As internal candidates go Satya is an inspired choice to lead STB.  He’s done a great job since taking over the Search/Ad/etc. engineering team.  He has a background in servers, spent a good chunk of time building apps on top of STB’s offerings so he has the customer perspective, and of course he’s been operating in the cloud world the last few years.  He also shares some of Bob Muglia’s better characteristics and I think there will be less culture shock to STB than other candidates would have brought.  Great choice Steve.

BTW, one of the things about Satya is that people consistently underestimate him.  I think Bing may finally have put that to rest.  But if the folks at Oracle etc. are saying “Satya Who?” with a chuckle, they are making a mistake.