Nadella Wants to Spend More Time With Engineers

It seems Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants to spend more time hanging out with engineers and less with customers and government officials. That’s the upshot of Microsoft’s announcement early Wednesday that Nadella would hand off some of his business responsibilities to Microsoft’s chief commercial officer, Judson Althoff. Nadella, an engineer by training, oversaw the company’s cloud and enterprise group before taking the top job in 2014. He gets to dip his toes more deeply into those waters now.

Nadella told staff he and the company’s engineer leaders would now be “laser focused on our highest-ambition technical work,” including in areas like Microsoft’s data center buildout, AI science and product innovation. That seems like a smart move, so much so that you have to wonder why Nadella was dealing with business stuff in the first place! Still, let’s not nitpick. If ever there was a time for Nadella to make this shift, it’s now. (Catch The Information’s Aaron Holmes discussing the news on TITV today).