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

by Satya Nadella

At some point during my time at Bing, I met with the Red Dog team to explore how we might work together. I quickly realized that Microsoft’s storied server and tools business (STB), where products like Windows Server and SQL Server had been invented and built and where Red Dog was housed, was worlds apart from Bing. STB was Microsoft’s third largest group by revenue after Office and Windows. They were the deep distributed systems experts. But when I contrasted STB with Bing a few things were apparent. They lacked the feedback loop that comes from running an at-scale cloud service. I realized that they were caught up in the local maxima of servicing their existing customer base and were not learning fast enough about the new world of cloud services. And the Red Dog team was a side effort that was ignored by the mainstream of the STB leadership and organization.