My adventure at Microsoft started on 14 August 1994. On July 2016 I left Microsoft to start my own company but 22 years ago I had no idea how powerful joining Microsoft at the time would be or how it would flavour my future life. So many experiences, so much personal growth. I loved the passion, the possibilities, the people, the persistence and the energy. It felt like doing an MBA every year. I was proud to be part of something that is shaping the future world.
I made a lot of friends, travelled around the world, had colourful encounters, learned so much, and have been constantly amazed by Microsoft’s ability to adapt, learn from its failures, accelerate successes and reinvent itself.
Since 2014 Microsoft has wanted to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more, a full transformation under CEO Satya Nadella’s inspiring and refreshing leadership, always fully in with his heart and soul. A man with his head in the cloud. An authentic leader and a company on a mission.
The company’s market capitalization crossed the 500 billon threshold again after 17 years. Microsoft is now the third-largest publicly traded company in the world. Since Satya was appointed as new CEO in February 2014 Microsoft’s stock jumped $200 billion in value.
So what’s the story?
Setting the scene. Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and they wanted ‘to put a PC on every desk and in every home’. At the end of the 20th century, iconic technology giants like IBM (Big Blue), Microsoft and Intel (Wintel) were seen as the main players in the technology market, Microsoft thriving on its Windows and Office business software, IBM with its all-inclusive hardware, software and services solutions (never get fired when you choose IBM), and Intel with its chipset powering all hardware and software. This has changed in the last few years with rapid acceleration of mobile devices and the shift to the Cloud. Microsoft was not cool anymore and lost their mojo despite being very profitable and showing growth every year. But one of the three found their second breath.
What happened? For a while everyone thought that any innovation would be ruled by the GAFA technology giants. GAFA – Google (now Alphabet Inc.), Apple, Facebook and Amazon – is an acronym invented by the French to represent concerns in the face of these technology giants. And on top of that China is on its way to become one of the top innovating countries in the world – just look at the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, founded by Jack Ma, calling itself the ‘World’s Leading Platform for Global Trade’ or to others like Baidu, Xiaomi, Ten cent and Youku Tudou. From Silicon Valley to Silicon Dragon, both a geography of Genius.
However, Microsoft, with a new CEO Satya Nadella since 2014, reimagined its business. As a 22-year Microsoft veteran, Satya, decided to start by resetting Microsoft’s purpose, its aspiration and its culture to build a future-proof organisation.
Purpose – Empowering every Person and Organization on the Planet to achieve More in the Mobile-first, Cloud-first World
It is transforming its culture to have a growth mindset, reshaping its senior leadership around the world, moving everything to the Cloud and trying to think like a customer. It dethroned windows allowing Microsoft experiences to run on competing platforms and opened their world by signing partnership agreements with their rivals reflecting the reality of today’s customers having to integrate multiple solutions. And Microsoft now appears on stage on Apple and Salesforce.com events.
Culture – Growth and Open mindset, Learn to Fail Faster Successfully, One Microsoft, Diverse and Inclusive, Optimized for Cross-group collaboration
It de-invested in high cost shrinking areas like the Nokia phones and shifting the right investments into other areas, like the acquisition of LinkedIn with its 467 million active professionals for more than $ 26.2 billion. Its largest acquisition to date is a smart move into the mobile world – six out of ten LinkedIn users view it on their mobile device, making Microsoft ready to battle with Slack and Facebook At Work. With the strength of its Cloud computing, AI and the power of its professional network, Microsoft is set to be the powerhouse of business networking.
It is not just driven anymore on envy of what others have like Apple and Amazon, but on where it can truly differentiate.
Satya is working on making Microsoft future-proof. The Cloud (Azure, Office365), Artificial Intelligence (Cortana) and hardware (Surface line, Xbox and mixed reality headset HoloLens) take center-stage, all mapped to their aspirations.
Aspirations – Re-invent productivity, build an Intelligent Cloud and to create far more Personal Computing Experiences
Microsoft is betting its future on AI and a couple of months ago, Microsoft formed an AI team of more than 5,000 engineers and researchers to design the operating system of the future.
And it wants to learn to fail faster successfully and supports field journalism by communicating success and failure, allow people to see where progress is being made and where it is not. Give them a perspective on the short term and long term results, an outlook on when hard work will give dividends and how far the light at the end of the tunnel is. Show signs that things are working and be transparent about failures.
An example of that is Microsoft Tay. In March 2016 Microsoft announced Tay, an artificial intelligence Twitter person that would learn from tweets while engaging with millennials. However, some people went into hacking mode and maliciously provided Tay with racist information. Tay became a racist. Tay heard all those words, self-learned from them and thought that was what people wanted, then he became that person. Microsoft pulled the experiment off-line within forty-eight hours and Satya shared an open apology email to the market and all employees on what happened, what they learned and that this learning would be put into future practice. Since then they launched Zo bot and chat app Kik.
Outcomes. Today Microsoft is present in more than 192 countries, employs +110,000 people, has annual revenue of +90 billion dollars, 400 million Windows 10 users, 80% of the Fortune 500 on the Microsoft Cloud, 1.2 billion people on Microsoft Office and they passed the market cap of 500 billion dollars adding 200 billion dollars since February 2014. It has put the customer at its heart, value people as their soul and see digital as the oxygen of the company. And all 3 clearly aligned to a new purpose and aspiration.
With a growth and collaborative mindset open for curiosity we allow innovation to flourish. It is the mindset that matters, regardless of age, legacy or occupation. And many current and former workers say that Microsoft has changed in the core of its DNA.
Microsoft is finding its new sparkle while it performs by going through a major transformation as a business – people, digital, customers, purpose (why) and aspiration (what) – in this Mobile and Cloud first world. The transformation is not complete as to thrive in the future world it will require continuous agility, creativity and new ways of servicing their customers.
“It’s never about our technology,” Nadella said. “It is really to me about your passion, your imagination, and what you can do with technologies that we create. What societal problem, what industry will you reshape. That’s really what we dream about. We want to democratize AI just like we brought information to your fingertips.”
Microsoft seems to be back, and its transformation is accelerating.
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Olivier Van Duüren
As international Public Speaker, Trend Sensemaker, Executive Whisperer and Author, I help businesses to take the pain out of their personal and business transformation, leaving them with a regained sense of spark.
