Satya Nadella is my new superhero

This was first published on SaddaHaq.com

"Our industry’s progress is punctuated by moments of category creation."

Satya Nadella opened with this quote at a Microsoft event named "Next Chapter". He is absolutely correct. The Mac, the iPod and the iPhone created new categories that changed the face of the world. Courtesy of these products, the master behind, Steve Jobs, who seductively unveiled each of them to a voyeuristic audience, became a cult figure and a super hero.

I just witnessed another such moment of category creation. In a pleasantly shocking revelation, Microsoft has just announced their latest and greatest innovation yet - the Microsoft HoloLens. HoloLens is an extremely sophisticated device that you wear around your head to project holographs -- essentially, virtual 3D renders of objects -- anywhere and everywhere.It's surreal. HoloLens might even bully Google Glass out of its lunch money. For the first time, Microsoft will be the cool company on the tech street hogging the attention away from Apple and Google.

Microsoft definitely owes this to their new CEO, Satya Nadella. These kind of projects take decades of research and hard work by hundreds of designer, engineers and scientists. So, it might seem harsh to attribute this moment to Satya Nadella alone, but it's not. Examining Microsoft's history will tell you why.

Any tech observer would know that Microsoft has been one of the most lavish spenders on research and development. In fact, Microsoft is one of the few companies that has an independent R&D center, Microsoft Research (MSR), which gets its budget allocation directly from the CEO. MSR's budget is one of the largest in the world and almost 3 times the size of Apple's R&D budget. Microsoft files about 3000 patents each year and has over 10,000 of them in its bank already.

Microsoft's R&D budget has always been one of the largest in the world.Despite all of these great attributes, Microsoft was always perceived as a follower than a leader, especially so in the last decade or more. Its products were so bloated that its investors had called for many of them, even successful ones, to be culled as late as last year.Microsoft had a huge cultural challenge too. It's bloated size of over 100,000 employees created layers of bureaucracy that killed innovations. Each product was so independent that many of them had their own CFOs.

The day Nadella took over as the CEO, he turned the company's mission from being "a devices and services company" to being a "mobile first, cloud first" thinker. In a world where "mobile" often refers to devices and apps, Nadella's mission seemed outdated because Microsoft had long lost the mobile turf to Apple and Google. Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure, is still one of industry's worst and Nadella was its head before becoming the CEO.

The leader of a failed Enterprise division leading the entire company, with a huge consumer focus, was a fishy proposition.

Given this backdrop of a slumbering giant in a jet speed world, what Microsoft has announced today is truly incredible and no one deserves more credit than Satya Nadella. His opening statement and the entire event stands testimony to his vision, management and execution prowess.

Microsoft just announced and demoed a number things today and all of them had one underlying theme that talks a lot about what Nadella had done.

Everyone at Microsoft now works for the same company with a unified purpose!

• A single version of Windows 10 is at the heart of everything that the company is planning, including Internet of Things and HoloLens! In fact, even the name is same across every device. No more Windows Phone and Windows Embedded. It's all Windows 10.
• Cortana is not just an independent utility. It is now at the heart of Windows 10, which essentially means Cortana is at the heart of every Microsoft product.
• Bing is no longer just an independent search engine. Bing drives Cortana, which means Bing is also in every Microsoft product.
• Skype is the common communication platform across all platforms. Finally, the money that Microsoft spent on Skype seems to make sense.
• Every service is driven by the company's own Azure.
• Even the two new hardware products that were unveiled today comply with all the above points! It appears that the foundation has been set in stone.

While this unification of all of company's products and platforms is a great achievement in itself, the clarity of vision that the company exhibited is probably even more important.

When Steve Ballmer announced a "devices and services company" strategy, he set out to drive the company along two different paths. Similarly, when Nadella announced "mobile first, cloud first" strategy, it appeared as if he was driving two different agendas too. However, what Microsoft announced today speaks quite contrary to that.

For one, Nadella and co have put forth a vision that Mobile is not just about devices and apps, but is about the experience of being able to move from moment to moment and from environment to environment in a seamless and consistent way, not just for users, but also for developers.

Besides, Nadella and co have also demonstrated that Mobile and Cloud, which are distinct and independent terms, go in the same vein for the company. They support and complement each other to create simple and powerful experiences, which could make the company and its services ecosystem cool and attractive.

Nadella not only woke up a slumbering giant, but injected it with a dose of confidence and positivity.

Microsoft is yet to clarify the business opportunity in HoloLens. A few years ago, this situation could have lead to the scrapping of the product. By letting HoloLens see the light of day, Nadella has passed a great message to his colleagues at Microsoft. If this trend continues, Microsoft could soon be competing against Google in radical innovations.

Whether or not he has won over investors and the rest of the world is a huge debate. One thing is sure, however. Nadella has just earned a super fan in me.