What is the Microsoft CEO actually saying?

Radio 4 recently featured an interview with a management expert to try and decipher what the new Microsoft CEO meant in his recent speech

The final summary was

he should speak in plain language and use half the words to stop people getting bored.

I remember a presentation from a sales person, he referred to hot-spots and heat-maps of the market, along with a bunch of other jargon. People were either puzzled or bored because they didn't understand the points being made.

The jargon used resulted in not getting the intended message across, subsequently the audience were bored. The worse thing about a boring presentation is they seem to last forever.

Microsoft

Monitoring the direction and big decisions of Microsoft are making fascinating, everyone has used/uses Microsoft products (Windows and Microsoft Office).

I have written a couple of posts on Microsoft before

Microsoft gives with one hand and takes away with the Other

NoTime to wait - Touch Friendly Office for android to be released before windows 8 version

Whether I agree or disagree with the decisions I have been impressed by the decisiveness and lack of procrastination from the Microsoft CEO, Satya has a plan and he is acting quickly.

Microsoft need to stop waiting for rest of the industry to make decisions and try and follow the good ones (tablets/phones). If the tablet/phone procrastination lesson is not to be repeated, Microsoft need to lead the industry and not follow. If they are slow in an area they have the resources to quickly bridge the gap as long as they don't hesitate.

The Microsoft CEO has big decisions to make, so I was curious to see what I could glean from his address to the Microsoft employees.

Bold Ambition & Our Core

The new CEO for Microsoft Satya Nadella gave a speech to the Microsoft employees, you can read the full transcript here, I will look at the some aspects but not all because it's long. The title was interesting, I don't think many people would say Microsoft have shown Bold Ambition in recent years, more a slow and steady approach.

From: Satya Nadella
To: All Employees
Date: July 10, 2014 at 6:00 a.m. PT
Subject: Starting FY15 - Bold Ambition & Our Core

The day I took on my new role I said that our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation. I also said that in order to accelerate our innovation, we must rediscover our soul – our unique core. We must all understand and embrace what only Microsoft can contribute to the world and how we can once again change the world. I consider the job before us to be bolder and more ambitious than anything we have ever done.

It's encouraging to hear he wants Microsoft to change the world, I agree whole heartily with this because Microsoft should be innovating and they have the size, money and expertise to do so.

The next section is under the title Our Worldview

We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world. Computing is ubiquitous and experiences span devices and exhibit ambient intelligence. Billions of sensors, screens and devices – in conference rooms, living rooms, cities, cars, phones, PCs – are forming a vast network and streams of data that simply disappear into the background of our lives. This computing power will digitize nearly everything around us and will derive insights from all of the data being generated by interactions among people and between people and machines. We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.

Our passion is to enable people to thrive in this mobile-first and cloud-first world.

It starts to get confusing but he seems to be saying the internet/cloud is available everywhere and there are a plethora of devices to consume it. Digital life is in the cloud and the cloud is everywhere.

Our Core

Microsoft was founded on the belief that technology creates opportunities for people and organizations to express and achieve their dreams by putting a PC on every desk and in every home.

More recently, we have described ourselves as a "devices and services" company. While the devices and services description was helpful in starting our transformation, we now need to hone in on our unique strategy.

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

At this point I imagine people in attendance started to wonder what Satya was rambling on about. Whilst reading it I started thinking the person Satya replaced Steve Ballmer the (former) CEO of Microsoft. Steve Ballmer made many odd/humorous speeches but I don't believe any one had any problems understanding what he was saying.

When I read the quote below I was wondering what software/services he was talking about?

Productivity for us goes well beyond documents, spreadsheets and slides. We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks. We will build the solutions that address the productivity needs of groups and entire organizations as well as individuals by putting them at the center of their computing experiences. We will shift the meaning of productivity beyond solely producing something to include empowering people with new insights. We will build tools to be more predictive, personal andhelpful. We will enable organizations to move from automated business processes to intelligent business processes. Every experience Microsoft builds will understand the rich context of an individual at work and in life to help them organize and accomplish things with ease.

The speech mentions the cloud/hardware and other offerings but I wasn't really sure the direction Microsoft are heading or the key points form these sections (please read the full transcript)

Overall the speech had a lot of words but didn't really seem to say much. I couldn't really decide what the key points of the speech were and If someone asked me to condense the speech into one paragraph I would struggle.

I have had the pleasure to attend many company presentations and the one's I got the most benefit had these attributes

Good company presentations

• PowerPoint presentations kept to the minimum
• Didn't use Jargon
• Concise
• Funny
• Positive
• A few key points for everyone to take away

picture from
Bhupinder Nayyar