Bill Gates Is 'Very Happy' With Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

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Satya Nadella

Flickr/Johannes Marliem

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

It's been nine months since Microsoft named Satya Nadella as CEO and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says he's still happy with the choice.

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Bloomberg Television anchor Erik Schatzker interviewed Gates at the Sibos conference in Boston.

In that short time, Nadella has made some big and somewhat controversial decisions.

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He's currently lording over the largest layoff in Microsoft's history, 18,000 people. That includes cutting half of Nokia's acquired workforce and another 5,000 Microsoft employees.

He's also shaking up Microsoft's organizational structure, and, although he's grown more friendly toward competitive products, like the iPad, he killed Nokia's Android phones.

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When Schatzker asked Gates if he thought Nadella moving fast enough to transform Microsoft, Gates replied, "I'm very happy with what he's doing. I see a new sense of energy. There's a lot of opportunity there, some things the company isn't the leader on, and he sees that he needs to change that."

Gates also wants Nadella focused on Microsoft's cash-cow product, Office, saying, "Of all the things Microsoft needs to do in terms of making people more productive in their work, helping them communicate in new ways, it's a long list of opportunities Microsoft has to innovate. And taking Office and making it dramatically better would be really high on the list there. That's the kind of thing I'm trying to help make sure they move fast on."

Nadella seems to be moving there, introducing long-promised new features for Office like "Delve" (previously code-named "Oslo"), a product that helps you sift through all the data stored in multiple Microsoft products to find the stuff you need to see.

Here's the full video:

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