On February 4, 2014, Microsoft's stock was listed at $27. It was the day before Satya Nadella, who had been with Microsoft for 20 years and of Indian origin, received a call from a board member informing him that he was to be appointed Chief Executive Officer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. Nadella recalls saying what one says when one is unexpectedly offered such a top job: he felt honored, needed a moment to catch his breath, and yes, he was grateful for the trust placed in him. Hardly anyone among Microsoft's partners had bet on him at the time – and I won extremely lucrative bets then…
When Nadella took over the job, the stock was at $27. Today, ten years later, Microsoft's stock is listed at $378 – exactly fourteen times the value of the stock at that time, amounting to a market value of more than one trillion dollars (One Trillion in Anglo-American notation). This incredible rise is closely associated with the name Satya Nadella and with a strategic shift that might sound like a paraphrase of George Washington's (and later Donald Trump's) campaign slogan "America First": "Cloud First, Mobile First!"
This technological shift has not only changed Microsoft, but it has also shaped the world as we know it today. But perhaps even more important is the cultural change that Satya Nadella initiated in June 2015, when he formulated the mission statement in an employee memo that still stands today: "Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more."
However, even more crucial was the internal cultural shift: In his 1998 book "Babarians Led by Bill Gates," former Microsoft employee Marlin Eller criticized the competitive culture focused on mutual competition among employees and teams, which was further toxified by Gates' successor Steve Ballmer. Manu Comet, a former Google employee, made his depiction of the organizational structures of leading tech companies clear in funny schematic drawings: while at Google, somehow everyone reported to everyone, Microsoft teams were shooting at each other with pistols. The goal was to push through one's own development and discredit that of other teams.
Satya Nadella countered this with the momentum of empathy, showing interest in the views and goals of others and culminating in the belief that no platform can win if some contribute and others benefit. In this conviction, he had to make tough decisions initially. This included writing off the $7.6 billion investment in Nokia's Mobile Phone Business, with which Steve Ballmer wanted to advance the struggling Windows Mobile and Microsoft Phones business. Nadella acted according to the tried and tested motto: "If you're riding a dead horse, throw away the whip and dismount."
Nadella seems to be proceeding no differently in the gaming market today. After realizing that the platform competition with the major console providers was no longer winnable, he opted for the availability of games over the cloud – following the motto: "Cloud First, Xbox Second." For two years, Microsoft President Brad Smith had to explain this strategy to various national antitrust authorities before the acquisition of Activision Blizzard could finally become a reality. No wonder: the competition, which relied on platforms – that is, consoles – was concerned about their market dominance if games could be streamed from the cloud in the future. The fact that consumers would gain more platform independence was obscured by the competition.
This could have been Satya Nadella's masterpiece in his "Cloud First" strategy. Over the past years, Microsoft has consistently caught up with Amazon Web Services with the Azure platform. And with Office 365, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365, Microsoft's entire solution range has been "cloudified." The fact that Azure is also becoming one of the most important platforms for the Internet of Things further strengthens Microsoft's position in the cloud business.
Yet now, a revolution is sweeping across the globe, significantly shaped by Microsoft and the "Cloud First" strategy: the triumph of artificial intelligence. Not only has Microsoft as the main sponsor of the startup OpenAI massively driven the development of ChatGPT, but it has also – and most importantly – integrated the AI-powered voice assistant into almost all Microsoft products. The fact that the smallest, small, medium-sized, and large companies can use these AI services without investing in their own elaborate infrastructure is the result of the "Cloud First" strategy. Or as Satya Nadella himself said, "We want to democratize artificial intelligence."