What was Satya Nadella really saying to his employees and the media last week?
1. PC World | CEO Nadella promises to shake-up Microsoft's culture: 'Nothing is off the table'
Honestly, my first thought on reading this piece was that Satya's quote of poet Rainer Maria Rilke ("The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens") sounded like a direct response to a Steve Jobs statement from several years ago about why Apple has been so successful in making such great stuff over the years: Steve said "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough, that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."
Steve's statement is difficult for many technologists to wrap their head around, but is fully consistent with my understanding of Steve's experience at least as far back as when he audited a calligraphy class at Reed College, which informed his desire for proportional font requirements for the first Macintosh early in its development, especially after he'd seen proportional fonts on the Xerox Alto while visiting PARC.
My second thought on reading this piece was that this promised shake-up was an incredibly positive development for Microsoft since everything I knew of Microsoft's culture had been so bound up with:
* intra-company competition
* protecting its virtual monopolies in Windows and Office
* releasing software before ensuring that the product worked really well
… that Microsoft had become unwilling to be agents of the same disruptive innovation Apple gleefully unloosed upon a willing world in the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
It remains to be seen what result Satya's initiative will have but I continue to believe that any initiative with one of its first goals being to "flatten the organization" can't be all bad.
Microsoft has historically had a reputation as being a tough place to work, due to infighting, staff fragmentation and cutthroat office politics. Steve Ballmer, Nadella's predecessor, set in motion his own culture-changing effort, called One Microsoft, shortly before announcing his retirement.
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Specifically, Microsoft will "modernize" its engineering processes, so that they're more in tune with customer needs, and are more data driven, faster and more focused on quality, according to Nadella.
Yes, Microsoft does indeed have the reputation of being a tough place to work for precisely those reasons, and changing that culture would no doubt make some hearts sing, if not quite in the same way that Steve's did.
And hey, if Microsoft was finally truly able to move away from the idiotic practice of Hungarian notation, then "modernizing its engineering process" should be a piece of cake.
2. NetworkWorld | Microsoft 3.0: Satya Nadella is now fully in charge
Aw man … not only does Microsoft have the potential to credibly compete with Apple's nascent 3.0 platform-oriented incarnation, they're even going to be referred to as Microsoft 3.0 ?!
3. Seattle P-I | Re-org! New Microsoft CEO says 'We must rediscover our soul'
"At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world," Nadella wrote.
The new boss sees Microsoft as having "a unique ability to harmonize the world's devices, apps, docs, data and social networks in digital work and life experiences so that people are at the center and are empowered to do more and achieve more with what is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity – time!"
That doesn't mean the XBox is going anywhere.
"We are fortunate to have Xbox in our family to go after this opportunity with unique and bold innovation," says Nadella. "Bottom line, we will continue to innovate and grow our fan base with Xbox while also creating additive business value for Microsoft."
And Nadella sees a bigger role for Cortana, aka Microsoft's Siri. "In the future, it will be even more intelligent as a personal assistant who takes notes, books meetings and understands if my question about the weather is to determine my clothes for the day or is intended to start a complex task like booking a family vacation."
My second thought on reading this piece was to wonder what makes Microsoft all of a sudden "the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world", which seems more aspirational (like Ballmer's "devices and services company") than real.
My third thought was to wonder what "unique ability" Microsoft has "to harmonize" a laundry list of marketing bullets, but on further thought I realized that Microsoft really is in a unique position with its enterprise dominance combined with a credible presence in the living room. This is somewhat orthogonal to the strengths of Apple and Google, giving the rapidly developing platform race between these three titans the potential for a real competition. Assuming Microsoft can execute, which would have been a tall order for them before but maybe Satya can manage to turn the supertanker around where Ballmer was unable or unwilling to do so. There are a lot of smart people at Microsoft, after all. It could happen, unless ...
4. Business Insider | Satya Nadella Proves That Microsoft Hasn't Changed At All
The word "productivity" shows up in Nadella’s message 20 times; variations of the word "work" make 27 appearances. He says that Microsoft must be a company hyper-focused on its customers. But the tenor and tone of the missive makes one thing abundantly clear.
You and I are not the customers he is thinking about.
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Nadella's pitch is not to the average consumer, the normal person working an everyday job that uses a computer and a smartphone to get things done. No, we are just a consequence. Nadella is really pitching the IT departments of the world, the decision makers who ostensibly choose the devices we will use to be productive.
OK, now this whole thing is starting to make more sense. The article has a lot more great insight, too, which I may return to in later posts.
5. PC Magazine | Report: Microsoft Layoffs Expected This Week
Yep, right on schedule ...
6. ComputerWorld | Without the cloud, Microsoft may lose grasp on the enterprise
Looks to partners to help convince enterprises to switch from Microsoft software to its cloud services
Yes, these are the stakes for Microsoft. A big 3.0 year for Apple might well spell the beginning of the end for Microsoft, 3.0 or no. I don't think it will be quite as big a surprise as the iPhone was to Steve Ballmer, but Microsoft is clearly scrambling already, maybe as never before, or at least not since Netscape.
Dear Tim, if you avoid referring to Windows as " a poorly debugged set of device drivers" (which Marc Andreeson did at Netscape) with the result that you get the full ire of Microsoft's fleet of people just as smart as yours (Andreeson spun up Microsoft's developers well and truly), you might have a shot at this.
Apple 3.0 is Cupertino's play for all the marbles, people. |
