And then there were two, we think?
The search for a Microsoft CEO has been intensely monitored by journalists and financial analysts alike. The recent acquisition of Nokia (which was just approved by the DOJ, by the way) suggested that its CEO, Stephen Elop, was in the front running; if you watched coverage you would think CEO of Microsoft was his fate while everyone daydreamed of Alan Mulally.
While not confirmed, it looks like he (and former CEO of Skype, Tony Bates) are out of the running.
The top two candidates are Alan Mulally and Satya Nadella. The former would be an "acquisition" from Ford (more like a stressful retirement from there). His fame arose from turning that company around just prior to the 2008 Financial Crisis which wrecked the rest of the US auto industry. The latter runs the Cloud and Enterprise group which successfully evolved as times change without even a peep of trouble; it is just about the only stable division the company has.
Personally, I must say that those were just about the two best candidates in the pool — at least from an outsider viewpoint. Their roles as CEO seem quite different but might not be. Both Mulally and Nadella have a track record of successfully navigating a changing landscape; the difference has been the rate and visibility.
This should be good news either way. Journalists will not have as many exciting things to talk about if Satya will be chosen but this is Microsoft's story, not theirs.
First task for new M$ CEO, a
First task for new M$ CEO, a french revolution style purge of all those involved with TIFKAM! After that, update and turn windows 7, into the new M$ enterprise OS, and place the resulting enterprise OS development into its own seperate devision! Realise that M$ is never going to return to being an OS market leader, and port the office suite over to other OSs! Offer your windows update service, as an update service to device OEMs, offering OEMs a unified updating service for the OEM specific system software, on your remaining windows 7, and windows enterprise OS’s based systems! OEM update software universally sucks, so they are in need of an Update as a service, that you can sell, and as crappy as your newist OS is, and as some of your updates themselves are, your update delivery system is not so bad that you could not make money with it! Linux is not going away, nor are its variants, and in the not too distant future, OSs will be treated much like the interstate highways, and other vital infrastructure (ex: PCI-SIG), with standardized open ISA OSs built around the Linux core!
Realise that device owners own their hardware, that they purchased from 3rd party OEMs, and device owners expect the OS to service the hardware owner’s needs, and not the Needs($$$$$) of the supplier of the OS!