The Inspiring Story Of Satya Nadella: How This Indian Engineer Revamped A Software Giant
When Satya Nadella first took over as Microsoft¡¯s CEO in February 2014, the company was starting to flag. Their smartphone business had effectively tanked, Windows 8 had been panned, and consumers were starting to lose faith. So, he went to work.
When Satya Nadella first took over as Microsoft's CEO in February 2014, the company was starting to flag. Their smartphone business had effectively tanked, Windows 8 had been panned, and consumers were starting to lose faith. So, he went to work.
In just five years, Nadella has pulled Microsoft up by its bootstraps, making it one of the top tech companies in the world once more. And he's put in a lot of work on the way to achieve that.
Images courtesy: Reuters
Who is Satya Nadella?
Born in Hyderabad in 1967, Nadella wanted to be a professional cricket player as a child. It was only later that he realised he had a really great aptitude for science and technology. He went on to receive his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology in 1988, eventually travelling to the US to graduate from his first real computer science program in 1990.
Nadella went on to work for Sun Microsystems, only joining Microsoft in 1992, while Bill Gates was still CEO and the company was at the top of the world. One of his first projects was in fact the failed Windows NT platform.
Revamping Microsoft Azure
When Nadella took the reins in 2014, he was quick to make changes to what his predecessor Steve Ballmer had set in motion. Microsoft's Azure cloud platform itself was a gamble when set up. Nadella took that one step further. He made the controversial decision to allow open-source competitor Linux, which Ballmer had once called "cancer", to operate on Azure. Since then, the platform has shown impressive growth, though it still trails Amazon's AWS, and the revenue from is a massive chunk of their yearly earnings
Embracing other platforms
Under Nadella, Microsoft began rolling out its popular Microsoft Office software to other platforms as well, specifically to the iOS and Android mobile platforms. This gained them millions of news users, something that would never have happened in the previous era of Windows-only.
The success of Office 365
With it's new pivot to cloud computing, Microsoft was perfectly primed to approach enterprises with their new cloud productivity suite of apps in Office 365. It also helped that Google had recently experienced success in the niche thanks to its own offerings. Microsoft did so well in its partnerships with corporates, it eventually even released a consumer version of the line of softwares and services.
Making the right buys
When Nadella first took over, the company was still trying to cope with the fact that its expensive acquisition, Nokia, was a failure. He ended up axing that fairly quickly, but the new CEO also followed up with other choice purchases.
Minecraft was a really expensive buy at the time, costing them $2.5 billion, but the revenue from the popular game has helped keep them afloat for years, including in the education market of all places. LinkedIn was also a smart purchase, contributing both revenue and users at a steady rate.
GitHub meanwhile may not have been the most profitable buy for the company. But what Nadella chose to sacrifice as revenue he gained in invaluable measure: a way to connect directly with developers. And since they've switched their stance on open-source products like Linux, they've gained trust too.
It's through all of these small changes that Satya Nadella Has managed to bring Microsoft back from the brink of collapse, and turn it into a trillion-dollar company.
