Satya Nadella -- one of a small handful of alleged internal candidates for the Microsoft CEO job -- has been at the company for 21 years. Since 2011, he's been running Microsoft's lucrative server and tools businesses (His official title, as of the July 2013 reorg, is Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise.)

For the last three years, Nadella, who is a member of Microsoft's senior leadership team, has reported directly to Ballmer.

While there are plenty of critics who've lambasted Ballmer for being slow to respond to changing industry dynamics -- of being a follower instead of a leader -- Nadella said he felt Ballmer struck a better balance than for what he's credited, in terms of cadence and priorities.

Ballmer "is perhaps one of the most grounded people I run across in this place around what our current realities are," Nadella told me during a sit-down interview in Building 34 in Redmond at the end of November, when I talked with him about outgoing Steve Ballmer's legacy.

Nadella recalled a performance review he had with Ballmer two or three years ago.

"I went to him and sort of said, 'Hey, you know, how am I doing?" The first thing he said is,'Dude, you're going to know it, I'm going to know it, so don't keep asking me. You know, we're all going to know what is happening because it's going to be in the air.'

"The second thing I asked him, 'Hey, what about all these past grades and how did they do? And how am I doing relative?'" Nadella said. "He said, 'Why does that matter? Look, this business is not about longevity of any idea. It's all about inventing new formulas. So the thing that I would want to really evaluate you on and I want you super focused on is not how I did or anyone else did with any opportunity we had, because that's not going to tell you anything about the future opportunity.'"

While Ballmer is extremely detail-focused, Nadella said there's never been a meeting win which Ballmer asked something like "have you optimized this CAL (client-access license) with this thing or what have you." Instead, it's "mostly all about what is the next play," Nadella said.

The notion is "there's nothing in this industry -- and definitely in this particular segment -- that's built to last," Nadella continued. "It's all about being able to reinvent yourself.

"And that, I think, is his lasting legacy," said Nadella of Ballmer. "As he would say, it's about batting averages. You're not going to take everything and be a hit. It's not like, oh, we have a great enterprise business. In fact, we have had many enterprise business births and deaths in his tenure."

In the enterprise specifically, Microsoft has evolved from a client-enterprise, to a client-server-enterprise, to a server-workload business. The current phase is cloud. But even that business-model and architectural shift has roots in the so-called Energizer project -- via which Microsoft's IT department provided customers directly with services starting back in 2005.

Nadella said Ballmer told him "all formulas have a timeline or a half-life. And if you don't sort of get focused on inventing the new formula at the right time, you're dead in this business."

At the same time, because everything about Ballmer's approach has been about the long-term, he hasn't been a leader who makes changes haphazardly.

Nadella cited device management as an example.

"There is a very important (management and security) construct called domain join we invented. You could say the IT folks may have misused it to screw up some of the experiences in some cases. But you don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

"You have to reimagine and build new constructs, which we have done with this workplace join," Nadella continued. But we also have to grandfather in other devices into this concept. That doesn't mean we somehow go away from speaking about the virtues. In fact, the fascinating thing that we're seeing now is customers are all realizing, in fact, even our competitors are realizing that this information assurance is probably what enterprises need. They can't willy-nilly let any device come into the enterprise, install any application with no data protection and no ability to test to the device state."

Nadella said Ballmer's often is the first to question new ideas. He cited Microsoft's Windows Intune device security and management service as an example. When Nadella first pitched Ballmer about the evolving bring-your-own-device (BYOD) dynamic and the need to repivot to become more of a cloud service for managing Windows and non-Windows, he got a lot of pushback from Ballmer about the branding, to the concept, to the business model. Why not just continue to rely on System Center, Ballmer wanted to know.

"You come up with an idea, he'll say, 'That's the dumbest thing.' Or, 'I don't buy that,'" Nadella said. "But with him, you've got to just keep going back. You keep going back."

This is a trait Ballmer shared with Chairman Bill Gates, Nadella said. (I can confirm it from an outsider perspective, having been on the receiving end of more than one "That's the stupidest question I ever heard" rants from Gates back when he was CEO.)

"They (Gates and Ballmer) yell at you, they'll scream at you, they'll sort of say you're crazy and you're destroying this place," Nadella said. "And all the melodrama aside, you come back at it with the data, with the -- with your own conviction, because a lot of that stuff is all to test whether you know what you're talking about."

The result: Ballmer may change his position. Sometimes in very big ways.

"I keep my score on that. And whenever he does, and he'll sort of say, 'Yeah, you were right.' And he'll move on," Nadella said.

