Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella — after almost six months of his appointment at the new position — has shared his vision for the company in an email sent to all employees. Nadella sees Microsoft as a productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. The email marks the beginning of the company’s fiscal year and hints at the changes that are about to come in the coming months.
Nadella has stuck to his “mobile first, cloud first” ambition, and has added “ubiquitous computing” and “ambient intelligence” in which we are surrounded by computing devices. The company wants to reinvent technology and make it accessible to more people. “We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.”
The company also wants to work on the technologies that are unique to it. Nadella said that “while the devices and services description was helpful in starting our transformation, we now need to hone in on our unique strategy.”
Microsoft now sees every technology consumer as a potential “dual user” — who uses powerful technology both at work and in their personal lives. “Across Microsoft, we will obsess over reinventing productivity and platforms. We will relentlessly focus on and build great digital work and life experiences with specific focus on dual use.”
Besides that, Nadella also hinted at some of the changes that the company will be going through later on in this month, possibly around July 22, when the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings will be announced. “Over the course of July, the Senior Leadership Team and I will share more on the engineering and organization changes we believe are needed,” Nadella wrote.
The company recently developed a new mobile department, Microsoft Mobile which put 25,000 Nokia employees under one hood. There have been numerous rumors doing the rounds that several employees might lose their jobs. Though, Nadella didn’t address those rumors in today’s email, however, he did hint at a few things that we can expect.
“Across Microsoft, we will obsess over reinventing productivity and platforms. We will relentlessly focus on and build great digital work and life experiences with specific focus on dual use”
“In order to deliver the experiences our customers need for the mobile-first and cloud-first world, we will modernize our engineering processes to be customer-obsessed, data-driven, speed-oriented and quality-focused. We will be more effective in predicting and understanding what our customers need and more nimble in adjusting to information we get from the market. We will streamline the engineering process and reduce the amount of time and energy it takes to get things done. You can expect to have fewer processes but more focused and measurable outcomes.”, he wrote.
Nadella also squashed rumors of Microsoft selling the Xbox division. “I also want to share some additional thoughts on Xbox and its importance to Microsoft,” he wrote.
“We are fortunate to have Xbox in our family to go after this opportunity with unique and bold innovation. Microsoft will continue to vigorously innovate and delight gamers with Xbox. Xbox is one of the most-revered consumer brands, with a growing online community and service, and a raving fan base. We also benefit from many technologies flowing from our gaming efforts into our productivity efforts – core graphics and NUI in Windows, speech recognition in Skype, camera technology in Kinect for Windows, Azure cloud enhancements for GPU simulation and many more,” he added.
If you remember, at the Code conference a few weeks ago, Nadella had already made the company’s stance regarding the commitment with Bing clear.
On the tablet front, Nadella seemed happy with the company’s own hardware production capabilities. The acquisition of Nokia will only help build this. He also hints that Microsoft will continue trying to expand its portfolio and venturing into new categories. “That means at times we’ll develop new categories like we did with Surface. It also means we will responsibly make the market for Windows Phone, which is our goal with the Nokia devices and services acquisition.”
At last, Nadella plans to reshape the top layer, leadership board and speed up the engineering and decision making processes. Addressing the employees, Nadella wants to improve the training, making more resources available to every engineering group. You can read the complete 3000-word long email here.
