If you don't have a real stake in the new, then just surviving on the old - even if it is about efficiency - I don't think is a long-term game.
If every sector of business and society will be driven by software - how does that get enabled? By highly-paid computer scientists funded by risk capital in Silicon Valley? Or by lots of engineers who can build it themselves?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The future of business and society relies on software development, which can be achieved by either well-funded experts or a broader base of skilled engineers.
In this quote, Satya Nadella emphasizes the growing importance of software in all areas of business and society, and he raises a thought-provoking question about how this software-driven future will be realized. He suggests two potential paths: one that relies on highly-paid experts who are supported by significant financial backing, and another that empowers a larger group of engineers to develop technology independently. This highlights a central debate in the tech world about accessibility, skills, and innovation in the age of software.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can inspire discussions at tech conferences about the role of software in society.
More from Satya Nadella
All quotes →You look at marketing: everything that's happening in marketing is digitized. Everything that's happening in finance is digitized. So pretty much every industry, every function in every industry, has a huge element that's driven by information technology. It's no longer discrete.
What matters is 'Have you done a better job of making our experiences feel like home on Windows?' That's our real goal, and that's what we're going to stay focused on.
If you don't jump on the new, you don't survive.
I want everyone inside of Microsoft to take that responsibility. This is not about top-line growth. This is not about bottom-line growth. This is about us individually having a growth mindset.
At Microsoft, we're aspiring to have a living, learning culture with a growth mindset that allows us to learn from ourselves and our customers. These are the key attributes of the new culture at Microsoft, and I feel great about how it seems to be resonating and how it's seen as empowering.
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Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.
I think Amazon is the greatest start-up and the greatest company in the world. The way they are using new technologies is not just disrupting retail, it's getting ready to disrupt everything.
An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.
I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.
I find it amusing that I'm on the Internet now, because I've criticized it, but mainly I've criticized it on the basis of, 'What are you going to do with it?'