Hit Refresh

by Satya Nadella

After all, on that cold February day in 2014 when Microsoft’s board of directors announced that I would become CEO, I put the company’s culture at the top of our agenda. I said that we needed to rediscover the soul of Microsoft, our reason for being.

Sony introduced the CD-ROM,

It showed me that you must always have respect for your competitor, but don’t be in awe. Go and compete.

One brilliant character who does not put team first can destroy the entire team.

That is what leadership is about. It’s about bringing out the best in everyone.

An empathetic leader needs to be out in the world, meeting people where they live and seeing how the technology we create affects their daily activities.

A distributed system, simply put, is how software communicates and coordinates across networked computers. Imagine hundreds of thousands of people typing in search queries at the same time. If those queries landed in just one server somewhere in a room on the West Coast, it would break that server. But now imagine those queries being distributed evenly across a network of servers. The vast array of computing power would enable delivery of instant, relevant results to the consumer.

Building Bing taught us about scale, experimentation-led design, applied ML, and auction-based pricing.

Leadership means making choices and then rallying the team around those choices.

cloud-based infrastructure and applications that can convert vast amounts of data into predictive and analytical power through the use of advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI.

Eagleton, who lives in Ireland, notes that a mailbox in his country is evidence of civilization, but the fact they are all painted green is evidence of culture.

Culture is how an organization thinks and acts, but individuals shape it.

I like to think that the C in CEO stands for culture. The CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture. As I had told employees in Orlando, anything is possible for a company when its culture is about listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents to the company’s mission.

In every meeting, don’t just listen—make it possible for others to speak so that everyone’s ideas come through. Inclusiveness will help us become open to learning about our own biases and changing our behaviors so we can tap into the collective power of everyone in the company.

colleagues they get to own a customer scenario, not the code.

We’re making great progress, but we should never be done. It’s not a program with a start and end date. It’s a way of being.

In this case, the individual was Phil Spencer, who heads Xbox. Phil understood that we needed to be the most attractive platform in the world for gamers, and he knew Minecraft had a dedicated and gigantic community of players who invented and built new worlds in this virtual Lego-like video game.

mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. These technologies will inevitably lead to massive shifts in our economy and society.

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash popularized the term metaverse, envisioning a collective virtual and shared space.

David Gelernter wrote Mirror Worlds, foreseeing software that would revolutionize computing and transform society by replacing reality with a digital imitation.

Don’t imagine that one day a quantum computer will take the form of a new stand-alone, super-fast PC that will sit on your desk at work. Instead, a quantum computer will operate as a coprocessor, receiving its instructions and cues from a stack of classical processors. It will be a hybrid device that sits in the cloud and accelerates highly complex calculations beyond our wildest dreams. Your AI agent, acting on your behalf, might tackle a problem for which there are a billion graphs to check by using a quantum computer that can scan those billion possibilities and come back to you instantly with just a few choices.

When we were in the midst of negotiating the acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016, their CEO Jeff Weiner turned to me and said, “Consistency over time is trust.” That may be an even better equation.

We live in a time of what David Gelernter calls the “mirror worlds”: the physical world is mirrored in an online world where data is accumulating and taking on more and more significance.

Millennials in particular—many of them digital natives born since the advent of the Internet—are comfortable sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings with a digital companion because the discussions are nonjudgmental and anonymous.

singularity, the moment when computer intelligence will surpass human intelligence, might occur by the year 2100 (while others claim it will remain simply the stuff of science fiction).

Asimov’s Laws are hierarchical, with the first taking priority over the second and the second taking priority over the third. First, robots should never harm a human being through action or allow harm to come to a human being through inaction. Second, they must obey human orders. Third, they must protect themselves.

PC was the first run time for which Microsoft developed applications like the Office suite of tools—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the rest. Today the Web is the second run time. In an AI and robotics world, productivity and communication tools will be written for an entirely new platform, one that doesn’t just manage information but also learns from information and interacts with the physical world.

The power loom was invented in 1810 but took thirty-five years to transform the clothing industry because of shortages of trained mechanics.

Andrew McAfee pointed out that productivity data fail to measure many of the ways technology has enhanced human life, from improvements in health care to the way tools like Wikipedia have made information available to millions of people anytime, anywhere.

Would you prefer to have $100,000 today or be a millionaire in 1920? Many would love to be a millionaire in the previous century, but your money then could not buy lifesaving penicillin, a phone call to family on the other side of the country, or many of the benefits of innovations we take for granted today.

Comin agrees that differences between rich and poor nations can largely be explained by the speed at which they adopted industrial technologies. But equally important, he says, is the intensity they employ in putting new technologies to work. Even when countries that were slow to adopt new technologies eventually catch up, it’s the intensity of how they use the technology—not simply the access—that creates economic opportunity.

Gini coefficient, which measures the difference between a society’s division of income and a perfectly equal division of income. It’s really quite elegant. If 100 percent of a given population were to earn $1 per day, that would be absolute equality. If 100 percent earned $1 million per year, that too would be absolute equality. But when only 1 percent earn $1 million while everyone else earns nothing, we’re approaching absolute inequality.

The Gini coefficient for an advanced European country like Germany has hovered around .3 for decades, while the figure for the United States has risen for years, now matching that of China and Mexico at over .4.