The New Blood To Watch at Microsoft

Since Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft’s CEO, there’s been talk of a “new Microsoft” that is fighting for every scrap of relevance with consumers and businesses. Some of that is true—Azure has become a strong rival to AWS, for instance. But what hasn’t changed much is how veterans still dominate the company’s management team.

Mr. Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992. The average tenure of Mr. Nadella’s direct reports—executive vice presidents—will be 16.7 years by the end of this year, company filings and other disclosures show. That compares with the 12.7-year average executive tenure at Apple, a company known for being dominated by old-timers. Moreover, only two out of Microsoft’s 11 executive vice presidents—Qi Lu, the applications chief who joined from Yahoo in 2008, and Peggy Johnson, the head dealmaker who joined from Qualcomm in 2014—have spent less than a decade at Microsoft.