In 2007, Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, wrote an article entitled Microsoft . The argument in this article is that, due to the combination of the Internet, Mac computer and Google, Microsoft has become unrelated. In fact, at that time, Y-Combinator did not participate in the invitation of Microsoft to the era of demonstration to meet any of their startups, but Yahoo was indeed invited, which was a more related company at the time.
From 2002 to 2019, I have been working in Microsoft, and I almost agree that Microsoft has died in nature as an innovative technology company in 2007. However, the company also tried and failed to build any eye -catching products in each new space that tried. The company has tried and failed to establish a striking mobile operating system , consumer email services , social network applications , search engines or music services . Due to the failure of tablet PC or Zune , it also tried and could not build hardware.
The whole time period was finally described as Microsoft's loss for ten years . I remember in that ten years, I remember as an employee, the stock price was always $ 27 ± $ 2. It has never been less than 25 US dollars, nor does it exceed $ 29 in the first ten years as an employee. The stock price is about $ 34, and Steve Ballmer announced that he will resign on August 23, 2013,
Satya Nadella took over the company on February 4, 2014, and immediately began to work hard to change the company's cultural and business performance. The market, employees and customers responded positively to his changes. Today, Microsoft's stock price is $ 410. From the day of Satya's taking over, the performance of Nasdaq's comprehensive materials has exceeded three times. His transition to Microsoft has caused many people to describe him as the most successful CEO in the technology industry .
Therefore, the question of trillions of dollars is how Satya changes Microsoft? Next is my observation of his key changes in the company, and these changes have completely changed their trajectory.
Lesson 1: Cultural breakfast strategy
The first thing that Satya did was to immediately begin to change Microsoft's culture. Satya firmly believes that the company's mission is shown in the first letter to the employee when he became CEO , but he also realized that the company's culture was returning Microsoft.
The definition of culture under the leadership of Steve Ballmer is a sense of complacent and arrogance. Despite failure, the company's behavior is like the best thing we have since we are sliced bread, because we have Windows & Office, which is the two most successful software products in history.
Satya (Satya) directly strives to challenge this way of thinking, asking everyone of the company to accept the growth mentality . We will become a company that learn, not all -round. People expect people to be curious, embrace changes and try new things. Each meeting room has a sticker in sharp contrast. The meeting is a fixed mentality meeting and a growth mentality meeting.
Encourage the company to try new things, learn from failure and refuse to be complacent. Satya takes an example as an example to change our various ways of doing business because the company has been in trouble. This is a changeable cultural change, starting with the senior management, but each team of the company believes.
Lesson 2: Forget the strategy and do the best for customers
Microsoft is a company that believes in strategy. Everything that the enterprise moves is to create chess measures to create some long -lasting competitive advantages. Over the years, this has worked well. Office and Windows have become a virtuous cycle. The company purchased Windows because they need it to operate the office and buy the office because it is the best productive software for Windows. Enterprise business is like vines like vines. Once you get Active Directory and exchange at the door, you can attract various other Microsoft products, such as SharePoint , although thousands of dollars are widely laid inside and outside. Product company.
However, most of this strategy is also hostile to users. Windows 8's attempt is a failed attempt to turn the desktop window into an iOS -style operating system. This is the idea that we must prevent the iPad from destroying the window. Therefore, it can also run the touch tablet of the Windows Desktop application. It is by no means part of the equation that can even try to actively perform available products.
Microsoft also avoided the fact that they brought their productivity applications to the network or mobile devices, although they have obviously won the Windows desktop.
Satya sent a signal to the company and our customers, indicating that those days ended through the office on the iPad within one month when the chief executives became CEOs. This is the product that the Office team has worked hard for a while, but thinks that they will never be approved because this is a "non -cooperative strategy." Other customers -centered actions, such as Satya, announced that a few months later, Microsoft likes Linux, which is a clear signal, that is, Azure will now be regarded as preferred matters, not Mainly focusing on hosting Windows VM.
Microsoft is a company that makes people popular in strategic taxes . It makes it difficult for a product to give up the philosophy of Satya alone, so that a person is more difficult to integrate the product alone. The office no longer needs to ignore the network or iOS because it reduces the value of the window. Azure no longer needs to ignore Linux because it reduces the value of Windows Server.
