Satya Nadella
Courtesy of Microsoft
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On the day that
Microsoft
announced the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014, the knee-jerk reaction by investors was to push the stock lower. Hope that wasn’t you.
Almost immediately, Nadella overhauled Microsoft to focus on creating cloud-based versions of its software applications, while boosting investment in Microsoft Azure, a business he had been running before becoming chief.
The company succeeded on both fronts, triggering a rebound in financial performance that has made Nadella one of Wall Street’s favorite CEOs. The company now has a market cap of nearly $2.5 trillion, trailing only
Apple
.
In 2023, Nadella is at it again. This time, the focus is on generative AI. Among other things, the company has invested a reported $10 billion or more in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and a leading provider of large language models.
Microsoft earlier this year announced a revamp of its Bing search engine, built on models from OpenAI. That move spurred some investors to sell shares of
Alphabet
,
parent of Google, by far the dominant player in search. Microsoft has since provided demos of revamped versions of Office and various other apps. Customers are excited, and so are investors. And so is Nadella.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
Source: https://www.barrons.com/articles/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-ai-27ffcb8e?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo