The Microsoft Board of Directors made it official: A Microsoft insider will now run the company. As has been telegraphed in recent days, the new CEO is 46 year old Satya Nadella, who’s been running Microsoft’s so-called Cloud Services. In a statement, Nadella said “The opportunity ahead for Microsoft is vast, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster and continue to transform.”
And, one key headline to watch today is one fromm the Commerce Department: December factory orders. It’s coming after yesterday’s very weak report drawn from a January survey of people who do ordering at factories. That one showed the biggest drop in factory orders in 33 years. The number of manufacturing jobs in America has been inching up, but there are two million fewer of those jobs since the start of the recession. Where have they gone?
And, as Satya Nadella takes over the reins of Microsoft, we can’t forget the previous CEO Steve Ballmer, who dropped out of Stanford Business School to help his friend and co-founder Bill Gates build the software company. Microsoft was about five years old and together they turned Microsoft into a the Windows juggernaut that it once was. Marketplace’s Queena Kim brings us this Ballmer retrospective.
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