Learn the story of the business executive born in India who revolutionized the computing business
Satya Nadella, or Satya Narayana Nadella if we use his full name (born August 19, 1967, Hyderabad, India), is a well-known business executive born in India and the CEO of the software company Microsoft since 2014. Let’s take a closer look at him and how he got there.
Nadella grew up in the city of Hyderabad in southern India and studied electrical engineering at Mangalore University (B.Sc., 1988).
After moving to the United States, he completed (1990) a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and began working at Sun Microsystems, Inc., as a member of the technology staff.
He left Sun in 1992 to join Microsoft, where he initially worked on the development of Windows NT, a historic operating system primarily aimed at business users.
While working full-time at Microsoft, Nadella also earned (1997) a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago.
Nadella steadily rose through the management ranks at Microsoft, slowly but surely.
In 1999 he was named vice president of Microsoft Central’s small business service, and two years later he became corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions.
In 2007, he was promoted to senior vice president of research and development for the company’s online services division, and later served (2011–13) as president of Microsoft’s servers and tools business, which generated about $19 billion in annual revenue.
Nadella was also executive vice president in charge of the company’s cloud computing platform, which provided the infrastructure for Microsoft offerings such as the Bing online search engine, the Xbox Live broadband gaming network, and the Office 365 subscription-based services.
The CEO who succeeded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer
On February 4, 2014, Nadella became CEO of Microsoft, the third person to hold the position in the company’s nearly 40-year history, after company co-founder Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
One of Nadella’s first major tasks was overseeing the completion of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia Corp.’s mobile device business for $7.2 billion, a transaction that had been announced in 2013 despite the reservations of several Microsoft executives, one of whom was reportedly Nadella.
Shortly after the deal closed in April 2014, he announced the largest layoff in Microsoft’s history; 18,000 jobs were cut, most of which belonged to Nokia.
In 2016, Nadella oversaw the acquisition of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site that today is a fulfilled promise and an absolute sensation.
Finally, Nadella co-authored (with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols) Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (2017), which included a discussion of his life as well as his thoughts on technology and leadership.