Scott Guthrie

Guthrie, known by his email handle ScottGu, is executive vice president in charge of the company’s Cloud and AI group. In 2018 Guthrie gained more power when Microsoft divvied up the Windows and Devices Group and moved a good chunk of it — the Windows platform team — into his organization. He joined Microsoft immediately after taking his bachelor’s degree from Duke University in 1997. He was a founding member of the team that developed Microsoft’s .NET, a set of technologies for software developers to write applications. He’s also the father of ASP.NET, for building web applications. For many years he has shown up at events in solid red polo shirts, the closest Microsoft comes to having a person with a regular uniform like former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who often wore black turtlenecks. In 2011 he took control of the application platform team for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure offering that competes with Amazon Web Services, to get developers building on Azure. Back then Azure was not the company’s biggest priority, and it wasn’t the easiest thing to use. Even some Microsoft executives had trouble with it, Business Insider reported. The day before Nadella became CEO, he asked Guthrie to take over for him as head of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise business that includes Azure. “We’ve worked so closely together, so it was a pretty quick conversation,” Guthrie said in a 2019 interview.