Two months after Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, the company closed its almost $8 billion purchase of Nokia.

It was a catastrophic deal and represented the last vestiges of the Steve Ballmer era.

While Nadella inherited Nokia, an acquisition that was struck the prior year, he's taken a very different approach to dealmaking than former CEO Ballmer, and has been lauded for luring large and growing communities of users and developers to a company that had become notorious for missing out on technology trends.

On Monday, Microsoft said that it's spending $7.5 billion on GitHub, a popular platform used by software developers to collaborate and share code. GitHub, which was last valued at $2 billion by venture investors, is light on revenue because a lot of customers use the free version. But it's a service that's been almost universally adopted by developers.

Similarly, when Microsoft made its biggest purchase ever in 2016 — the $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn — Nadella was bringing in by far the most popular website used by working professionals to connect with one another. That's an immensely valuable data source that Microsoft can weave into other products, like its software that's used by salespeople.

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Wall Street has celebrated his strategy, lifting the stock over 160 percent in Nadella's four years at the helm. Microsoft has finally returned to growth but more importantly, it's positioned in markets with momentum.

The GitHub deal is just the latest example of Microsoft's embrace of open-source software, which is necessary if the company is going to get developers innovating on its platforms. Nadella has forged partnerships with longtime rivals of Microsoft with the view that customers want to use what they want to use, so you might as well make it easy for them.

Nadella hasn't only made his mark in the enterprise. After LinkedIn and GitHub, Nadella's next biggest deal was for Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, which Microsoft snapped up for $2.5 billion in late 2014