Our Bureau
In 2014, when Satya Nadella was named CEO of Microsoft, the company was seen as a dominant but largely a legacy player in the global technology stage as it was being rapidly overtaken by nimbler competitors in the fast-emerging cloud space. It also had a bit of reputation for not-playing so nice due to the aggressive personality of Steve Ballamer, Nadella’s predecessor.
So Nadella had quite a job in turning around the fortunes of Microsoft with his ‘mobile-first and cloud-first’ strategy. The proof eventually was seen in the results. The market cap of Microsoft has shot up from a little over $300 billion, when he took over, to $2 trillion.
The ‘Telugu bidda’ from Begumpet in Hyderabad, whose father and father-in-law were senior IAS officers, did his engineering from Manipal in Karnataka, apart from a Master’s in Computer Science in University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee and an MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He briefly worked with Sun Microsystems before joining Microsoft in 1992.
Nadella is married to Anupama, his junior at Manipal who was studying B.Arch, and they have three children. He is also an avid cricket fan and part owns Seattle Sounders FC, a major league soccer club in USA.