Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

by Satya Nadella

With mixed reality we are building the ultimate computing experience, one in which your field of view becomes a computing surface and the digital world and your physical world become one. The data, apps, and even the colleagues and friends you think of as being on your phone or tablet are now available anywhere you want to access them—while you’re working in your office, visiting a customer, or collaborating with colleagues in a conference room. Artificial intelligence powers every experience, augmenting human capability with insights and predictive power that would be impossible to achieve on our own. Finally, quantum computing will allow us to go beyond the bounds of Moore’s Law—the observation that the number of transistors in a computer chip doubles roughly every two years—by changing the very physics of computing as we know it today, providing the computational power to solve the world’s biggest and most complex problems. MR, AI, and quantum may be independent threads today, but they are going to come together. We’re betting on it. A technology company that misses multiple trends like these will inevitably fall behind. At the same time, of course, it’s dangerous to chase untested future technologies while neglecting the core of the current business. That’s the classic innovator’s dilemma—to risk existing success while pursuing new opportunities.