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Adam Bryant interviews Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft in Feb. 2014. Nadella led the cloud computing effort at Microsoft before becoming CEO in 2014. He is a native of Hyderabad, India, studied electronics and communication engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology, and computer science at the University of Wisconsin. Here Nadella recalls his early leadership experiences. As a bowler on his school's cricket team (similiar to a pitcher in baseball), Nadella was pulled out from a bowling spell when he wasn't having success getting batters out. He recalls the captain bowling to get some outs and then putting Nadella back in, who continued getting wickets at that point. He sees this sports analogy as a leadership experience where the captain was sensitive about keeping Nadella motivated and confident, and giving him an opportunity to try again. He takes more out of this and other experiences in his role at Microsoft- to create energy and genuine commitment in his team, and build a team effort to take advantage of opportunties that present themselves in the future. Nadella makes some interesting observations about the tech business. A $1 million business can seem too small for a large company, but in the tech business driven constantly by innovation, there is the need to pay attention to innovation that starts small. At some point says Nadella an innovation can appear to be a failure, an absolute flop, until it becomes a hit. Leadership has to be able to dig deeper and listen, as small changes can lead to big things. About people Nadella likes to know what people have done that they are most proud of, and what they feel didn't work out or where they failed, and looks for how a person can reflect on his experiences and grow as a result of having had them. A useful point Nadella makes at the end of the interview is that people outlive companies in our rapidly changing society, having a sense of our own mortality within this short duration, gives one a special sense of responsibility. ...

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Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, is intervewed by Shira Ovide of the WSJ. Compared to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella has a quiet demeanor. Responding to a question about how he made it from heading R&D for the Bing search engine to the CEO position, he says what helped him most was working in different jobs at Microsoft with different contexts and challenges, including a mix of some where success was achieved and some in which it was much harder. The experience of people in his management team is similar. He says his sense of being an outsider while being an insider is something he always had in him, and something he now encourages as a CEO. Reading outside of work is his only rule, and this may help him maintain some distance from work to think like an outsider. His preference is literary reading not common among senior managers- T.S. Eliot's poetry. Taking some off from work for medical leave or other reasons, is something he supports, especially from his own experience needing such leave as a 29 year old at Microsoft....

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testifies at the US Justice Department's trial of Google that the deal Google made with Apple led to its search engine becoming ubiquitous with monopoly power. Nadella said that the unfettered power of Google made it difficult for Microsoft to compete with Google on the internet. 

"Despite my enthusiasm that there is a new angle with AI, I worry a lot that htis vicious cycle I am trapped in could get even more vicious." Nadella said that Google's deal with Apple made it oligopolistic.

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Satya Nadella, a 22 year employee of Microsoft is seen as the most likely choice for CEO.

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This exceptional account by WSJ's Shira Ovide on Microsoft Windows 10 looks at ways CEO Satya Nadella is changing Microsoft's culture and old way of doing business. Microsoft is changing its culture and strategy of charging for all its products. It will let businesses and individual buyers upgrade for free to the new Windows 10 product. This means $500 million less in sales revenues in 2015, but opens up new oppoortunities in sale of add-on apps and services on more devices, such as health sensors and smartphones. The failure to penetrate the smartphone business- with a meager 3% penetration for Windows in smartphones - is a problem facing Microsoft as it competes with Apple, Google and other companies. Terry Myerson describing the thinking behind this change at Microsoft puts it in a cultural perspective, saying that it should result in a more engaged user base. There is a sense that the space Microsoft is in stretches way beyond PC's to all the new computing devices now in place, including smartphones and other devices, with Windows taking up only 15% of these devices. Founder Bill Gates calls this "exciting" and is excited to see the reaction in the market....

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During the pandemic with more people working from home, demand for cloud services of Microsoft has increased by 50%. Other competitors in this field are Google and Amazon. CEO Satya Nadella says this is the second wave of digital transformation and attributes the achievement to the strategic investments made by the company. Closely related are increased sales of Microsoft's Xbox video game consoles.

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President Trump says TikTok app would be banned in the U.S. after September 15. He said he had talked to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and told him Microsoft could buy the apps U.S. operations but if it does so a substantial portion of the price must go to the U.S. Treasury because of the approval of the deal the U.S. is giving after the review. He told Nadella "Look it can't be controlled for security reasons by China- too big,too invasive. Here's the deal, I don't mind whether its Microsoft or somebody else, a big company, a secure company, a very American company buy it."

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Satya Nadella joined Microsoft from Sun Microsystems in 1992. He is originally from Hyderabad, India, and studied electronics and communication engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology. In the U.S. he studied for a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin and a MBA from the University of Chicago. At Microsoft Nadella worked on business areas Windows, Office suite of programs, the Bing Search engine, SQL Server database, and cloud service Azure, moving every couple of years. Langley, Clark and Ovide relate comments from classmates of the student days and colleagues at Microsoft about the 46 year old Nadella's aspiring nature, willingness to take risks and good rapport with engineers and staff at the company- including one comment from a former Microsoft executive that collaborative work spirit alone will not be enough to change Microsoft's culture.

