Nadella leaves no doubt of who's in charge at Microsoft


Satya Nadella had his share of hits and misses in the first 6 months as the head of Microsoft, but he's made his presence felt from the start
Say what you will about Satya Nadella's first six months as Microsoft CEO, but no one can deny the man jumped in with both feet from day one and has led the company with decisiveness.

Some of his moves have been met with applause and others with raspberries.

He got a standing ovation weeks into his tenure when the company finally launched Office for the iPad. More recently, many viewed him as corporate villain after he approved a 14 percent staff reduction, the largest in Microsoft's history, and explained it with what some felt was too much corporate jargon.

Throughout it all, Nadella has laid out his vision for Microsoft's success: pursuing a "mobile first, cloud first" approach to product development intended to yield applications, servers, OSes, tablets, smartphones, and cloud computing services that boost productivity for people at home and at work.

Along the way, he hasn't been shy about altering his predecessor's path. He retired Steve Ballmer's "devices and services" company description, emphasizing "platform and productivity" instead, and he is seen as much more open and flexible to having Microsoft software run on non-Windows platforms.

He has approved surprising moves, like giving Windows free to makers of certain devices and partnering with CRM rival Salesforce.com.

Nadella is credited with feeding Microsoft a hearty helping of humble pie, something many felt was needed and overdue. He likes to say Microsoft has shifted to a "challenger" mentality, as it battles Apple, Samsung, and Google in a world where Windows still powers most PCs but only about 15 percent of total devices worldwide.

He's intent on changing Microsoft's corporate culture, which Ballmer also identified at the end of his tenure as an area in need of repairs. As outlined in his recent public letter to employees, Nadella is taking concrete organizational steps to accelerate decision making, speed up engineering processes and foster innovation.

Microsoft turns 40 next year and Nadella is only its third CEO. Has he done enough so far? Is he leading Microsoft wisely? Is there enough substance behind his talk? Will he succeed? While it's too early to make that judgment, some industry experts, customers, and partners say they generally like what they've seen so far, but that he's got a long road ahead of him.

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