first time since 2002, and has tussled with Amazon for the lead ever since.
During my day at Microsoft's Redmond HQ near Seattle, I'm reminded that the unwieldy supertanker of stage six doesn't have to vanish beneath that next wave.
Stage seven can either be a sinking of Titanic proportions or it can be a sinking into the background, becoming part of the infrastructure, and quietly, unostentatiously, allowing your confidence to grow.
"We don't want to be the cool company in the tech sector," Mr Nadella has previously said.
"We want to be the company that makes other people cool."
Sure the PR machine is in full swing here. But the numbers suggest Microsoft has a lot to crow about.
And with that stage-seven confidence, comes an acceptance that you can't win every battle; that you should welcome other's successes.
Embracing new ideas that don't have to originate within Microsoft, seems to be one of Mr Nadella's core principles.
And so the firm has embraced open source, and partnered with competitors, including its cloud services rival, Amazon.
Microsoft Office now runs on the iPad - and Mr Clayton uses an iPhone.
"Don't be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all."
That's another Nadella quote for the bank.
"In 2014, we cancelled our company meeting where our leaders would tell employees what was important, in favour of having a hackathon that lets our employees tell our leaders what's important," recalls Jeff Ramos.
He is head of the Microsoft Garage, where employees with a bright idea can come and experiment, build, hack, and see if it has legs

(1) (Reply)

Svned Scam / Researchers Discover A Simple, 12-minute Trick To Instantly Improve Your Mood / Top Five Memory Card 32 GB - High Speed SD Card

(Go Up)

Sections: politics (1) business autos (1) jobs (1) career education (1) romance computers phones travel sports fashion health
religion celebs tv-movies music-radio literature webmasters programming techmarket

Links: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

Nairaland - Copyright © 2005 - 2024 Oluwaseun Osewa. All rights reserved. See How To Advertise. 18
Disclaimer: Every Nairaland member is solely responsible for anything that he/she posts or uploads on Nairaland.