Microsoft is Almost Ready to Announce its New CEO

It has been five months since Microsoft has started scouting for its next CEO since Steve Ballmer announced that he planned to retire in 2014. The outside candidates have already been shortlisted and some have voluntary removed themselves from the selection. The hottest rumor is that the company’s executive vice-president in charge of cloud and enterprise, Satya Nadella is the likely candidate for the CEO post. It may take a couple of weeks more before the official announcement is made. There are also rumors that Bill Gates will be replaced as the company’s chairman by independent director, John Thompson. Bill Gates is likely to stay as director. Microsoft is refusing to make any comments.

Short list of candidates

The list of candidates for the CEO position had been trimmed to six, with outsiders Allan Mulally, CEO of Ford Motor Co., Qualcomm’s Steve Mollenkopf, Hans Vestberg of Ericcson, and insiders Stephen Elop (former CEO of Nokia who will be joining Microsoft when Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s hand phone business is finalized), former Skype head Tony Bates (also now with Microsoft and in-charge of business development) and Nadella.

Mulally was favored by investors who wanted radical changes to be implemented in the company but he failed to present a detailed plan for the company and had voluntarily dropped out. Mollenkopf, the former president of Qualcomm has been named as the company’s CEO in December last year and Vestberg, Ericsson’s CEO opted to stay with his company.

The race for the CEO is now left to the three Microsoft insiders although Nadella’s name is being bandied about as the most likely one to be named to the coveted position.

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella is from Hyderabad, the place where Microsoft’s largest research facility outside of the United States is located. He has been with Microsoft for 22 years. He first worked at Sun Microsystems before joining Microsoft in 1992 and proved his worth through his lead roles as part of the team working on the Bing search engine and Office. In 2011 he was promoted to head the server and tools unit of Microsoft, now the backbone of the cloud computing platform of the company, which he heads today. The Cloud OS is the power behind Dynamics, Skype, Xbox Live, SkyDrive, Bing and Office 365.

Nadella though has little experience in dealing with Wall Street investors that have been calling for an outside CEO who will be a mover and shaker. He is a brainy technologist just like Bill Gates and the exact opposite of Steve Ballmer, who is a brilliant salesman.

Microsoft is set to have a meeting next week to decide on the issue. Pundits are saying that on the technical aspect, Nadella will be a very good choice. With his background however, he may not able to satisfy the investors, some of which have been rallying for Bill Gates to step down. They view Gates as a block to radical changes in the company that will greatly favor the investors.

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