Satya Nadella Ranked Top Visionary Among High-Tech Leaders
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the most influential leader in the high-tech industry, according to Juniper Research's annual ranking released Tuesday. Nadella bested the likes of Apple's Chief Design Officer Tony Ive, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Netfix Cofounder and CEO Reed Hastings, Alibaba Founder and Chairman Jack Ma, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla Founder and Chairman Elon Musk.
Nadella's ability to surge past this eclectic and prominent group of technology executives is an unusual turn of events given many people have written off Microsoft as a company with vision, which is the basis of Juniper's ranking.
"The rankings, which are based on Juniper's assessment of key criteria including vision, innovation and personal capital, noted that Nadella's implementation of 'Windows-as-a-Service' represented a fundamental change to Microsoft's OS-focused business model, resulting in a very different process of development at Redmond in future," according to Juniper Research's announcement of this year's survey.
Juniper Research's survey of tech visionaries may not represent the most prominent of rankings but it will be interesting to see if Nadella finds himself coming up more often when it comes to looking at who's setting the agenda for the IT industry. And that's not a given, considering Nadella was just named CEO just under 16 months ago.
While Nadella has set the pace for change in a short amount of time and has strived to show the world Microsoft still has some new tricks up its sleeve, his work has just started and success remains to be seen. Nevertheless, this ranking is another sign that critics may not want to write Microsoft off yet.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/27/2015 at 8:39 AM