Lesson 3: Sometimes you only need to reduce losses
Steve Ballmer is obsessed with competitors. When chasing Microsoft's focus on competitors, there is no high price. The company has lost billions of dollars for many years after chasing Google's Bing Chasting for many years. It spent more than $ 6 billion in purchasing aquatic products after being rejected by DoubleClick. The company sold to Google for $ 3 billion, but it will only be Nokia's Nokia repaid $ 200 million for $ 7.2 billion. iphone .
When Satya takes over the company, it is clear that Windows Phone and Nokia Lumia devices are one -third of the distant iPhone and Android phones. Satya wrote all the costs of acquisitions and lay off nearly 26,000 Nokia employees in two years. In 2014, it was 18,000 , an increase of 7,800 in 2015 .
Obviously, Nokia's smartphone business has no meaningful way to succeed, so Satia ignored the cost of sinking, and then abandoned the business. During my whole time in Microsoft, I observed the ridicule caused by similar companies, and it was almost worthless in continuous investment.
I am the loyal supporter of the Microsoft band. The Microsoft band is the competitor of Microsoft's competitors Fitbit. The competitor was knocked down in 2016 . I remember asking Satya in the leadership question and answer, and he replied that the business model at that time was not good, and even the market leader's Fitbit had no outstanding business model. It turns out that Satya is correct because Fitbit is acquired by Google at $ 2.1 billion, which is the company's future uncertainty.
Lesson 4, every investment has a chance to cost
This is more of Amy Hood , not a class of Satya. It is not well known outside Microsoft, but she is the company's most influential person except Satya. Amy is the chief financial officer and runs a very nervous ship in terms of expenditure.
I used to work in Bing ADS, and a constant question that our team once asked is why, although the effect of search correlation with Google search correlation with Google search correlation in the United States , but our products are in Latin America or Europe, etc. Poor performance in other markets. It turns out that Amy Hood is the reason.
In the leadership question and answer, Amy shared that her philosophy is to always study the opportunity cost of each business requirements for business groups. Therefore, when the Bing team requires a $ 1 billion of search crawling and training AI models to improve the search correlation between Europe and Latin America, she asked how much money to make money and spent $ 1 billion for Azure on the data center. In view of the increase in the acquisition of advertising customers and adjusting the advertising algorithm behind the increase in any usage of increasing correlation in consumer search experience, ROI spent on Azure has always been better.
As a person in the Bing product team, this is bad. Friends who are still working there today still complain about it. However, as business decisions and Microsoft shareholders, I am very satisfied with Amy's decision.
What should be pointed out is that this is a way to use cautiously, because in some cases, investment is not as strategic as other opportunities.
Lesson 5 of the software company engineer is your most valuable resource, please listen.
During the Steve Ballmer, Microsoft forgot to as the root cause of his software company because his CEO comes from sales, not a product team. This means that some of the unprepared practice of the product team under the leadership of Steve Ballmer seemed to be obvious. When I engaged in cloud services such as Windows Live and Bing ADS, I was amazed by the Microsoft software (such as SQL Server) we used. The solution was doing at the time.
The company is also hostile to open source. The company is combined with the above Microsoft B2B software.
Some of the of them were initially improved under Satya. If you review it, you can use open source software. When I was a group product manager of Bing ADS, I experienced this process, where I got Walkme 's service to create drills for our advertisers tools. However, I quickly discovered that the process was Kafkaesque. I need to pay $ 20,000 in the team's budget to review, and then it is only applicable to a specific main+secondary version combination. Therefore, if a new version of the software package is released next week, I need to pay $ 20,000 to get the review and certification, or I want some other teams of Microsoft to own it.
After spending $ 20,000 to obtain the Bing ADS certified by JQuery, because WalkME relies on it, and realize that whenever the library is updated, I need to find another $ 20,000. I sent an email to Satya to understand the process of the process. absurd. He asked his team members to follow me, and they mentioned that they had heard some complaints about the process. I gave them a bunch of feedback. Soon after, the software review process disappeared. Microsoft began to use open source to build its products, just like all other technology companies.
This greatly improves the productivity of the Microsoft engineering team. In the early days when Satya served as the chief executive officer of Microsoft in the early days, there were various examples (such as migrating Windows source code to Git to Git ) and small (such as hackers ). These examples are calculated as Microsoft CEO, they are counted as listening to developers and make them happier, transformed into higher productive forces and productivity and higher productivity and higher morale.