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Microsoft 丑补蝉听announced it will hand the reins of the company to longtime executive Satya Nadella, thus ending a search that began last August.

In a letter to Microsoft employees, Mr. Nadella聽 it was an聽"incredible honor for me to lead and serve this great company of ours," and hinted that his focus would be on further developing Microsoft's cloud-computing and mobile businesses.听

So how has news of Nadella's promotion been received by investors and tech industry insiders?

Well, it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, as Daniel Ives, a managing director at FBR Capital Markets, recently MarketWatch, "It鈥檚 a sigh of relief that this elongated process is over. It was widely viewed that Nadella would be the guy so investors should not be surprised."聽

And Nadella has received glowing marks from a range of current and former CEOs, including Michael Dell and Jack Welch, who hailed Nadella's track record at Microsoft. (Nadella is perhaps best known for helping massively the company's server business.) Nadella "knows the business and has watched the moves for years has best chance to win," Mr. Welch .听

But his stature as a Microsoft insider can cut both ways. As Peter Cohan of Forbes this week, considering the range of prominent non-Microsoft execs said to be in the running for the job, the selection of Nadella feels like a "compromise."聽

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian, Heidi Moore to Nadella's first memo, which indicates that the new CEO will lean heavily on the expertise of Gates and John Thompson, the new chairman of Microsoft's board 鈥� and the head of the search committee that selected Nadella for his new gig.听

"This is not what Wall Street wants to hear, and it's Wall Street 鈥� and its powerful pressure of the dollar 鈥� that has been the audience for Microsoft's narrative so far," Ms. Moore notes. "Analysts won't be convinced that Nadella means change at Microsoft until he bites the hands that fed him the executive suite. They want Nadella to get distance from his predecessors, not pull them closer."聽