Microsoft Names Netflix CEO to Board
Microsoft said Monday it elected Reed Hastings, the chairman and chief executive of Netflix, to its board of directors.
Hastings, 46, becomes the 10th member of Microsoft's board. He was appointed to the board's finance committee.
He founded online DVD rental company Netflix in 1997 and took the company public in 2002.
Microsoft's board was scaled back to nine members last year, when former U.S. Labor Secretary Ann McLaughlin Korologos retired at its annual shareholder meeting in November.
Hastings, who also founded one of the world's 50 largest software companies, Pure Software, becomes the only representative on Microsoft's board from an Internet-based company.
Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, plans to tap into Hastings' consumer and technology knowledge, the company's chairman Bill Gates said in a statement.
The addition of Hastings comes as Microsoft tries to beef up its Web services business to better compete with rivals like Google and Yahoo.
