7 things to know about Microsoft’s New CEO - Satya Nadella

Microsoft finally announced its new chief executive as Satya Nadella after a six-month-long flood of speculations and rumours. 

Although Ballmer and Gates are well-known within the tech community, much less is known about Nadella.

Nadella, relatively unknown outside of the company, has been with Microsoft for 22 years, and comes in as founder Bill Gates’s moves on from his role as chairman to technology adviser.

As Nadella steps into the national spotlight, here’s 7 things to know about Microsoft’s new CEO:

1.    He grew up in India. Nadella was born in 1967 in Hyderabad, India, attended public schools there and received a bachelors’ degree in electrical engineering from Manipal University. His father, B.N. Yugandhar, still lives in Hyderabad. According to Reuters, the senior Nadella was a member of the elite Indian Administrative Service and a member of the Planning Commission during 2004-2009 under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

2.    Nadella is known for his work with cloud computing at Microsoft and his deep technical knowledge. The company's cloud platform which Nadella came to oversee in 2013 is the infrastructure beneath Microsoft services such as Bing, Xbox Live, Office 365 and Windows Azure.

Nadella has helped Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure, become a more serious competitor to Amazon's cloud. Before becoming head of cloud and enterprise engineering, Nadella led Microsoft's server and tools division.

3.    He reads poetry. Nadella says he kicks back by reading poetry, which he says is like code. “You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.”

4.    Nadella joins the growing list of Indian-born executives heading major global corporations. Nadella's appointment would make him one of the America's most powerful Indian-origin executives, alongside MasterCard's Ajay Banga and PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi.

5.    He’s a multi-tasker. When he joined Microsoft in 1992, he was on track to get his master’s degree. Rather than choose between the two, he did both, flying out from Redmond on Friday nights for classes at the University of Chicago. He finished a master’s in business administration in just two and a half years.

6.    Nadella would be only the third CEO of 38-year-old Microsoft after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

7.    Nadella  has three university qualifications – a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Mangalore University, a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin and another master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicag