From "Linux is a cancer" to "Microsoft loves Linux" - Cultural and strategic shift at Microsoft
The Economist has published a great article summarizing the shift of Microsoft from its traditional desktop product-based strategy to Cloud, AI and HW - while changing the company culture to be much more open and collaborative:
(...) "to change the firm’s culture—which is so important, he believes (along with Peter Drucker), that it “eats strategy for breakfast”. Technologies come and go, he says, so “we need a culture that allows you to constantly renew yourself”.
Mr Nadella sent around an e-mail saying “Keep pushing, and know that I am with you…(the) key is to keep learning and improving.”
Employees are no longer assessed on a curve, with those ending up at the lower end often getting no bonus or promotion.
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Although the cloud is the core of the new Microsoft, hardware is another important bet. The firm has shed its ailing mobile-phone division, which it had bought from Nokia, but on its campus in Redmond hundreds of employees are busy developing new devices.
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AI is a growing part of Azure, too. In recent months Microsoft has introduced two dozen “cognitive services” to Azure. Some understand language and can identify individual speakers, others recognise faces and can tap into academic knowledge. The idea is for other firms to be able to use these offerings to make their own products smarter, thus “democratising AI”.
"Genchi Genbutsu" - Go & see yourself to learn about your target market
"Todd McKinnon, CEO and cofounder of a then-tiny San Francisco start-up called Okta Inc., remembers Nadella showing up in jeans a few years ago to see how Okta used the cloud. "We're not using Azure," McKinnon said. "We use AWS."
Nadella shrugged. This wasn't a sales call. It was somewhere between fact-finding and espionage. At the end of the hourlong visit Nadella had drawn out a detailed map of what startups like Okta wanted from the cloud. Over the next few months he met with at least seven other startups in similar settings. Those talks inspired Nadella to offer Linux at a special, lower price on Azure--forgoing Windows licensing fees to keep customers happy. The decision was so at odds with Microsoft's usual lockstep methods that it later became the subject of a Harvard Business Review case study. Azure now is the fastest-growing of the five major cloud infrastructure services, Synergy Research finds, with an estimated 154% revenue leap in the past year."