Microsoft has been seeing a lot of administrative changes in the past week. Ballmer is finally leaving, and a new CEO has been tapped — Satya Nadella, former Executive Vice President of Cloud Services and Enterprising at Microsoft. Before taking on that position, he acted as head of Microsoft’s servers division.
Besides announcing a new CEO, Microsoft announced a new Chairman of the Board. That’s right, no more Bill on the board. Now it’s John Thompson, former Vice President of IBM and former CEO of Symantec, known for Norton Virus (lol Norton).
It’s a changing world and Microsoft seems to accept that now. Diverging from Ballmer’s mantra of “devices and services,” Nadella told interviewers that Microsoft must rather be chanting “mobile first, cloud first.”
Oh and listen to what Ballmer has to say about Nadella in this video, as the board of directors and Bill stand behind the camera making sure he doesn’t go rogue by deviating from the teleprompter script.
Now with Ballmer away (no longer taking a poop on this company), Thompson is running business and Nadella is at the helms. Is Bill just gonna ride off into the sunset with Melinda and call it a day and just focus saving the world?
Nope. He’s now the founder and technology advisor at Microsoft, and he’s going to be spending a whole 1/3rd of his time there. That is, if you come into the offices in Seattle at any arbitrary time of the week, your likelihood of being in the same building as Bill Gates is 0.33333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333….
For Microsoft to succeed truly, they’ve really gotta make the Windows Phone OS suck less. They’ve gotta allow Microsoft Office across mobile phone platforms, and stop putting forward shitty products.
This shake up was definitely what Microsoft needed. Their true test lies ahead, and their success depends on the execution of this new vision favoring mobile/cloud over devices/services. But that’s another story for another time.