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Cloud computing is a growing $300 billion business, with Amazon a key player having 28% of the market. It competes with Google and Microsoft in cloud computing. Andy Jassy has built the cloud computing business with $51 billion in sales. It generates 10% of sales in the final quarter of 2020 for Amazon but over half the profit. Renting out server space and software to customers is a profitable business compared to online retail. Sales of $12.7 billion in the final quarter of 2020 generated $3.6 billion in profit. And growth a brisk 28% over the prior year quarter.

Satya Nadella ran the cloud computing business at Microsoft before becoming CEO. IBM named a new CEO from this business that revived growth. Now Andy Jassy is promoted to CEO at Amazon in the sequence of new CEO's from cloud computing.

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Microsoft has done poorly in anticipating and developing products for the internet and mobile devices. On the enterprise side the server and tools business has done well. Microsoft's Server And Tools business made operating profit of $8.2 billion in the year ending June 2013, up 13% from the prior year. Office 365 sold on a subscription basis to accomodate the shift to cloud computing, and other cloud products are expected to make up for decline in Windows revenues with decline in PC sales. Satya Nadella, who ran the Server and Tools business from 2011 till he was shifted to head the cloud computing effort in the reorganization of 2013, is a candidate for the CEO position.

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Microsoft CEO completed 36 major acquisitions since taking over from Steve Ballmer in 2014. In this report Jay Greene of WSJ points out a significant change under Nadella. Under Gates and Ballmer the heads of companies acquired were not brought into company executives discussions. Nadella invited these heads to join the rest of the company's top managers to meetings to hear different views. Nadella says Microsoft would not have missed big trends had it listened more. Under Ballmer acquisitions such as Nokia were not properly handled. Even under Gates in the earlier period products in Search later developed by Google did not get the attention they deserved and heads of companies acquired did not get  to actively participate. The Not Invented Here Syndrome applied to Microsoft managers. The aggressive attitudes did not produce the best results. Like Apple's Cook who has a collaborative style, Nadella has set out to open up the company to different ideas and people. Nadella has shifted the company away from earlier products to cloud computing and mobile computing to produce better results. Under Nadella open source software programming receives the openness and respect it deserves, after the Ballmer years. The change in attitude is real and Nadella as a Microsoft veteran for 24 years has been able to steer the company in a new direction. ...

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Women in a 2011 group studied by Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Monika Hamori and Rocio Bonet of the IE Business School in Madrid, show increasing numbers of women and foreign educated managers in top positions at large corporations. Mary Barra of GM and Satya Nadella of Microsoft are two of the prominent names appointed recently. Women now have 18% of the top positions at large U.S. corporations and foreign educated have 11% in this 2011 group. The numbers would be expected to be higher in 2014 with an acceleration in this trend. On average it takes women 28 years to reach these positions compared to 29 for men. A big dropoff is noticed in the study for women in the corporate promotion track who are middle managers for a few years.

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Microsoft's Satya Nadella got his start at age 24 at Bing search engine. He is now 56 years. During this period he worked with both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer who succeeded Gates at Microsoft. He is now remaking the Bing Search engine by using AI. This has happened since 2018 when he met Altman at the Sun Valley Tech conference in Idaho. He invested $1 billion in Altman's OpenAI, and has recently brought in Suleyman of Inflection who is a competitor of  Altman's OpenAI into Microsoft with the idea of setting up an internal AI business as well. To do this he has invested $10 billion in advanced AI chips that he has bought from chipmakers which have reduced the capital available for Microsoft's other businesses. This WSJ report by Dotan and Jin says Altman started his venture because he did not want to let AI to be led by Google silently developing its own version and doing leapfrog over competitors. A At this point in 2024 Google, Facebook and Amazon are building their own AI talent and making large investments in the chips that support AI. It is rapidly becoming an oligopoly of a few tech companies that makes deals among themselves for strategic advantage and protect themselves from public or government regulatory scrutiny. The controversy surrounding the firing and rehiring of Altman at OpenAI has brought new scrutiny from the FTC. The monopolistic behaviour of tech companies and their splitting the tech market among themselves as Google and Apple have done show the need for government action to prevent a repeat of this in AI. And to take action to break up existing monopolies in Search engines and in the Internet as Theodore Roosevelt did at the turn of the century for the oil business, breaking up Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Esso. Only when that happens can the true potential of the Internet be realized for Education, Health and other fields. Who can say that the iPad or iPhone or Google's Search engine has increased global literacy or American literacy? By freeing up these technologies- that belong to the people of America and the world- for education, health and other fields of human development mankind can advance once again. By regulating provide the ground rules for good use instead of the current danger of the Internet acting in ways to reduce public knowledge to levels that cannot sustain democratic process, and create stratified society where each group only sees what it has seen before and does not explore the world or knowledge in all its variety, all its ability to surprise us with new discoveries. ...