How Satya Nadella & Steve Ballmer Helped Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) This Year

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has been helped by its current and former CEOs this year, David Kirkpatrick said in a discussion on Bloomberg’s In The Loop.

The comment was made by the founder and CEO of Techonomy as it was pointed out in the program that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) shares are up 29% this year. Was it Satya Nadella or the fact that Steve Ballmer left that contributed to this performance?

“It’s both. Ballmer certainly was not someone that people were sorry to see leave although I think he did some smart things there. But Satya has just done incredibly smart stuff. He’s really looked at Microsoft and said, ‘What are our assets? What can we do uniquely well? Let’s get rid of religion. Let’s not think it all has to be Windows everywhere.’ [He has been] putting their products on other platforms,” he said.

Kirkpatrick noted that one of the first things the new Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO did after he landed his job was to put Office on the iPad though that effort started under Ballmer.

Nadella has made it very clear that he is not religious, the Techonomy founder said. The technology giant, he said, has been a very religious company in the past and that religion was Windows. Kirkpatrick said that sticking to Windows and not making their products such as Office available on other platforms has been really detrimental to the Redmond, Washington-based company.

Furthermore, he noted that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has “some really smart people” who can be considered “the most creative thinkers in tech.” Nadella has done well in working with these people, Kirkpatrick said, which will lead to more and more creative, out-of-the-box products and initiatives.

Moreover, when told that the company didn’t really know what they are doing in cloud and mobile, he pointed out that Microsoft is one of the biggest cloud companies in the world. It has a lot of expertise in the field, he said.

Richard S. Pzena’s Pzena Investment Management owned about 10.13 million Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) shares by the end of the third quarter.