A lot has changed since Satya Nadella took over at Microsoft a little more than a year ago.
Windows no longer rules the roost. The energy has shifted away from big expensive software to "cloud" services. It's investing in cutting-edge products like HoloLens. Morale is better than it's been in years, according to long-time employees.
But Nadella can't do it alone. Who's helping him out?
We talked to some people close to the company to find out who the most important execs are under Nadella right now. Here's what we heard.
Scott Guthrie, Executive VP of Cloud and Enterprise
Guthrie oversees big bread-and-butter products that companies use in their data centers, like Windows Server and SQL Server, which was Microsoft's fastest-growing business through the 2000s.
But he's also in charge of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft's cloud answer to Amazon Web Services, where Microsoft hopes a lot of its future growth will come from. In addition, he runs the group responsible for creating Microsoft tools for developers.
Guthrie has a particularly tough job because he's overseeing a lot of the businesses Nadella was running before he took over as CEO. Under his watch, Microsoft's development platforms and Azure cloud have started to support a bunch of non-Microsoft technologies — previously unheard of during the "Windows first, Windows forever" reigns of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
Qi Lu, Executive VP of Applications and Services
Qi Lu joined Microsoft in 2008 from Yahoo and rose to lead its consumer online services, Bing and MSN. Those products lost a lot of money over the years and always seemed like a bit of an expensive hobby, and as a result Lu never seemed that important from the outside.
That couldn't be further from the truth today. Lu now leads Office 365, the most successful part of Microsoft's cloud business as well as the good old Office suite, which for years has been Microsoft's second-biggest product after Windows. He also continues to oversee Bing, which may not have toppled Google from the top rung in search, but is doing interesting research into artificial intelligence and coming up with things like the Cortana virtual assistant.
Plus, one source told us Lu regularly consults with another very important person at Microsoft...
Bill Gates, Founder and Technology Advisor
Gates returned to an active advisory role at Microsoft when Nadella took over, and while he's not involved in daily product and business decisions like he was as CEO or Chief Software Architect, we've heard this isn't just a figurehead position either.
In particular, Gates is an active participant in a debate at the company about the role of Windows. In the old days, the Windows team almost always got what it wanted, and if another division wanted to create competing technology, Windows often made it back down. Nowadays, there's a camp within Microsoft arguing that Windows should be forced to earn its place like every other product group at Microsoft.
If we had to guess, we'd say Gates is on the "Windows-first" side, but perhaps he's playing devil's advocate. Either way, he's spending more time at Microsoft than he has in years.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider