Windows 11 gave me a renewed sense of purpose

[Disclaimer: I'm a Microsoft employee, but this is entirely my own personal opinion]

Companies tend to talk about values and mission statements as specific view of a larger company culture. You might even have declined a job offer in the past because you felt it wasn't a good culture fit, so we all know that culture is real. Personally I have always been conflicted because I have felt that company mission statements tend to be lofty goals without a solid anchor in reality, and to what management practices on a day to day basis. I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way at times.

But first, I want to turn back the clock about 5 years. At that point in time I had worked for major cloud providers such as IBM and AWS in various different cloud related roles for about a decade, and had always kept an eye on Microsoft as a competitor. Satya was about 2 years in role, and his mark on the company was already becoming apparent, even to an outsider such as myself. I have always been motivated by technology, especially cloud technology, and how it can empower people and companies to achieve more. My main motivator was to do "cool" and impactful things that had a meaning, by leveraging technology. I had been fortunate enough to get the opportunity to work with everything from getting small startups off the ground quickly using cloud native stuff, all the way up to global enterprises such as Toyota and Sony reimagine how they do IT and create new products and services. My innate need to do impactful things was being satisfied, but the goal set out by the company was never really to empower people, have an impact on society or help customers create new products and platforms to reimagine our lives. All the impact we were having was incidental to sales. I have always believed that having an impact and driving business value will organically drive revenue, not the other way around. This is one of the reasons I love the consumption based model of cloud; it aligns perfectly.

In the cloud space there's always a comingling of people between companies, much like any other industry I suppose, and an old friend who was now working at Microsoft reached out to see if I was interested in getting an inside view of the transformation Satya had kickstarted. I definitely was, if nothing else, as a sceptic of large scale organizational culture transformation. What followed was a battery of discussions with a wide range of Microsoft employees, which turned into interviews, which turned into me taking a bet on the new Microsoft they were all talking about. Satya definitely had people excited about change.

Turn the clock back to present day, and it's been a wild ride with explosive year over year growth. Since joining Microsoft to help large enterprises and global conglomerates empower employees, optimize operations, transform products and engage customers, Azure has seen massive growth, and Microsoft reached a mindboggling $2 trillion dollar market cap earlier this week.

But had I started to fall into the old trap of focusing on revenue, to let company values and culture fall to the wayside? Was I embodying and enforcing the culture that I had felt that Satya was trying to create 5 years earlier? What I definitely knew was that I was asking myself these questions, while trying to define my own impact and how I embrace and enforce what I want Microsoft to be. Did I still feel the same excitement about the cultural shift I had felt just a few years earlier?

Operating systems as a metaphor

I have always been somewhat of an OS nerd, which I guess comes with the territory of being excited by technology. Windows has a long history, and I can think of no better single product or thing to embody Microsoft's transformation and evolution over time. To this day, Microsoft is Windows, to many people.

While Windows has always been impressive from a technical point of view, and I remember being awed by the NT 4.0 kernel with its support for IA-32, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC when it was released. However, I also have somewhat bitter memories on the business side of things which led to a ridiculously cool and small operating system competitor, BeOS, being squashed by questionable practices using the clout and scale of Microsoft. Anybody who has installed Slackware, OpenBSD or BeOS in the early days, probably have a guarded stance when it comes to Microsoft.

This was very much the mark of a very sharp, but ruthless, business man; Bill Gates. Brilliant, technologically savvy, and a very aggressive business person focused on growth. There are countless examples of how this manifested itself through things like MSN, Internet Explorer, Office document formats etc, but I think there is no better example of Microsoft evolving than Windows itself.

Windows 11 - doubling down on the new Microsoft

Come June 24th, 2021, and Windows 11 was announced. Being the self-proclaimed OS nerd, I tuned in to the announcement.

I knew this would be a large release, despite certain people trying to dismiss it as a new theme on top of Windows 10. The buzz inside that company was on, and many people I know and trust were very excited, even though they couldn't (or wouldn't) tell me much. I have now had a day to think about all the updates and new things as they were officially announced, and the more I think about it, the more I feel a renewed sense of purpose, and connection to the company culture.

In Windows 10, there were a lot of steps taken to open things up, meet people where they are, and create a more inclusive platform. A specific example would be the announcement and subsequent evolution of WSL, Windows Subsystem for Linux, which is something that would have been unthinkable in the era of squashing BeOS, and being ruthless when it came to competition. Microsoft embracing Linux, containers and becoming a huge open source contributor are all things that have pointed towards Microsoft changing. Something is changing. All the hints have been in plain sight for those who have been looking. Windows 10 is under the hood a distant evolution of the NT 4.0 I once admired, but was born out of a ruthless Microsoft. It has since transformed into something open and inclusive in line with the Satya mindset that I see permeating the company.

