Satya Nadella Tells Employees He Wants Microsoft To Change The World

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants the company to become one of the most influential in the world and embody its new mission statement – to “empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more.”

In a memo to all employees obtained by Geekwire, Nadella laid out the company’s strategy for the year ahead, and revealed details about its prime targets and focuses, including the launch of Windows 10.

Magical things

“This mission is ambitious and at the core of what our customers deeply care about,” Nadella wrote. “We have unique capability in harmonising the needs of both individuals and organisations.

“This is in our DNA. We also deeply care about taking things global and making a difference in lives and organisations in all corners of the planet.

“I believe that we can do magical things when we come together with a shared mission, clear strategy, and a culture that brings out the best in us individually and collectively.”

Revealing Microsoft’s strategy to “build best-in-class platforms and productivity services for a mobile-first, cloud-first world”, Nadella alluded to the upcoming launch of Windows 10 as a key point for the company.

“We have approached Windows 10 with a growth mindset and obsession for our customers,” he wrote. “We have the opportunity to connect with 1.5 billion Windows customers in 190 countries around the globe.

“More details will be available in the coming weeks — our hope is that not only our employees, but customers and partners as well, will get involved and be inspired. Together, we can make a big difference in our world.”

However Nadella also noted that “tough choices” would need facing in the coming fiscal year.

“We will need to innovate in new areas, execute against our plans, make some tough choices in areas where things are not working and solve hard problems in ways that drive customer value,” he said.

New focus

Overall, Nadella named three main focuses for Microsoft in the coming year – “Reinvent productivity and business processes”, “Build the intelligent cloud platform”, and “Create more personal computing” – highlighting the importance of creating “inter-connectedness” between the company’s different product offerings.

The cloud will play a central part in this, he said, promoting a service “that provides our customers faster time to value, improved agility and cost reduction, and solutions that differentiate their business.”

Going forward, Microsoft will look to provide a powerful extensibility model that is attractive to third-party developers and enterprises, which will also help the company attract applications to our cloud platform whilst also promoting other offerings such as identity management, rich data management, machine learning and advanced analytics.

Elsewhere, Nadella also touched on Microsoft’s growth of its gaming division as part of a broader vision to increase the appeal of Windows.

This includes bringing together Xbox Live and first-party gaming efforts across PC, console, mobile and new categories like HoloLens into one integrated play experience. However there was no specific mention of smartphones or Windows Phone as Windows 10 and cloud took precedence.

“I believe that culture is not static,” Nadella’s memo ended. “It evolves every day based on the behaviours of everyone in the organisation. We are in an incredible position to seize new growth this year. We will need to innovate in new areas, execute against our plans, make some tough choices in areas where things are not working and solve hard problems in ways that drive customer value.”

One person who won’t be part of this vision is former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, who was the most high profile casualty of the latest restructure at Microsoft, announced last week.

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