When Microsoft announced that Nokia has acquired for $ 7.2 billion in September 2013, the movement confused many industry observers. A month earlier, Steve Ballmer revealed his resignation as CEO. The man charged with finding a replacement to lead the Windows machine was John Thompson, 65, a member of the board of Microsoft that has followed the company's co-founder Bill Gates as president last year.
In July, Satya Nadella, Mr. Thompson selection for the post, decided Nokia has been an albatross and wrote almost all Nokia buy the 7,800 jobs cut in the Finnish group. The measure was a clear rejection of Microsoft's ambition to become a leader in the smartphone sector. But he asked if Nokia believes that the agreement of a costly mistake, Mr. Thompson says he has "no regrets" about the transaction.
"I will always raise my hand and say that I voted for him," says Mr. Thompson. "No one wants to pay back $ 7.8 billion, but no one wants to limit the choices" We were in the midst of a CEO search and if we had said, 'Oh, we will not continue with the agreement Nokia because Steve has announced that it will retired, and we expect the new CEO to get their sea legs' we could find ourselves in the position where Nokia was not available to us."
Thompson said he supported the change in direction of Mr. Nadella, as part of a broader effort to "reshape Microsoft". Over the past 18 months, the company has cut more than 25,000 jobs, it gave much of their advertising operations of AOL and decided to give the latest version of its Windows operating system for consumers for free. "I give great credit Satya say," Wait a minute, we can not keep doing this, '"says Mr. Thompson, adding that his role is to be a" coach or mentor Satya ", leaving the big strategic calls CEO.
But people who know Mr. Thompson will be credited rather than being a sounding board. They say he worked between racks to lead a major step in your boardroom, as well as the office of the Director General, when the shareholders have lost patience in Mr. Ballmer. A diplomat and statesman of the software world, their role in the remake the board including Ballmer to give more space to his successor, and the decision to resign as President of Gates has been the key to give Mr. Nadella space to rebuild society .
Microsoft hopes to increase revenues from the sale of software licenses for their cloud computing products, such as Office 365 suite of business productivity and online storage Azure. "The whole world is moving to the cloud. If we make a big bet on the cloud, to bet?" Says.But he admits that for the strategy to succeed, Microsoft needs to create more culture "free", ready to build applications and services that run on more platforms and devices software, regardless of who makes them.Thompson says Mr. Nadella has "spent more time in Silicon Valley in the 18 months that Steve spent five years." The company has made its products available in office furniture systems from Apple iOS and Google Android, while also releasing tools for software developers to create applications to run your platform, such as Windows 10.
The Microsoft strategy to create smoother a more collaborative? "Time will tell," he says. "It 's too late? I do not know. If so, then we will know in two or three years."New playbook Mr. Nadella can borrow some advice from Thompson old. After 28 years as an executive at IBM, he spent a decade as CEO of Symantec, the software company for computer security. Thompson was credited with streamlining the company, the abandonment or sale of these divisions, such as software development tools for the construction industry, to focus entirely on computer security.
By the time he resigned in 2008, annual sales of Symantec had increased $ 600 million to $ 6 billion. However, its mandate also included errors, such as the acquisition of Veritas Software $ 10 billion company data storage Symantec. Last month, the private equity group Carlyle has a buy Veritas for $ 8bn.In 2010, Mr. Thompson became CEO of virtual instruments, a startup based in cloud of San Jose, which focuses networks infrastructure management performance storage large companies.
Private enterprise has generated $ 350m- $ 400 revenues from its founding in 2008, but still not profitable. Thompson said Virtual Instruments has 350 customers, including "about 50 of the Fortune Global 100 and 200 500" as Dell and Microsoft.As one of the most important African-Americans in the technology sector, Mr. Thompson agrees that it is a rarity . But he defended the record of technology companies, citing "the group of candidates of engineering talent is rich in diversity," while schools and colleges that suggest should do more to add to this pool.
