While it's never been considered a "cool" company, Microsoft is still a force — worth $300 billion, and Windows operating systems still run on a big chunk of the world's computers. While the profile of founder and former CEO Bill Gates still looms large, outgoing leader Steve Ballmer took the reins in 2000. And Tuesday, the board chose an internal candidate — 47-year-old Indian-American engineer Satya Nadella — to head the company. He's only the third CEO in Microsoft's 38-year history.

For the uninitiated, here are eight things to know about Nadella, so you're ready for this week's cocktail party chatter.

1) Nadella is known for his work with cloud computing at Microsoft and his deep technical knowledge. The company's cloud platform — which Nadella came to oversee in 2013 — is the infrastructure beneath Microsoft services such as Bing, Xbox Live, Office 365 and Windows Azure. Nadella has helped Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure, become a more serious competitor to Amazon's cloud. Before becoming head of cloud and enterprise engineering, Nadella led Microsoft's server and tools division.  [Link]