Microsoft: Can Satya Nadella bring the company to greater height?

September 3, 2014
By Lawrence Teo
After 14 years as a company director, Chief
Executive Steve Ballmer finally quits his post
and gives way to new CEO, Satya Nadella to
reshape Microsoft. Can Nadella Survive,
Build the businesses and Create a Legacy like
Bill Gate and Steve Jobs?
Since Nadella took over in February 2014, he has been taking firm and decisive steps to solidify his
leadership in Microsoft.
Surviving as CEO
As a new CEO, Nadella was quick to reshape the companys new cultural, goals and internal structure so
as to support Microsofts Vision and Strategy for the future.
New Cultural and Goals
To reshape the cultural, Nadella wrote an internal memo to staff to explain on how his new
corporate credo would reshape Microsoft to become the productivity and platform company for
the mobile-first and cloud-first world. His subsequent memo shared that 18,000 jobs would be
cut by 2015 to achieve Work simplification and Strategic Alignment.

Internal Restructuring
To shape up the Management, Nadella had done major shuffling to his top executives like
appointing Scott Guthrie as Head of Cloud and Enterprise Business, Stephen Elop (from Nokia)
as Head for Devices, etc.
There were also changes for the Board with Bill Gate stepping down from chairmanship and
been appointed as adviser to Nadella for product development while Steve Ballmer stepped out
of the Board and would be busy with his personal hobby.
Building on the Businesses
To his advantage, Nadella had reaped benefits from businesses that were in pipeline before he took over.
Making Nokia and Surface work
Nokia deal is in line with Microsofts credo to become a products and services company. Nokia
and Surface would provide the hardware to support the businesses. Now, Nadella will need to
integrate it into the software, Window Operating System. Or should it be the opposite?
Building on the success of the Office 365
Strategy of targeting business as life-long customers had worked well for Microsoft in 1990s.
Using same strategy, Office 365 would target on students by offering free service to them when
their universities buy it. Student can also purchase it at S$108 for four years subscription on
multiple devices.
Making Office available for iOS
Microsoft acknowledges that Businesses are dealing more with Apple devices and making
Microsoft 365 available to Apple devices is the most sensible thing to do. This is something that
we dont see Apple doing.
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Creating a Legacy
Creating own legacy is visionary.
Azure for Cloud-First World
Since Azure was Nadellas baby before Nadella took over Microsoft, he would want to
continue and create a legacy out of it. For its cloud service, Microsoft has been providing new
features to complete with Amazon Web Services and these have gotten quite a number of new
customers.
The Future
Based on Microsofts stock price as of 02 September 2014, we can see that Wall Street is happy with
Nalleda as Microsofts stock price has risen from about $36 to about $45 per share since his
appointment. From investors perspective, he is definitely doing better than Ballmer and the $45 is the
highest in last 14 years. But this may not continue as Nadella faces many on-going challenges like
Making Nokia Works, Selling Microsoft Surface Pro 3 as Replacement for Macbook Air and Ipad,
Promoting Window 8.1 to Business, Getting More Window 8 apps, etc. With so many projects going on
and competition getting tougher, Nadella has to be focus and make ensure that he does not repeat the
same mistake that his predecessor had made for Window Vista.

Tagged: Microsoft, Satya Nadella, Bill Gate, Steve Ballmer, Nokia, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Surface,
Microsoft Azure.
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