How Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella led company’s biggest turnaround in 2018

2018 was a good year for Microsoft that continues to grow under the stable leadership of its Indian-origin CEO Satya Nadella. The Redmond-headquartered company finished as the most valuable company in the world in November 2018, surpassing Apple and Amazon, reported Forbes. The industry analysts agree that Microsoft will be hitting $1 trillion in market cap sometime in 2019, the report said.

The 51-year-old Microsoft CEO told Forbes in an interview in December last year that he wants to take Microsoft back to its glory days when the tech giant did best “when other companies are making money off its products”.

The Hyderabad-born alumnus of Manipal Institute of Technology had worked at Sun Microsystems before he succeeded Steve Ballmer to take over the reigns of Microsoft as CEO in 2014, making him only the third chief executive of the company; the only other person to have held the position besides Nadella and Ballmer is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates himself.

Nadella spoke about how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates reminded him of how the company functioned in its hay days when other companies profited from its products.

He told Forbes, “Bill used to teach me, ‘Every dollar we make, there’s got to be five dollars, ten dollars on the outside.’”

Nadella also recalled that Gates reminded him of how “great companies were once built on Microsoft’s code.” Bill Gates’s big mission for Nadella was to – rebuild Microsoft brick by brick until it can happen again.

“That’s what I want us to rediscover,” Nadella agrees. And it shows.

For example, in October 2018, Microsoft closed an impressive $7.5 billion acquisition of open-sourced GitHub, which is a leading software development platform bringing together nearly 31 million developers to build, share and work together on each other’s work.

In December 2016, Microsoft officially acquired LinkedIn in a $26.2 billion deal and under its purview, LinkedIn continues to acquire start-ups. According to CrunchBase, with over 600 million users, LinkedIn “pulled in $1.46 billion in revenue for Microsoft during its most recent fiscal quarter.”

Nadella continues in his efforts to rebuild the industry trust in Microsoft and lessen the “institutional arrogance” inside the workplace culture of Microsoft.