Within months, Ballmer was gone — ousted as the CEO of Microsoft and replaced by India-born Satya Nadella, the then head of the software firm’s cloud division. The incoming CEO wrote off the entire US$7.2 billion Nokia investment, fired all of the 18,000 people in its mobile handset division and refocused the company towards a “cloud-first, mobile-first” future, prioritising cloud computing services and mobile as the default option for delivering IT services. Microsoft was facing an existential crisis when its board reached out to Nadella and handed him the leadership baton. It needed an extreme makeover. The big question at the time was: Will Microsoft become the next IBM, the one-time champion and perennial laggard, or did it have what it took to reinvent itself?
Over 10 years ago, in mid-2013, I wrote a fairly critical column about Microsoft Inc for The Edge Singapore. At the time, the software giant was in the process of acquiring Finnish cellular phone maker Nokia for US$7.2 billion. It seemed comical that a fading software firm was betting that its fortunes could be turned around by buying a sinking cellular handset maker.
Microsoft’s once lofty stock, which had traded at over US$119 a share in late 1999, was by then languishing at around US$32 a share. Back then, it was run by Steve Ballmer, a college buddy of founder Bill Gates, who was adamant that Nokia would help his firm oust iPhone maker Apple Inc from its perch as the world’s most profitable smartphone company.
