A New Era has Began in Microsoft... Bill Gates is gone. Microsoft is now officially Satya Nadella's. Read more.....

In case there was any doubt, the Satya
Nadella era has arrived at Microsoft.
Nadella announced Thursday that Microsoft
( , Tech30 ) will cut 18,000 jobs within the
next year, part of his push to slim down the
company and narrow its focus.

Analysts see this strategy shift as long-overdue.
Microsoft dominated the tech industry when
Nadella's predecessor, Steve Ballmer , took over
from founder Bill Gates in 2000. But in the years
since, Microsoft has sputtered.
Microsoft under Ballmer had been slow to
respond to innovations from rivals like Apple
( , Tech30 ) and Google ( ). It launched
a series of poorly conceived devices and two
poorly received versions of Windows. Observers
questioned Microsoft's direction.
The layoffs Microsoft announced Thursday "speak
to Nadella's attempt at cleaning up part of the
mess that Ballmer left behind," analysts at FBR
Capital Markets wrote in a research note.
The house-cleaning also proves that Microsoft is
now officially Nadella's company.
Industry observers often suspected that Gates
retained ultimate authority at Microsoft during
Ballmer's rocky tenure. Nadella has left the issue
unambiguous. The company announced that
Gates would step down as chairman on the same
day Nadella's hiring was made publi c.
"I run the place," Nadella said at a conference in
May. "Bill's helping."
Related: Bill Gates no longer Microsoft's biggest
shareholder
Since taking over, Nadella has said repeatedly
that Microsoft must position itself for a "mobile-
first, cloud-first world," with a particular focus on
productivity software. It's a vision he outlined at
length in an open letter to employees last week.
The strategy makes sense given that Windows
sales have eroded over the past year-plus. The
goal is to make products like Office, Outlook and
Skype staples for individual customers regardless
of the device they're using, and to transform
Windows from a desktop operating system to
cloud computing platform that can be accessed
from anywhere.
Nadella also made his presence known at Nokia,
the last major acquisition Microsoft made during
the Ballmer era. Some 12,500 of the layoffs
announced Thursday will come from Nokia, many
of which were redundancies Microsoft found
between the two companies. And Nadella killed
off Nokia's plans to make Android smartphones,
transitioning the "Nokia X" project to Windows Phone software.

Investors appear enthusiastic about Nadella's
moves thus far -- Microsoft shares rose 2%
Thursday, and are up nearly 20% since his hiring
in February.
It's worth noting, however, that Microsoft has
announced a number of major reorganizations
since the turn of the century that haven't
amounted to much. The challenge for Nadella
now is to put his vision into action -- to make
Microsoft relevant again in an industry that's
been reshaped by its competitors.
"We participated in the PC market," he told
analysts in April. "Now we're in a market that's
much bigger than the PC market."