Microsoft’s Quiet Office Evolution Under Satya Nadella
Mr. Nadella, 48 years old, is more likely to quote German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche than to scream and shout like his predecessors. His mission is markedly different, too: attempting to make Microsoft more innovative, a change that critics say was long overdue at a company that tended to fall behind in emerging technology areas.
Messrs. Gates and Ballmer built a $350 billion software empire on the popularity of Windows, the personal-computer operating system that for years was the default interface of office life. Yet the primacy of Microsoft’s Office software—with its built-in Outlook email, Word for writing documents, and Excel spreadsheets—is no longer a sure thing. Rival tools for office tasks have arrived, include file-sharing service Dropbox Inc., Apple Inc.’s iPhones, and workplace versions of Google Inc.’s Gmail and Docs, many of them free.
Thus Mr. Nadella is intent on talking about the evolution of Office, a program that first started appearing in 1989. These days, there is the cloud-based subscription variant known as Office 365. The latest downloadable version of Office, released last week, adopts features familiar to users of Google Apps for Work, which allow colleagues to work together on the same document or digital presentation.
The idea, says Mr. Nadella, is to make Office work seamlessly with non-Microsoft workplace technologies as well as other Microsoft.
In an interview, Mr. Nadella proved an unabashed supporter of the home team, gently prodding a reporter to use Microsoft’s digital note-taking app. The India-born executive also talked of seeing Microsoft as an outsider, struggling to be a present parent in the smartphone age, and the importance of nonbusiness reading.
Edited excerpts:
WSJ: Technologies like Dropbox and GoToMeeting have enabled new ways of working in the last few years, but few of those technologies came from Microsoft. What does that mean?
Mr. Nadella: There has always been competition. The only way to deal with it is to keep innovating, and that’s what we do.
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