Biography | Satya Nadella — The Redmond Campus Where the Board Named Him the Third Chief Executive

People treat a Microsoft succession as a Silicon Valley press event staged on a rented stage in San Francisco.

On 4 February 2014 the board appointed Satya Narayana Nadella chief executive at the company's own campus, One Microsoft Way, Redmond.

He was the third person to hold the title.

Bill Gates had held it from the founding until January 2000.

Steve Ballmer held it from January 2000 until he retired as an employee the same day Nadella took the job.

A Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lists 4 February 2014 as the date of the earliest event.

The same filing gives the principal office as One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399.

Nadella had joined the company in 1992.

In July 2013 he became executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise group, the unit that built and ran the computing platforms under Bing, Xbox, Office, and other services.

The board also seated him as a director that day.

Gates left the chairmanship and took a founder and technology advisor title while staying on the board.

John W. Thompson became chairman.

The public building a visitor can still walk into is Building 92, the visitor center on the west campus at 15010 NE 36th Street.

The 2014 vote was not a public rally in that hall.

The pin is the campus the filing names, not a private office and not a later East Campus tower.

Nadella had taken an electrical engineering degree at the Manipal Institute of Technology in 1988 and a computer-science master's at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1990.

He later finished a Chicago Booth MBA in 1997 while already on the payroll.

The announcement closed a search that began when Ballmer said in August 2013 that he would step down.

Photo: Coolcaesar, Building 92, Microsoft Redmond campus, 30 May 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Satya Nadella, LeWeb Paris, 10 December 2013, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.