<p>Microsoft's cloud chief, Satya Nadella, will lead the company as its next chief executive, according to a report from Bloomberg.</p><p>Microsoft's board is "preparing to name" Nadella chief executive, Bloomberg reported Thursday afternoon. Nadella, whose official title is executive vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise group, had been one of the front-runners in the race to replace current chief executive Steve Ballmer, who said last August that he planned to step down within a year.</p><p>But the board is also considering replacing Bill Gates as chairman of the company, Bloomberg reported, ousting the company's co-founder and possibly replacing him with John Thompson, Microsoft's lead independent director. If Gates is to go, as PCWorld suggested last year, it would remove two of Microsoft's iconic employees from the software giant.</p><p>The problem with replacing Ballmer or Gates, is that no one executive at Microsoft has traversed the range of the company's products, which include consumer businesses like the Xbox, cloud services such as Azure, the company's Windows business, server and development services like Visual Studio, and an emerging mobile business, too.</p><p><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/2092196/report-satya-nadella-to-be-named-microsoft-ceo-gates-out-too.html">Keep reading...</a></p>