You're getting crap for saying this, but you've hit the nail on the head. As people are replaced in a company, what does the company do? They backfill the role with someone who they estimate to be the most similar to the person who left! In my experience, the net difference is next to nothing.
Companies take on the behavior of the personalities of the people at the top. Nadella, like Gates and Ballmer before him, was selected based on shrewdness, and everything flows from there. It's simple. The company will continue to bear the culture born of Gates because of their board (at the top), and their HR department (everywhere else).
I don't doubt that Nadella is likely every bit as shrewd as the CEOs that came before him, and that his decisions are driven by ulterior motives that are more than what meets the eye.
However, shrewdness is just one trait, and I think it's disingenuous to insist that we can reasonably ignore all other consequences of having a different human being running the company because their shrewdness makes them as interchangeable as planks on a wooden boat.
Personalities and management philosophies can't be reduced into some simple measure on a shrewdness scale, and the other differences between these real human beings that you don't seem to be taking into account can and do bring real change in how the company behaves and operates. Maybe not a lot of the change is concentrated on the axis that you've cherry-picked, but that doesn't mean we can dismiss all the other change that may have resulted from this change in management as "next to nothing".
Absolutely they do not "backfill the role with someone who they estimate to be the most similar to the person who left!"
They in fact back fill the role with someone they think should be in charge of the future of the position (which is very often in a radically different direction), or more often than not eliminate the role altogether.
By your estimation, when Steve Balmer retired, the board would have hired another Steve. No, that's not the case. They hired Nadella who is different.
I am absolutely saying Microsoft's board replaced Ballmer with someone "like" him. To wit (as I said): shrewd. Ballmer shrewedly wrung all he could out of Microsoft's monopoly. People who think that Nadella is somehow some new, kinder, gentler Microsoft CEO are drinking the Microsoft-branded Kool-Aid. Nadella, per the popular notion, is only "embracing" open source out of a shrewd response to being forced to by the market. Moves like the one that inspired this entire article and discussion are proof of that.
Microsoft still sells (almost) no hardware, PC sales are dropping like a stone, corporate sales are lagging (my Fortune 150 switched to Windows 8 a YEAR after 10 was released), and Microsoft has to monetize seats of Windows somehow. What's left? Collecting and selling user data and advertising. This sort of thing has to have been approved by Nadella. Is this the move of a "kinder, gentler" CEO who just loves open source and freedom? No, it's a move by a shrewd person who is desperately trying to keep his company relevant in the face of phones, tablets, clouds, and social media.
The point of the paradox [1] is to replace/upgrade all the pieces with similar ones (planks with other planks). Unless you believe that human beings are interchangeable, it doesn't apply in this case
It's not the boat that's being replaced, but the crew. And life aboard the boat will change as the crew changes, but one crew member, even the captain, has limited power to change it all by themselves. So change comes, not necessarily very fast, or fast enough when the weather changes.
