Did Satya Nadella just blow up 26 billion dollars?
Vivek Khanna
CEO Peyote Morgan | Helping Insurgent Leaders Grow Transformational Tribes
Steve Jobs returned from oblivion in 1997 to pull off the greatest turnaround in tech. Lot of what he did then, including up to the launch of the iPhone in 2007, invited much ridicule and criticism from the “experts” and naysayers. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, what he then did, were clearly some very clever moves, driven by a clear vision.
While it’s perhaps unfair to compare the two very different people from very different contexts, I do think that Satya Nadella just set Microsoft in a direction that will take it to far greater heights than it's ever been before. Much like Apple soared when Steve Jobs decided to pursue the next big thing, instead of fighting battles that were already over.
One of Steve’s favourite quotes was:
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” - Wayne Gretzky
So, where is Satya Nadella’s puck headed?
Microsoft is described as an enterprise product company that produces productivity tools for work.
With increasing sophistication in Connectivity, Cloud and Cognitive technologies, the world of work is transforming exponentially.
From hierarchical, rigid, pyramid like structures ... a legacy of the Industrial Era, necessitated by limitations of one-to-many, people-to-people communication and manual operations…. work is evolving into flat fluid “networks”, enabled by sophistication in automation and social tools that facilitate communication between one-to-many and many-to-many, people and things, in ways never imagined before.
Business Enterprises, their vendors, alliances, partners and even customers will eventually come together to collaborate and co-create value, as one seamless network, to unleash unprecedented levels of innovation and productivity: a promise of the artificial intelligence driven Cognitive Era.
In the Desktop Era, Microsoft was the platform.
In the era of connectivity, cloud and cognitive computing, the network is the platform.
Work is central to our existence and defines who we are.
LinkedIn is the network for work, of over 433 million working people and growing.
If Satya can effectively execute on LinkedIn's mission to "Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful" combined with Microsoft's mission to "Empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more".....
Then Microsoft + LinkedIn can potentially once again be the platform of the future on which humanity connects to share, collaborate, co-create, transact and learn irrespective of who you work for, what you do and where you work from .... or even the devices you use.
I think the next big move from Microsoft should be of making their products Social Media enabled / oriented.
Chief Executive Officer at Orient Bell Ltd
8 年Microsoft is feeling the pressure of being" left behind" in the social media sweep stakes and believes that LinkedIn complements its suite of business productivity tools. The earlier mega investments like Nokia Skype have not really taken off. Hoping that they get it right this time.
Passionate about innovating and applying technology in new ways
8 年Like your angle on the article... finally a bold bet from Microsoft on the way to connect professionals.
Chief Software Engineer
8 年There is a tremendous amount of intelligence that can be inferred from social networks. When LinkedIn started we afforded it some trust because it had not proven to be otherwise untrustworthy. Now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn many of us that lived through the trials and tribulations of an untrustworthy Microsoft will need to rethink that trust relationship. LinkedIn was the only social network I trusted with my business contact list. What will Cortana do with all this data? Cortana is Microsoft's answer to IBM's Watson. Cortana's utility function is to improve Microsoft shareholder value. Cortana will harvest LinkedIn data, because it must. So far, that positioning is working. As a Unix bigot I am a big fan of Linux and OpenSource and my first scaleable cloud solutions were on Amazon AWS. Today I am more and more interested in Azure and Cortana. Not because of Microsoft, usually a detractor, but because Azure and Cortana Intelligence are heading in the right direction. The big question will be Can we trust Microsoft to not be evil, again? If Bill Gates can change, then maybe his creation will follow his example and work for the greater good of society.
Full Stack Web Developer | MERN Stack
8 年This is the most important strategic plan of expansion that Microsoft took after aquition of Nokia. Brilliant strategy.