Microsoft has always been a profitable machine, but in this century, it has indeed experienced a period in which people generally believe that its best and most attractive year has passed.
Editor’s note: This article is from Tencent Technology, reviewing the Golden Deer.
Microsoft has always been a profitable machine, but in this century, it has indeed experienced a period in which people generally believe that its best and most attractive year has passed. That was before Nadella restarted his culture with a strategy of “looking forward and looking backwards”.
On November 11th, according to foreign media reports, by February 4, 2020, Satya Nadella will be Microsoft’s CEO for six years. Compared with his predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, the time is not long, but he has enough time to leave his mark on the company. Regardless of any benchmark, Nadella’s tenure is successful, including leading Microsoft’s market value to exceed $1 trillion to become the world’s most valuable public company.
However, Nadella himself believes that it is very dangerous to use financial indicators such as market capitalization as an indicator of success. He said that after joining Microsoft in 1992, he experienced the first period of Microsoft becoming the world’s most valuable company.
He was in an interview with Stephanie Mehta, editor of Fast Company magazine, in New York. “I remember that at the time, those of us who joined in the early 1990s were thinking: ‘Oh, we The company must be great, look at its market value. ‘And this is always the beginning of the end: When you start somehow thinking that you are God’s gift to mankind, you may forget what was originally driving your success.”
Nadella added: “Inspired by that era, I said that we need to learn from omniscience to omniscience, which is how we talk about Microsoft’s corporate culture.”
“We want to commercialize digital technology”
Microsoft has always been a profitable machine, but in this century, it has indeed experienced a period in which people generally believe that its best and most attractive year has passed. That was before Nadella restarted his culture with a strategy of “looking forward and looking backwards”.
On the one hand, Nadella made a big bet in new areas such as cloud computing, mobile, and augmented reality (AR), and gave up Windows-centric thinking. But he did not give up the company’s historyThe advantage is to focus on the company’s mission to create useful tools to democratize technology. Since Gates and co-founder Paul Allen began writing programming languages in the 1970s, this pursuit has always been in the company’s mind.
Nadella said: “Remember, Microsoft is a company founded by building a BASIC interpreter for enterprise-level engineering software provider Altair, so our goal is anyone, be it a retailer, a manufacturer, or Healthcare companies, if they want to be software companies, we want to commercialize digital technology.”
Microsoft’s most recent contracted customer is the US Department of Defense, which received its $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) cloud computing contract. Even before the company signed the agreement, the deal sparked controversy among Microsoft employees, some of whom issued an open letter urging the company not to bid on the contract involving the war, which was designed for Trang. Under the supervision of the general government, the war was launched.
The first question that Mata raised during the interview was about the JEDI contract and its reactions within the company. Nadella emphasized that Microsoft employees should always feel that they have the power to express their opinions. He said: “We are very concerned about the issues they raised, what caused their concern, because I think this is very important. However, in the end, as an American company, we want to ensure that our best technology can be provided to those who choose Protect our free institutions.”
Metta also asked if another voter group (shareholders) was worried about the company’s help in dealing with the area of Seattle, its hometown. Like the area where Seattle and other tech workers are concentrated, less wealthy people are crowded out of once-prosperous communities. Earlier this year, Microsoft pledged to invest $500 million to build affordable housing in the area. Nadella responded: “Microsoft needs employees, and employees have to live in the community. The community needs hospitals and schools. Investors are willing to do more work.”
“We like to create new languages”
When Nadella and Mata talk to specific Microsoft products, services and technologies, the focus of the chat is on new areas, not the traditional “cash cow”, and they haven’t even mentioned Windows.
Nadella mentions the HoloLens 2 AR helmet that began shipping this week and shows Microsoft executive Julia White using this helmet to record his own English hologram in real time, which is translated in real time as Japanese. Nadella said: “We are excited about the large amount of human communication it contains.” Nadella did not feel uneasy about Mata’s comparison of the show with the scene in Black Mirror.
In the past talks about artificial intelligence (AI), Nadella himself has some rather dark descriptions, he willThe dystopian possibilities of technology are compared with the film “1984” and “Beautiful New World”. He argues that companies such as Microsoft have a responsibility to guide the AI in the right direction and serve humanity by creating actions such as a toolkit to eliminate prejudice and to be open to relevant legislative measures.
When Mita mentioned that Google recently announced that it had achieved “quantum hegemony”, that is, the task of performing traditional computers on the experimental quantum computer, Nadella did not object to Google’s controversial claims, even though Microsoft Have their own ambitious quantum research projects.
In contrast, he called the Quantum Era an opportunity for Microsoft as a tool provider and promoted the company’s quantum programming language Q#. He also pointed out that the quantum age requires him to improve his skills. After all, “the things I have learned in computer science have little to do with this.”
When their conversation came to an end, Mata noted the Fast Company community’s enthusiasm for Microsoft’s efficiency recommendations and asked if Nadella could share his method of managing his unusually busy schedule. For example, he managed to take time out to participate in various activities, although this may overlap with Microsoft’s own Ignite conference schedule. Nadella’s answer is: “Sometimes, we will confuse everything we should do with something that only you can do, and focusing on the latter is a filter that is very helpful to me.” /p>
This is not to say that Nadella has all the answers in his mind, or just facing the problem of needing him to play a special feat. He explained: “Some people will complain that Word doesn’t do what they expect it to do. I’m sure I can’t solve it, but at least I can figure it out.”