Microsoft hitting a trillion $. Does it matter? Of course not!

Last week Microsoft, the company I that happen to work for since almost sixteen years, hit a market cap of one trillion dollars. My boys (13 and 11), who don't speak really English, except Fortnight's English, wanted to know what that meant? Was it in french "un billion or un trillion", or in dutch "een biljoen or een triljoen"? Frankly speaking, I didn't know but it made me realize that Microsoft hitting that billion $ milestone was a topic of discussion.

So in this post I won't talk about the fact if it matters or not. It doesn't. But as an almost 16 years veteran at the company, I wanted to share what we did that potentially made it happen, and what I think many others can be inspired from.

(1) It is all about your soul, about what you stand for. What would happen if you don't exist anymore? Many people tend to forget but Bill G to some extend actually invented the software industry. At least you need to give him credit that he firmly believed that software would eat the world (vs hardware). Satya (our current CEO) had to bring us back to this reality. Microsoft is about building Technology that helps others build more...

(2) It is all about the Innovator's dilemma (Clayton's book) where you need to confront the fact that you are going to exchange a 90% gross margin business (Windows) against a 30% margin (Azure). Today the Azure cloud is our biggest growth engine. That requires serious ...

(3) It is all about the customer. And the customer doesn't care about ecosystems, and certainly not about protecting dominance or monopolies. And sometimes you need symbols like when Satya (still our CEO, read above) presented the iPhone Pro. The iPhone Pro being a normal iPhone (you know that thing with a crappy a battery (sorry I couldn't help myself)) with a full screen of Microsoft apps. In 2019 a normality, but in 2014 it was not done to make Microsoft's core apps available on iOS or other operating systems. BTW, that lead also to other co-opetition agreements like the open data agreement with Adobe and SAP.

(4) It is all about culture, and culture is people. You cannot transform a company by changing its way of working, its processes. That would be too cumbersome. You transform it by focusing on the culture, on the people. I have never been as empowered to make decisions, to take risks, to push our people. And additionally I would say that our customers start to understand they can co-innovate with us. We don't always know the answer, but we sure will find out together.

(5) It is all about trust. Surveys are showing that many people are believeing that Cyber Security is a bigger issue than Climate Change. Having some understanding of what we (Microsoft) do on Cybersecurity, that is a bit concerning. Let me say that I will encourage my sons to continue to fight for climate change while I'll keep Microsoft (and myself) accountable about what we do on Security, Privacy and AI ethics...

(6) It is about building the right capabilities. When you start to build trust and confidence (also in slicon valley) you can think about adding the right communities to your world. First Minecraft, the biggest in spe programmers community; then Linkedin ( I could say the biggest leaders in spe community, but that would be cruel); and Github, which we had to earn. Big time.

Not sure if this is relevant for your businesses but I think that thinking about your competenencies, your values, your culture, your customer ethos, etc. is quite universal.

PS.: I used this picture because I'm sure Satya Nadella would I have preferred not to personalize this post. That being said I'm still a big fan...

PS2.: a few hours later, my kids still wonder if a billion or a trillion means the same thing in all languages ;-)