This morning, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent his employees an email, and a pretty important one at that (Read it here). July marks the beginning of FY15 for Microsoft, and it’s a time to reflect on the previous year and plan for the future. For Nadella, this means determining where the focus lies as the company forges ahead in an industry deeply rooted in innovation.
Nadella is the third Microsoft CEO, leading the company since February, and has been with the company for over two decades. It’s safe to say, he’s seen a lot change at Microsoft during that time, and has held a variety of roles and positions – most recently, as the executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group.
With his background, running the division responsible for the technology powering Microsoft’s cloud-centric services, and the fact that Microsoft has led with the cloud for several years now, the choice to make Nadella chief executive fits right in with Microsoft’s transition. This cloud focus has been evident in recent partnerships with Oracle and Salesforce, both of which serve as a way to grow Azure, Microsoft’s cloud hosting platform, by providing popular application choices to use with Azure.
In today’s email, Nadella wrote:
We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world. Computing is ubiquitous and experiences span devices and exhibit ambient intelligence. Billions of sensors, screens and devices – in conference rooms, living rooms, cities, cars, phones, PCs – are forming a vast network and streams of data that simply disappear into the background of our lives. This computing power will digitize nearly everything around us and will derive insights from all of the data being generated by interactions among people and between people and machines.
He goes on to describe how the many devices, combined with cloud services, create a unique opportunity for Microsoft. And Microsoft’s passion? Well, it’s to allow people to thrive in our mobile-first, cloud-first world. And, while officially announced today, the company’s been heading in a more multi platform supportive direction for some time now (even releasing Office for iPad a few months ago).
It seems Microsoft is saying what so many have been looking for – the device doesn’t matter.
So, if device doesn’t matter, how can “devices and services” be Microsoft’s mantra? That’s changing too. From Microsoft’s inception, over the years, what’s been a constant is how Microsoft products and services help us get things accomplished – all of us. Whether you are talking about a high school student, a grandmother, or maybe a small mom and pop store, a non-profit organization, a large global company with complex business processes… Microsoft’s there, behind the scenes, enabling us to be more productive. Per Nadella:
At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.
When it comes to digital work and life experiences in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, Nadella brought up the notion of ambient intelligence. This includes Delve, the first experience powered by Office Graph which was just announced yesterday, and Cortana, both of which are able to ask questions and have those questions answered with Power Q&A, an aspect of Power BI, self-service analytics available through Office 365. He went on to describe how apps will be reinvented in this new world, and the shift from Office as a product to Office as a cloud-based service.
Apps will be designed as dual use with the intelligence to partition data between work and life and with the respect for each person’s privacy choices. All of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways. They will be built for other ecosystems so as people move from device to device, so will their content and the richness of their services – it’s one way we keep people, not devices, at the center. This transformation is well underway as we moved Office from the desktop to a service with Office 365 and our solutions from individual productivity to group productivity tools – both to the delight of our customers. We’ll push forward and evolve the world-class productivity, collaboration and business process tools people know and love today, including Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Bing and Dynamics.
As a Microsoft partner, we are excited about the opportunity that’s ahead of Microsoft, and look forward to being part of that opportunity, helping our own customers with their own transition to a mobile-first and cloud-first world.
Note: I highly recommend reading the email in full from Satya Nadella, as there’s a lot of great information, some of which I did not touch on.
