14 DAY TRIAL // Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer in February 2014, and in just one year spent at the helm of the Redmond-based software giant, the former Microsoft cloud boss managed to change the company’s vision almost entirely.
Microsoft is no longer the kind of company that criticizes products, services, or strategies belonging to its rivals and is trying to work together with its users to improve its software, in an attempt to deliver solutions that better tackle our needs.
With a new slogan, called “for people who do,” Microsoft has become a true gentleman that does business in a different way than the old version of the company headed by none other than Steve Ballmer did.
It’s no secret that Ballmer was a fun man to watch. He called Linux “a cancer,” he laughed off the Apple iPhone, claiming that it would never sell in high numbers because of its price, and danced and screamed on the stage on pretty much every single occasion.
Satya Nadella, on the other hand, is a different type of CEO. He’s calm, he doesn’t talk about rival products, and he often tries to put the human side of his company in the spotlight. And the new Microsoft has fully adopted his image.
No more Scroogled and getting closer to buyers
Recently, Microsoft has decided to drop the Scroogled campaign that was launched in Ballmer’s era and that tried to highlight Google’s unfair practices and the way the search giant displayed ads to its users.
But the new Microsoft no longer does that. And a statement released by Michael Sajor, CIO of Apollo Education Group Inc., in a recent talk with the WSJ perfectly shows that Redmond has a different way of doing business these days.
He says that a few years ago he decided to stop meeting with Microsoft sales staff because they only tried to sell software without even asking anything about his business. “They were, all-around, just a pretty ugly company to deal with,” he was quoted as saying.
Things changed though since Satya Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer at the helm of the company. Company employees are now more interested in how their software can actually help customers improve their businesses and discuss ways to adapt products to each subscriber. As a result, Office 365 is now available for 250,000 students from the University of Phoenix, one of the organizations working with Sajor.
Needless to say, it might seem like Microsoft is going in the right direction, but it’s still too early to tell whether this new approach has any chance to pay off in the long term or not.
2015 is going to be a crucial year for Microsoft, especially because of the arrival of Windows 10, so there’s a lot of work for the company if it really wants to be successful with Satya Nadella at the helm.