Via: ZDNet

Yahoo confirmed the outage at the time but details were sketchy about what caused it or how many people were affected. Mayer’s post Friday sheds a little bit more light on the fiasco.

”Unfortunately, the outage was much more complex than it seemed at first, which is why it's taking us several days to resolve the compounding issues,” she wrote.

Yahoo’s Mail engineering team was alerted Monday night to a hardware outage in one of the company’s storage systems serving 1 percent of Yahoo’s users, she said. With around 100 million daily users, that implies about a million users may have been affected at the start of the week.

The Mail team immediately started working with storage engineers to restore access and move to back-up systems, expecting a full recovery by Tuesday afternoon, Mayer wrote Friday.

”However, the problem was a particularly rare one, and the resolution for the affected accounts was nuanced since different users were impacted in different ways,” she wrote.

For instance, some people saw an outdated “scheduled maintenance” page while trying to log in to their accounts, which was an incorrect message.

As of the post Friday afternoon, Mail had been restored to almost everyone, Mayer said, and the backlog of messages had been delivered. The company will continue to roll out IMAP access and restore people’s inboxes, including returning messages in folders and starring messages, she said.

”We’re going to be working hard on improvements to prevent issues like this in the future,” she said.

The problems are unfortunate, given how important Mail is to Yahoo. As one of its most prominent products, improving the service has been a focus to attract new users to the company.

Via : PCWorld

Mollenkopf had been in line to eventually succeed CEO Paul Jacobs, the 51-year-old son of a Qualcomm co-founder, but that plan was sped up in order to keep the senior executive from leaving, Jacobs told Reuters in an interview.

"Our executives are very talented and very sought after," Jacobs said, when asked by Reuters whether the promotion was related to an offer from Microsoft.

On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported that Microsoft has been considering Mollenkopf as a candidate for CEO.

"He would have been an awesome (Microsoft) CEO," said FBR analyst Chris Rolland. "But Qualcomm didn't want to lose him, and it makes sense to me."

"If I were the son of a founder of a $130 billion company, I would want to make sure I have the top guy behind me - and Steve is definitely that guy," Rolland said.

Removing Mollenkopf from the shortlist of CEO candidates at Microsoft could complicate matters for its board. The company was down to a "handful" of candidates with no clear leader, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters this week.

Mollenkopf, 44, will take the reins in March, as Qualcomm faces a shift in smartphone growth away from the United States toward China, where it faces an antitrust investigation and where consumers often spend less on their phones.

Via : Reuters

CREDIT: REUTERS/BRENDAN MCDERMID

Elop reportedly open to killing Bing and selling Xbox

Wal-Mart Stores  named the head of its international division, Doug McMillon, to replace Chief Executive Mike Duke, who will retire on January 31 after five years at the helm of the world's largest retailer.

McMillon, a 47-year-old Wal-Mart veteran, will take charge after the holiday shopping season at a time when the company is facing intense competition from dollar stores and other discounters, such as Target Corp .

"McMillon was responsible for the growth area for Wal-Mart - international sales - and that's why he got the nod," said Walter Loeb, president of retail consultancy Loeb Associates.

Wal-Mart, whose shares rose 0.5 percent in early trading, has missed Wall Street estimates for U.S. comparable sales for three quarters in a row.

McMillon, currently CEO of Wal-Mart's second-largest operating unit, will start in his new role on February 1, the company said in a statement on Monday.

Originally from Jonesboro, Arkansas, McMillon joined Wal-Mart in 1984 as a summer employee in a distribution center. After studying for an MBA degree, he rejoined the company in a Tulsa, Oklahoma store in 1990.

He was promoted to his current role as head of Walmart International in January 2009. Prior to that, he was president and CEO of the company's retail warehouse chain, Sam's Club.

"McMillon has done just about every job there is (at Wal-Mart)," said Joe Feldman, analyst with Telsey Advisory Group.

"He's a good fit culturally and, as a young 47-year-old, there's an opportunity to be there for a long time," he said.

Duke, 63, will continue as chairman of the executive committee of the board and stay on as an adviser to McMillon for a year.

During his five-year tenure as chief executive, Wal-Mart's share price has risen by just over half, underperforming a more-than doubling of the S&P 500.

Duke's salary for the fiscal year ended January 31, was $1.3 million, while his total remuneration was $20.7 million, according to a regulatory filing in April. McMillon's total compensation for the period was $9.6 million.

Wal-Mart did not give details of his future salary as CEO.

Wal-Mart shares were up 0.49 percent at $80.20 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Source : Reuters