Microsoft has named Satya Nadella as its new CEO today, but the company also revealed that its co-founder Bill Gates, who has served as chairman of its board of directors since 2000, will now step down from that role to assist Nadella as Technology Advisor.
That means, for the first time in 14 years, Microsoft will have a new chairman, John Thompson. He was the leader of Microsoft's CEO search committee as it tried to find a new CEO for the company following the announcement in August that Steve Ballmer would retire from that role. Today, Microsoft uploaded a brief video showing Thompson as he talked about naming Nadella as the company's CEO and his own move to become the new chairman.
In the video, Thompson says one of his major goals as Microsoft's new chairman is to "engage with shareholders and keep focused on how, together, we can bring great innovation to the market and drive strong, long term shareholder value."
Microsoft's newly updated biography on Thompson shows that he has both the business and technology background to serve as the company's new chairman. He was CEO of Symantec from 1999 to 2009 and previous to that was a top executive at IBM. Currently, Thompson is the CEO of Virtual Instruments, a privately held company that describes itself as "the leader in Infrastructure Performance Management for physical, virtual and cloud computing environments."
Source: Microsoft on YouTube
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