Biography | Satya Nadella — The Redmond Campus Where the Board Named a Cloud Vice President CEO

People treat a chief-executive handover as a stage event.

This one was a press release dated from Redmond and an all-hands email.

On 4 February 2014 Microsoft's board appointed Satya Nadella chief executive and a director, effective that day.

He was forty-six.

He had joined the company in 1992 from Sun Microsystems and was then executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise group.

Steve Ballmer was stepping down.

Bill Gates left the chairmanship for a founder-and-technology-adviser seat on the same board.

Nadella became the third person to hold the office, after Gates and Ballmer.

The announcement carried a Redmond dateline.

This pin is Building 92 at 15010 Northeast 36th Street, for years the public face of the campus: visitor centre, store, and the place outsiders could actually walk in.

The visitor centre itself closed in February 2026, as the company repurposed the interior.

The building and the store remain.

The 2014 decision was not taken in a theatre.

It was a board resolution about a man who had spent two decades on this site moving server software toward rented compute.

Azure was already his brief.

The later market-cap story is a different memory.

The day the title changed is this one, on this campus.

Photo: Building 92, Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, 2016. Portrait from 4 February 2014: Satya Nadella, Brian Smale, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.