By Diane Brady
Publication Date: 2025-11-18 10:48:00
Good morning.Microsoft Ignite, the tech giant’s annual developer and IT conference, will kick off this morning in San Francisco. For the first time since he brought together Microsoft’s disparate tech events under one banner as a rookie CEO a decade ago, Satya Nadella will not deliver the opening keynote. Instead, that role will go to Judson Althoff, who leads Microsoft’s commercial business. That’s a shame as we need to be hearing more from CEOs like Nadella right now, especially given his stature in a time of mounting public mistrust of both tech leaders and AI.
Nadella announced last month that he’s taking a more internal focus, handing off some of his responsibilities to Althoff to focus on the company’s “highest-ambition technical work.” I bet a lot of his peers would love to do that: With the exceptions like Marc Benioff and John Chambers, many tech leaders I’ve met don’t relish the public-facing part of their jobs. Nadella did recently post a short essay…
