In Hyderabad, muted celebrations at homes of two ex-IAS officers

Satya studied at Hyderabad Public School in Begumpet, after which he obtained a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from Manipal University, Karnataka, in 1988. He met his future wife at school, the institution whose 90th anniversary he attended in Hyderabad last year.

“He is very humble. He told students there that they should never stop learning and never give up on their dreams. Satya also facilitated a visit by a team of young engineers from Microsoft who spoke about the future of Internet and Microsoft,” Faiz Khan, one of the directors of the HPS board, said.

In a 2012 interview, Satya said his daughters often failed to understand what he was doing at work. That was when he was leading the cloud and developer tools verticals of Microsoft. “Now I tell them, ‘I work on Windows but it’s not the Windows you see,” he was quoted as having said in the interview.

The Windows that we all see, despite commanding over 90 per cent of the market share, has not been doing well in recent times.

The unassailable market share is essentially in the PC market, which has started shrinking as common communication-driven computing starts moving to platforms like Android. Five years down the line, Microsoft might have fewer traditional PCs to lord over as people would have shifted to newer, cheaper, easier to use devices.

However, it would be hard to take Microsoft out of enterprises and enterprise computing, unless some major disruptor comes around soon. That has been Nadella’s core area and it would be no surprise that with him at the helm, Microsoft might just think of holding on to that base with innovations that make professional computing safer and more cost effective.

The company has for some time been under pressure to hive off some of its verticals like gaming, and a decision whether the company chooses a path that reduced its visibility to consumers while not hitting its bottom line could be on top of the new CEO’s agenda.