Ten years at the top: how Satya Nadella made Microsoft fit for the future
The Indian-born CEO turned a struggling giant into the world's most valuable company. His focus on the cloud was exactly right.
What is at stake
On 4 February 2014, Satya Nadella inherited a Microsoft that the market had written off. Ten years later, Microsoft is the world’s most valuable company, having overtaken Apple, with a market capitalisation of three trillion dollars – a gain of roughly 1,000 per cent. Few CEOs can point to a comparable realignment. The transformation is now taught as a case study at universities.
What Nadella inherited
Under his predecessor Steve Ballmer, Microsoft had missed the mobile era and chased dead ends – the Zune MP3 player, the Nokia acquisition. Windows had run out of headroom; the cloud division, which Nadella had built, was still small and marginalised by management. Nadella knew the future lay there.
The path to the top
Born in Hyderabad in 1967, son of a civil-service family. Electrical engineering degree in Karnataka, then computer science in Milwaukee and an MBA in Chicago. He joined Microsoft in 1992. In his autobiography “Hit Refresh” he writes: “It was not until the year 2000 that I and other developers from India were first promoted to leadership positions.” Today a whole generation of executives of Indian origin lead the US tech industry.
The next bet
His focus on Azure was the first right call. The second was the partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft invested early, before the world had heard of ChatGPT, and today benefits from the AI boom more than any other company. The question at this ten-year mark: is that bet enough for the years ahead – or is the next innovation trap already waiting?
I wrote the full piece together with Felix Holtermann for Handelsblatt.