http://ign.com/articles/2014/02/04/microsofts-new-ceo-revealed-gates-role-changed

It is none other then Satya Nadella, former head of their Cloud and Enterprise division. Bill Gates' role changed as well. He has stepped down as Chairman and taken on a new role of founder and technology advisor.

Man, I was really hoping it'd be Elop. There was a rumor that if it was Elop, he was going to close Bing and sell off the Xbox division.

Quite frankly, Microsoft would have done better with new blood, which is what the original rumors were suggesting, rather than promoting someone from within.

Personally, I don't like Ballmer. Something about him rubs me the wrong way.

Is that something they seriously entertained though? What's wrong with Satya?

This sounds to me like they're going to continue on their current path, trying to out-Apple Apple, and if the customers don't like it, well that's just too bad, they'll just have to deal with it.

Elop isn't exactly new blood though, he was at Microsoft before ruining Nokia (which was already going downwards but he made sure they definitely fell down the cliff).

There was a significantly large portion of the stakeholders who wanted to see it happen. the Xbox division makes little sense in the overall scheme of Microsoft's portfolio, and Bing's just been a moneydrain.

He's home-grown and won't be able to bring in a new mindset. He's never ran a comnpany before, he has no mobile experience. Looking at his history, the only real differences between him and Ballmer is that Ballmer was 100% home grown (being with the company pretty much all his career life) and Ballmer was more management whereas Satya looks to be a bit more technically inclined.

Without new blood and new ways of thinking, a company won't change. Satya doesn't provide new ways of thinking and isn't new blood. In fact, if you look over all the stories posted there's one word they all share in common, and that word is "safe". He was a safe bet. A safe bet isn't what Microsoft needs if it wants to stay relevant. Their current strategies have been a massive floundering failure (which is why Ballmer was nudged into retirement), so why choose a "safe" bet?

Oh, sorry, I edited in that last bit afterwards. I know he's not new blood, but he at least has recent outside experience. There were other potential CEOs that would have been new blood and also had decent management success with other companies.

I thought Bill stepped down as the chairman for a long time, but then I often get chairman and CEO confused with each other.

I was kinda hoping Xbox WOULD get sold-off. Microsoft doesn't seem to do an overly good job with it and I think it would be better on its own.

But the new CEO was the head of the whole cloud part of MS, so I really hope we don't see more "cloud integration".

...my internet at the college svcks too much for that...

He is the person responsible for all the boneheaded decisions that MS has made for the past 20 years (he was COO and President long before he was CEO). Ballmer had this idea about how the world should work and forced everyone to adhere to it. Unlike the early days of Microsoft where they gained dominance by making the best software.

For example, Windows 8 is not popular, so to drive sales of the OS, he announced Windows 7 is going to stop being offered (hopefully that will change), Ballmer was convinced that everyone uses Tablets which is why Windows 8 is what it is. Ironically, he ignored Tablets in the early days. He set up the system that forced anyone who wanted to have a web page display properly in IE, had to use Front Page to make the website, this was why Mozilla became so popular in the late 90's and early 2000's. He also set up systems where the software developers were ranked each quarter, and the lowest members on the team were booted. Well, after a few quarters, there are no low end people on a team anymore as they have been winnowed out. So one would think they would have a team of awesome coders. Nope, there still had to be a low ranked person according to the policy, so now coders that 3 months ago were considered great were shown the door.

I would be willing to bet that the pithy comment about the Xbox1 requiring always online by the outgoing head of the Xbox division was a reaction to Ballmer's forcing his vision of the world on everyone. Most of the things that MS wanted to do with the Xbox1 that everyone hated do have benefits in some instances, but not all. Instead of saying, "Hey, if your connected, here are all the cool things you can do" it was, be connected or don't play at all.

20 years!? Had no idea he was pulling strings that long!

I don't think it could support itself on its own.

Gates stepped down as CEO (Chief Executive Officer or main boss) a while back. The Board of Directors are people who are supposed to represent ownership at a strategic level for a company. While they don't run the company day to day like the CEO does, they set policy and strategy that the company then tries to implement. Board members do not always have ownership, at least of a significant amount, but are made up of industry leaders or visionaries (hopefully). Typically, the largest shareholder is the Chairman of the Board. The CoB can also be the CEO.

He has been with MS since the beginning. Why, he was Gates roomate at Harvard. He started at MS, then went to a company like Proctor and Gamble, then was brought back by Gates, given 5% of the stock. So, he has been with the company since the earliest days, but in charge for the last 20 years.

Elope would have been the death of Microsoft. He was a life long eff-up who landed a CEO position off of luck. Elope's main business model for the behemoth that is Microsoft was, get this, mobile office sales on non-Windows devices... Yeah, sales of a product that has very limited potential for growth & would not sustain them for more than a year. Also nixing Bing & Spinning off/Selling off Xbox would also be a bad idea; Bing unifies all of their products & provides legitimate competition for Google in their home field. Bing also further puts their fingers into Apple as well being Siri now uses Bing. Xbox provides MS with much needed consumer relations (despite the whole Xbox One hate they experience, its still a popular product) & of course Xbox One is the actualization of their vision for the future. They have far too much invested in what they have to let go; letting go would be good for stocks temporarily, but it would ruin the unified vision very quickly & over time we'd see Microsoft losing money because of it. After Ford's CEO Allan Mulally took himself out of the running Nadella was the only good choice.

Hence sold-off, as in, to another company. On its own, ya it would probably die off.

But anyways, I must have fallen out of the loop and had no idea about Elope's plans. I also didn't know much about Ballmer...So I guess I need to brush-up on my Microsoft history...

I just thought of this, back when Ballmer announced he was stepping down, the stock jumped 10% in price. So, he made himself richer by quitting.