|By K Raveendran|
Indians across the world celebrated the elevation of Satya Nadella as the new CEO of Microsoft. Dubai, with its compulsive spirit of celebration, was no exception.
The talking point at the week-end parties in Emirates Hills and Arabian Ranches was none other than the Hyderabad techie, who, by virtue of his new role at the most admired company in the world, becomes the latest brand ambassador of India as a superpower of IT skills. The previous occasion when someone became the natural choice for such a role was when Sabeer Bhatia sold his pioneering enterprise Hotmail in 1998 to the same company and brought cheer to more than one-sixth of the world population.
Nadella has no direct connection with Dubai, except that his alma mater Manipal University has a campus in the city and that it has one of the most dynamic Indian communities anywhere. Manipal University Chancellor Ramdas Pai described Nadella’s appointment as a great landmark for the university and a glorious moment for every single Manipal student.
Nadella is taking over the reins of Microsoft at a critical juncture where the company has to embark on a new journey if it wants to retain its coveted role of the past. This is similar to the situation Microsoft found itself in the mid-90s when the World Wide Web began exploding and the company was caught napping. But then Bill Gates was at the helm.
This columnist was present at an address by Gates on the occasion of Acer’s 20th founding anniversary in Taipei in 1996, where the Microsoft founder actually discounted the prospects of Internet as the all-pervading new technological revolution. Later interactions, however, revealed that he was referring to the state of Internet as it existed at that time and by implication had the tremendous opportunities that lay ahead in mind.
New challenge
Microsoft began to rediscover itself and was soon ready for the new challenge. The proliferation of the web finally helped the company realise its mission of placing a PC on every desk and in every home, which eminently suited the software giant’s business model.
But as Nadella has pointed out in his first communication to Microsoft employees, “the opportunity ahead will require us to reimagine a lot of what we have done in the past for a mobile and cloud-first world, and do new things.” Luckily for Nadella and Microsoft, he has been spearheading this activity in the company for some time.
In his most recent role as executive vice-president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, he had led the transformation to the cloud infrastructure and services business, which outperformed the market and took share from the competition. This experience probably clinched the deal in his favour.
As the new CEO has himself emphasised, computing over the next decade will become even more ubiquitous and the co-evolution of software and new hardware will intermediate the human experience in business and life as such. Unfortunately, the hardware part poses a question mark for the company as it has very little core competency in this area and Nokia, the partner with whose help it hopes to address this issue, has not had a successful track record of late. In any case, both brands are seen to be past their primes.
Nothing illustrates this dilemma in clearer terms than Nadella’s plain speaking to colleagues: “Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation. This is a critical time for the industry and for Microsoft.”
The change in focus throws up a peculiar challenge for Microsoft channel partners in the Middle East, who have so far remained detached from the company’s mobile and cloud computing strategies as they have been mostly doing business built around the PC and Windows operating system.
Engaging with the enterprise-focused solution providers to deal with a business built around a completely different model will be a daunting task for both Microsoft and the channel partners.
