When Bill Gates decided to step out from Microsoft as CEO,everyone wondered who is going to be the next.Surprisingly the lot went Steve Balmer, a long term employee at Microsoft, infact the 30th employ in the company.But he was not essentially a tech guy bit a business guy.He was in charge of business management and sales when he was an employee.So342, not surprisingly, after becoming the CEO, he thought the future of Microsoft dont lie in wasting money in new technological experiments but focusing around the business aspects.He thought windows already had a dominance in the operating system field and he widely promoted windows and tried to expand it into phones,but he was too late ,he lost the bet.The stocks went down and soon he had to resign.When he resigned the stocks went up by 7% , thats how badly the investors for him to be out.
When the company was searching for the new CEO,the person turned out to be Satya Nadella.HE too was not a tech guy ,but the head of a department balmer himself created.It279 was the time when amazon started making an impact in the market with its cloud services and web services,cloud services started becoming mainstream.So304 it is not a surprise for nadella to be the CEO,he being the head of the cloud efforts of Microsoft.Under him, Micosoft Azure,the cloud service of Microsoft, started working.
But the sad fact is that Azure was already under development during Balmers period,he was also turning Microsoft into an enterprise.
So what did Nadella essentially do? His success was more of a philosophical one.He removed the bad reputation Microsoft was having regarding anti competitive practises and suppression of open source development.Nadella bought github and also moved Microsoft office into iOS and android, creating a healthy competitive atmosphere,while Balmer followed idea of gates, aggressive expansion and outright war against competition.This is how Nadella "saved" microsoft.