What does Nadella at the helm of MSFT indicate?

Being an Indian, I take great pride in Satya Nadella’s elevation to the top of the pecking order at Microsoft. His singular achievement speaks volume about his capabilities as a leader (headed servers & tools group before his elevation) and his skill as a Tech visionary, who recognized business opportunity in emerging areas of cloud and pushed the behemoth, ie MSFT in that direction successfully. Today Azure stands neck to neck with Amazon, and leads VMware in that space.

Given Nadella’s background, I am sure MSFT will see more muscle deployed in the direction of the cloud and rightly so, because software is fast becoming a personal cloud in my view, with rapid emergence of smartphones, tablets and multiple Apps that dot them. Majority of the computing power (I remember having read > 80% ) of these smartphones/tablets are used by these Apps as users increasingly rely on them to connect with friends, send messages or search for nearest restaurant. These Apps are nothing but personal software cloud, in a very simplistic way. So Consumer software space is going to be increasingly dominated by Cloud in coming years. On enterprise side, businesses have invested heavily in legacy or ERP systems and it will take time to migrate to cloud but with the weight of likes of MSFT,AMZN and the likes I believe the enterprise IT will soon be headed completely in that direction.

It will be interesting to see the strategic direction that MSFT chooses for itself in coming days, having botched its earlier attempts to dominate both Enterprise (windows revenue is declining, etc) and Consumer space (Bing bombed, etc). Though the opportunities are humongous in both the spaces in this ‘software-powered world’ (in Nadella’s own words), the challenges are daunting too.