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
