"Microsoft’s resurgence: Reflecting on Satya Nadella’s leadership, a decade after he became CEO" (MSFT) plus the FANG in print anniversary

From Seattle's own, GeekWire (also serving Redmond and vicinity), February 1:

When I met Satya Nadella in 1992, we were both engineers at Microsoft, and I never would have guessed we’d go on to be life-long friends or that he’d end up running the company for over a decade.

This Sunday, Feb. 4 marks 10 years of Satya at the helm of the second company in the world to reach a $3 trillion market cap. This is no small feat given that Microsoft wasn’t even part of FAANG, the name Jim Cramer coined in 2013* for the tech stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) driving the market and consumer mindshare.

When Satya stepped into the CEO role, the industry’s opinion was that Microsoft was on a path to becoming irrelevant. While Microsoft was an early pioneer in personal computing, it missed the mobile and search waves, didn’t participate in the consumer social networking wave, and was coming from behind on cloud.

More and more, people were not thinking about Microsoft as innovative, and its underperforming stock painted a clear picture — Microsoft just wasn’t part of the conversation. 

Fast forward through Satya’s 10-year run as top executive, and that has all changed.

Microsoft’s valuation surged from $300 billion to $3 trillion, rivaling Apple as the world’s most valuable company. And it is part of the Magnificent Seven (or should we say Fabulous Five) surging stocks due in no small part to Microsoft being out ahead of everyone on the generative AI wave.

Satya’s leadership style, characterized as grounded, decisive, and empowering, reshaped the company’s culture, fostering agility, innovation, and collaboration. That success and Satya’s strategic focus on the cloud, acquisitions, and AI revitalized Microsoft and propelled it to the forefront of the tech industry. Companies just starting out and those already a couple decades in can learn from the transformation we have all witnessed. ...

....MUCH MORE

*It was eleven years ago today that the FANG acronym first appeared in print though I think it was earlier used on TV:

Cramer: Does Your Portfolio Have FANGs?

Credit to Cramer's technical analyst guy for originating the term:

https://realmoney.thestreet.com/author/bob-lang

Cramer has gotten a lot of things 180 degrees wrong but the FANG (sans Apple) was as right as right could be.