[Nadella] tells a story from a few years ago, when a group of tech analysts came from China to take the measure of Silicon Valley. They attended all the key developer’s conferences: Apple’s WWDC, Google I/O, AWS Re:Invent, and of course, Microsoft’s own Build. “They said, ‘God, you know what? For anything that the United States has got, we’ve got equivalents in China. We’ve got ecommerce, search, hardware manufacturers, social networks of our own. But there’s this one company that we visited, Microsoft, that’s pretty different.’” As Nadella tells it, the delegation marveled at the company’s breadth, with everything from the PC operating system to Xbox: “It all comes together as this one systems platform.” And, he now implies, Microsoft’s breadth sets it up to seize the most propitious opportunity in the history of technology.
It was an odd choice of anecdote, considering that Microsoft’s history has been plagued by its eagerness to use its size as a cudgel—and that today it’s under investigation by the European Union and the US Federal Trade Commission for those same tendencies. Nadella skates past that and brings up his greatest triumph, AI. He tells the tens of thousands of Softies around the world that the new goal was to put Copilot—that’s Microsoft’s name for its AI—in the hands of people and organizations everywhere.
Nadella doesn’t say outright what everyone in the room knows: Just a decade ago, pundits had declared the company brain-dead.
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“In a five-minute break, walking to the bathroom and back, we were able to completely change the company strategy around support for Linux and open source,” says Guthrie. When Nadella later told Ballmer, who was in his final days at the company, he simply informed him of the policy shift. Then, two months after Nadella became CEO, Guthrie suggested that they change the name “Windows Azure” to “Microsoft Azure.” It was done on the spot, sending a signal that Microsoft would no longer assess every move based on its impact on Windows.
