Microsoft boss Satya Nadella is paid $18m – and would trouser $20m if sacked Microsoft's chief exec Satya Nadella was awarded a big fat pay packet of $18m (£12m) for the company's last fiscal year. Nadella was awarded $12m in stocks for the period, according to the company's filing to US regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received 120 per cent of his target bonus – $4.3m (£2.8m) …
He is being paid to drive MS into the ground.
You beat me to it. From the article:
Under his leadership, Windows 10 was successfully launched
I'd say he's already working hard on "earning" that exit bonus. I fully expect quite a series of fresh CEOs over the coming years, all earning insane bags of money for what will at best amount to rearranging the deck chairs.
I wonder how they recruit these people. Do they have to be good at singing "my heart will go on" or something? As far as I can see it cannot be anything that is performance related..
Considering Ballmer and Go Nad, the main requirement seems to be the kind of swag that wouldn't be out of place in a Dilbert cartoon.
Go Nad has the Fist Pump of CEO Vision thing down too. That's got to be worth at least a few million on its own. (Dr Fox Effect? Oh yes.)
I still expect to see Cortana running MS within ten years though. Either that, or Amazon will pick up the pieces for a knock-down once-in-a-lifetime very special price.
Or maybe Nokia. That would be fun.
The bigger bonus for getting fired does suggest that was the plan, but as he was not fired he will have to try harder next year.
For mobile first equal, he inherited only a few percent market share. Any time he faces reality and does something with Android, he gets ranted and by the Lumia owners. Any time he pushes users to cloud first equal, he pisses of the desktop users. The obvious way to make money is to bump up the prices for locked in legacy users, and what a surprise, people scream when he does that too.
Somehow he has to balance between legacy support and securing a future. Any decision he makes will be interpreted as a recipe for catastrophe by half is divisional managers, business partners and customers. The monopoly is broken, so profits will fall whatever he does. Both sides will point at that and say it was his fault for not being 100% traditional and 100% modern.
The free software solution to problems like this is the project gets forked and users take their pick. If he could do that or something better at MS, then he would really deserve his bonus.
"WTF is "shareholder value"? "
It's a combination of dividends paid back to the shareholders (immediate / realised shareholder value) and market value of the share price (potential shareholder value that can be realised by selling the stock), and both metrics are very clear and easily available.
The problem is that in many cases (especially US) companies don't pay out dividends because they would be taxed, and prefer to use their cash to buy back their shares and so keep the share price up*. Thus executives' bonuses are linked to share price, leading to a lot of short-termism in decisions.
*Using their own cash to do this would also be taxed so a frequent trick is to borrow in the US against cash reserves held overseas, and use the borrowed cash to buy their stock back, which has an added tax benefit that the outstanding loan is a liability that can be offset against tax (ie can be used to lower their tax liability even further)
Thus executives' bonuses are linked to share price, leading to a lot of short-termism in decisions.
Indeed, the so-called "shareholder value" forces the C-Suite types to value their own money more than anything else. Shareholders do that also since they control the board. The worker bees and products mean little in this scheme. If the stock falls too far than the likes of Elliot Management get their paws in and strangle what's left. Yes, the C-Suite types usually come away with a pile of cash. Everyone else.. not so much.
*Using their own cash to do this would also be taxed so a frequent trick is to borrow in the US against cash reserves held overseas, and use the borrowed cash to buy their stock back, which has an added tax benefit that the outstanding loan is a liability that can be offset against tax (ie can be used to lower their tax liability even further)
The foreign reserves can charge "interest" to the US body which also accomplishes several things... the interest becomes a "business expense" and a write-off. More money is moved off-shore and protected.
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It's simply the typical...and usual...way of doing business in the corporate world.
1.) Move up the corporate ladder until you reach the top.
2.) Fuck things up so bad that the stock price tanks, and large numbers of employees are made redundant.
3.) Get your sorry ass "thrown out" by the Board of Directors...with an obscenely fat Golden Parachute.
4.) Wait a few months...then because you are now a former CEO...get hired by another large corporation...then rinse & repeat...over...and over again.
I'm not sure about (4). StevieB hasn't walked into a high profile position. If this guy doesn't actually turn MS around then this could be his last big gig.
Since the "successful applicant" is probably looking at early retirement in a few years, the MS board probably felt that they'd have to pay a fair bit to get anyone to take the job.
Oh really ?
Let me remember : no PCs available on launch date because image not available in time, first downloadable version made a complete pigs breakfast of many installs, first patch update to correct the mess made other things break, and in the first week of "deployment" Windows Update completely borked a good number of PCs that had to be reinstalled. And that was a successful launch ?
#Deity preserve us from a failed one.
And how many Linux upgrades have bricked machines, or made them fuck up? I know my MINT one did.
Complete reinstall required.
How many Mac upgrades brick machines?
When you have an install base running into 100's of millions, a few thousand fuck ups, unfortunately, are expected
Before you make any serious/major changes (or better still, every month), boot up from a GParted live CD then clone your system, home and data partitions onto a spare hard drive. Then, you can recover from ANY foul up. (You will probably need to run the Boot Repair utility, 32-bit or 64-bit version as appropriate, the first time you restore a Linux system like this but after that you just clone a backup and restore as needed. I've been doing that for over two years with Mint and it works every time. Try doing that with Windows; no, don't bother :)
Always have a separate /home partition. Ideally also a spare 20GB of unpartitoned HDD space.
Then worst case you can either re-install the OS over a badly borked one, or install a new one along side it, then boot it up, edit /etc/fstab to mount your old home partition and Robert is your little grandfather.
Now if only Windows always separated the OS partition form all user data and settings...and didn't bitch about activation keys, etc, if you do have to reinstall.
Not saying Linux won't ever fail, it is very rare, but it may do (most of the time X.org related).
However recovery is always a couple of commands away and rarely anything too complicated to fix, just revert a package or two, or clean some space and tell the package manager to clean up.
The worse I had ever to do with a server is to make it boot with the previous kernel version because a driver did not load with the newer one. Pinned the old kernel until a patch came to fix the problem with the new kernel a week later.
"I guess Satya isn't Jewish enough to make the really big bucks trousered by Balmer, Zuckerberg, Koum, Brin, Sandberg, Bezos, Ellison, ..."
don't spout racial bollox please
Balmer is a Scots name (though apparently the Swiss came up with is as well) while Ellison is an old English / Scandinavian name (admittedly based on a biblical name - Elijah's son). Neither are Jewish.
you missed the key phrase.....
"consistent vision and execution on our mobile-first and cloud-first strategy"
well, he executed windows mobile. Stretched its neck beyond hope. Presumably he's going to execute the microsoft cloud soon. But joking aside, that phrase pretty much indicates that PC operating systems don't matter for them. Windows is a legacy encumberance for them
The gushing assessment falls, in my book, in the category of "doing the job you were hired for". So why the enhanced bonus?
Oh. It's Microsoft. Everything is done for PR. Send the message at all times that everything is going really great and sod the reality.
You'll notice MS's persistent use of different buzzwords and phrases from time to time according to what their market psychologists tell them. With Steve B it was "say the word 'innovate' at every opportunity, even if it's out of context".
Now it's "get things done" in every public statement.
There is no company or any CEO job here. This is just ground-level politics. Its pathetic someone like Nadella that has not even gone to a valid school, is now earning millions, despite of his poor performance. He has caused a loss using excuses like blaming on Nokia, and now run out of excuses. Westerners whoring with anything thats indian garbage is pathetic and belongs to sewage.
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