14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft went through a painful and long reorganization process that was started just after the former CEO Steve Ballmer decided to step down, but Satya Nadella, the man who replaced him at the helm of the company, has the full support of the chairman and the board for the cost-cutting measures he has announced in the last 12 months.
That’s what Microsoft chairman John Thompson has said in an interview with the Financial Times, pointing out that everyone at the software giant is very pleased with how the restructuring process of the company is going under Satya Nadella’s umbrella.
Costly decision
Speaking about the takeover of Nokia’s Devices and Services unit, Thomson explains that it was indeed a costly deal for Microsoft, which was later written off by Satya Nadella, but he has no regrets about agreeing with it. Thomson admits he was one of the members of the board who agreed with Steve Ballmer when he decided to purchase the Finnish phone manufacturer.
“I’ll always raise my hand and say I voted for it. No one ever wants to write off $7.8bn. But no one ever wants to... limit the options,” he is quoted as saying.
“We were in the midst of a CEO search and... if we had said, ‘Gee, we’re not going to continue to pursue the Nokia deal because Steve has announced that he’s going to retire, and we’re going to wait for the new CEO to get his or her sea legs’... we could have found ourselves in the position where Nokia was not available to us.”
“All decisions are his”
Thomson also explains that the new CEO is the only one who makes decisions at the helm of the company, and no one from the board gets involved in this. He plays the role of mentor to Satya Nadella, he adds, but all decisions are his own, he emphasizes.
That’s why Nadella still has the support of the entire board, as many of the things he’s changed within the company were absolutely needed.
“I give Satya enormous credit for saying, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t keep doing this.’”
As compared to Steve Ballmer, Nadella spends more time at the company and that helps him become a people person. Ballmer left the company after the board became unhappy with his performance at the helm of the software giant, which is quite the opposite of what is happening right now with Satya Nadella, who has the full support of the board.
Nadella “spent more time in Silicon Valley in 18 months than Steve spent in five years,” Thompson points out, confirming that the new CEO is much more involved in Microsoft’s everyday activity than the previous company leader was.
Satya Nadella has indeed embarked on a long transformation journey that’s supposed to guide Microsoft towards an approach that’s more focused on customers, hence the improvements the company’s trying to make to its products with help from users across the world.
All software solutions, services, and hardware are designed for people who do, Nadella says, and the company now wants everyone to love Windows, not only to need and use it. This is indeed a completely new approach for the software giant after so many years of accusations that it tries to decide what’s best for its users, so it remains to be seen if this is going to pay off in the long term.