Microsoft has finally named a new CEO. The new head honcho at Microsoft is Satya Nadella, a 22-year company veteran with a fondness for enterprise and software. Now the real question is: Does Microsoft's future vision include Surface and Xbox?
Skype, Office, Bing and Microsoft's entire portfolio of enterprise software will certainly be a huge part of the company's future with Nadella steering the ship. Cloud computing will also undoubtedly grow under his leadership. But hardware, devices and accessories? Those might take a hit. Some tech pundits even believe that Nadella will parcel off Xbox and ditch the Surface altogether.
At the end of Ballmer's long reign as CEO, Microsoft was starting to resemble Apple is the sense that it planned to be a devices and services company. Ballmer fostered the Xbox gaming console and turned it into a boombing business. He introduced Microsoft's first mobile operating system, Windows 8. By the time Ballmer announced that he would be stepping down in a year, Microsoft had produced its first real piece of hardware: the Surface tablet. A few months later, Microsoft bought Nokia and everyone was so sure that Microsoft was preparing to stage a hostile take over of the mobile tech industry.
But then the Surface tanked, Windows 8 was almost universally hated and Nokia's smartphone lineup only gave Microsoft a tiny piece of the great mobile devices pie. At first, there was talk that Microsoft would hire a mobile tech guy like Stephen Elop or a marketing guru like Alan Mulally to plunge the company into the mobile devices market. However, now that Nadella, a software and enterprise master has claimed the coveted title of Microsoft CEO, all that has turned to a pile of dust.
What is Microsoft's future vision? Nadella already declared that we live in a "software-powered world," a "mobile and cloud-first world," so it's safe to say that although the Surface and smartphone businesses are certainly mobile, they may not exactly be the focus anymore and the Xbox certainly won't be.
Nadella is expected to focus heavily on improving Microsoft's software and enterprise businesses with a strong emphasis on cloud-based technology. Since he loves Bing, he will probably leverage Microsoft's search engine and pit it against Google. Nadella will probably hand the Xbox business over to someone else, but keep it inside the Microsoft family so as to continue to reap profits from the gaming console. He will almost certainly let Elop handle the smartphone business and quite possibly axe the Surface.
The Surface is a huge failure, so Nadella would be doing the company a huge favor by admitting that hardware just isn't Microsoft's thing. In the meantime, Nadella will be tasked with improving Windows 8 and forming Windows 9. Nadella better make sure that this time around, the new Windows doesn't inspire hate mail and mass conversions to Apple's OSX.
In many ways, Nadella is the right choice for Microsoft. He is smart, he puts innovation over tradition and he's not afraid to say "It's just not working, let's try something else." Nadella will bring Microsoft back to its roots in software and enterprise, but he will also drive the company forward into a truly mobile future.
