If you could understand impermanence deeply, you would develop more equanimity. You would not get too excited about either the ups and downs of life.
~ Satya Nadella
Information technology is at the core of how you do your business and how your business model itself evolves.
In our business, things look like a failure until they're not. It's pretty binary transitions.
It's not about the failure, it's about learning from the failures. Failure itself cannot be celebrated.
With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.
India for sure is a mobile-first country. But I don't think it will be a mobile-only country for all time. An emerging market will have more computing in their lives, not less computing, as there is more GDP and there is more need. As they grow, they will also want computers that grow from their phone.
I think the combination of graduate education in a field like Computer Science and the opportunity to apply this in a work environment like Microsoft is what drove me. The impact these opportunities create can lead to work that has broad, worldwide impact.
Human language is the new UI layer, bots are like new applications, and digital assistants are meta apps. Intelligence is infused into all of your interactions.
We want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences.
Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn. So the last part to me is the key, especially if you have had some initial success. It becomes even more critical that you have the learning 'bit' always switched on.
At Microsoft, we're aspiring to have a living, learning culture with a growth mindset that allows us to learn from ourselves and our customers. These are the key attributes of the new culture at Microsoft, and I feel great about how it seems to be resonating and how it's seen as empowering.
Every opportunity I got, I took it as a learning experience.
LinkedIn was an amazing deal for us to do because of their mission.
The thing I'm most focused on today is, how am I maximizing the effectiveness of the leadership team, and what am I doing to nurture it?
One thing we've talked a lot about, even in the first leadership meeting, was, what's the purpose of our leadership team? The framework we came up with is the notion that our purpose is to bring clarity, alignment and intensity.
You look at marketing: everything that's happening in marketing is digitized. Everything that's happening in finance is digitized. So pretty much every industry, every function in every industry, has a huge element that's driven by information technology. It's no longer discrete.
We've had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It's going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future.
We had the Windows app store in Windows 8, but one of the big changes in the design of Windows 10 is to make sure that the app store is front and center where our usage is, which is the desktop.
Businesses and users are going to use technology only if they can trust it.
I will talk about two sets of things. One is how productivity and collaboration are reinventing the nature of work, and how this will be very important for the global economy. And two, data. In other words, the profound impact of digital technology that stems from data and the data feedback loop.
I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.
Culture change means we will do things differently.
