Nadella Who Even Took Over as MS Board Chairman (Comprehensive)

Cloud Computing and Aggressive M&A
Praised for Leading a New Golden Age

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
[Photo by AP News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Cho Hyun-ui] Microsoft (MS) has appointed CEO Satya Nadella as the new chairman of the board. With this, CEO Nadella will concurrently serve as the chairman of the board.

On the 16th (local time), the U.S. economic media CNBC reported, "The MS board unanimously appointed CEO Nadella as the successor to John Thompson, the previous chairman of the board."

This appointment comes one year and three months after founder Bill Gates left the board in March last year. Gates, who recently announced his divorce from Melinda Gates, reportedly left the board after an internal investigation into inappropriate relations with a female employee.

MS issued a statement saying, "CEO Nadella will play a leading role in selecting the board's agenda based on his deep understanding of the business."

CEO Nadella, an Indian-born American engineer, graduated from Mangalore University in India and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the U.S. After working at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), he joined MS in 1992. He served as president of the Server and Tools Business, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise group, and was appointed as the third CEO in 2014.

He is credited with leading MS's new heyday through cloud computing services (technology that processes information on other computers connected via the internet rather than on one's own computer). A representative example is enabling Amazon's AI Alexa and MS's Cortana to be used on each other's services.

His bold mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to secure promising businesses have also drawn attention. CEO Nadella successfully acquired LinkedIn, the world's largest professional social media platform, in 2016; GitHub, a global developer community, in 2018; and ZeniMax, a video game manufacturer owning popular games like "Doom," in March this year.

CNBC evaluated, "The appointment of CEO Nadella as the new chairman of the board signifies that he has made MS more prominent in technology and business aspects during his seven years as CEO."