Windows 11 tries to take this to the next level, in what I consider to be a revolutionary way. From a technical point of view, it's an evolution, from a mission and culture point of view, this is very much a revolutionary release. The announcement is a reassertion of the new Microsoft; Satya's Microsoft. Building on the technology already in place, that had helped NT 4.0 be capable on running on things like Alpha, is what enabled the Windows team to be able to create an opportunity to run Android apps on Windows. Wait, what? Android apps on Windows? Surely it has to be accompanied by some sort of lock in attempt through the app store, right? Like a Microsoft extension of the app somehow? Nope. Or push to lock people into the app store? Nope. The Windows app store is opening up further, with more types of apps, allowing developers to bypass fees and create their own payment systems if they so choose. As part of opening up the app store for other players to create their own platforms on top, Amazon is providing the Android app store as part of all of this. What?! Amazon ... on the Windows app store ... providing Android apps natively ... ? Let that sink in for a bit.

While I'm impressed by the technical feat of being able to get Android apps on Windows natively, what has really cemented that sense of transformation and mission I felt five years ago joining Microsoft, is the full embrace of enabling other players than Microsoft to come and be a part of something bigger. There's enough room for everybody to collaborate and create something special, something revolutionary. If you're a gamer, maybe the fact that something like Steam possibly becoming its own independent platform on top of all of this, will tell you a lot.

I believe Microsoft's approach is unique, and it happened as a direct result of the renewed company culture, outspoken and direct mission statements, with management embracing and encouraging the new path that Microsoft is on.

Back to Azure

While Windows might be more familiar to the average person on the street, for the enterprise people and developers out there, Azure will probably sound almost equally familiar. I'm personally not a part of the Windows team, and sit on the sidelines as an enthusiastic supporter witnessing their transformation of the OS and the company, but my day to day job is with Azure.

So how does the Windows 11 announcement tie back to how I'm feeling about the work we do around Azure, and how did it give me a renewed sense of purpose working for Microsoft?

To explain that, I need to give you an example. This example is "Databricks". Databricks is not a Microsoft project name, but rather a super cool company focused on big data, analytics and machine learning. It's based on open source technology called Apache Spark, and has been widely adopted by the industry. In the old days of Microsoft, this would have most likely been seen as a compete threat, and somebody within the company would have scrambled to develop a competing product and rally the entire clout of Microsoft behind it.

However, Azure is unique in the cloud provider space in terms of how far it goes to embrace the idea of an open platform, to meet people where they are. Azure goes out of its way to not compete with its customers and partners. Databricks is today a first party service that has been tightly integrated into Azure, creating a platform on top of the platform, that helps people build cool stuff faster, more efficiently, in the way that they like. Much like the idea of Steam or Adobe Cloud on top of the Windows App store, Azure tries to create the best platform possible ... for other platforms, such as Databricks. Unfortunately I still see Azure's competitors doing things in the old Microsoft way, and Azure having embraced the new Microsoft, makes it unique in the market today.

In other words, there's a common theme that is emerging between different organizations, solutions and products coming out of Microsoft, whether it be Windows or Azure. How do you create a common thread in a company as large as Microsoft? Culture. A set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes the organization

Microsoft Culture

The Windows 11 announcement yesterday made me realize that the cultural change I started to see 5 years ago, that led to me joining the company, is alive and well. Azure is not a fluke in the sense of being a pocket of open and forward thinking, but rather one example of how the entire business is moving in that direction.

This gave me a renewed sense of purpose, and honestly a little bit of pride. Internally Microsoft is very vocal about embracing the culture of innovation, diversity and inclusion, and so on. All things that resonate with me. However, the important thing isn't creating lofty or aspirational goals and mission statements, if the culture does not embrace them with real actions. Seeing the Windows 11 launch gave me renewed confidence that Microsoft is walking the walk, so to speak. I see things happening that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, and I love the stuff that I'm seeing.

“You join [Microsoft], not to be cool, but to make others cool.”, Satya Nadella

I couldn't have summarized any better even if I tried. I've always been driven by technology, and empowering other people to leverage that technology to get to new heights. Seeing culture and company mission statements turn into products and services that help empower customers, partners and employees is one of the biggest motivators I can imagine.

How do you feel about your company's, or even your personal, mission statement?