Well those are the questions which has intrigued Satya Nadella and made him write this wonderful book “Hit Refresh”. The whole eastern philosophies (especially Hinduism) has been based on the existential question “Why do I exist? What is the purpose of my life?”. The land of India, has produced great seekers who spent their life time seeking answer to these questions. Well it is no surprise that hailing from India Satya Nadella also hit the same questions and he has embarked on answering these questions through this book.
What would be lost in the world if Microsoft just disappeared — the soul stirring search for this has been pretty well chronicled in this book by Satya Nadella. I was exposed to computers around 1995 and those days the only interface we had to work was the MS DOS. I still remember learning the DOS commands, coding in BASIC and C. Suddenly around 1996 is the first time some one showed me this fancy thing — you type win in DOS prompt suddenly the screen just transforms from black terminal to Windows 3.1. It was fascinating to use mouse and click those icons. Then came Windows 95, the most exciting thing which I did in Windows 95 first time was changing wall papers and mouse pointers. As Satya points out in the book Microsoft democratized Personal computers, they created a world where everyone started having one in their home and office. It was a legendary vision by Bill Gates to democratize computers and make them ubiquitous.
But along the way they lost the plot and the company stuttered — not financially, but being empathetic to customers. Personally for me also after 3 years of using Windows machines, there came a point of no return to Windows around 1998, when Richard Stallman came to our college and gave clairvoyant call to start using GNU/Linux. And being a middle class family in India, it was just impossible to buy licenses every year to upgrade windows and then anti-virus to protect your computer.
From Hit Refresh — what I understand about Satya Nadella is that he is an embodiment of empathy. He exudes empathy at every level — towards his employees, customers, partners and even competitors. A particularly difficult situation at home has emboldened Satya and eventually Microsoft in this path of empathy.
It was fascinating to read the various research effort going on in Microsoft for improving lives of differently abled — including speech recognition (cortana), eye motion tracking, glasses for the blind. Here is an inspiring video on the glasses for the blind. Through the book Satya has addressed a whole gamut of issues including building accessible tech, privacy concerns of the cloud, ethical framework for AI, solving job loss problems arising out of AI to name a few. The depth of thought and empathy gone into these areas are for sure a pointer to a transformed Microsoft and they are here to stay.
And finally the most important thing the book addresses is the overall future of Microsoft where it is going to be. As per Satya “Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world”. More than the bold statement — Hit refresh lists out clear plans on how to make Microsoft relevant and empower every person and every organization in the planet. The three key areas which Microsoft is betting on are
Quantum computing
AI
Mixed reality
The detailed plans outlaid for each of those three areas in the book, truly gave a sense of confidence that Microsoft is going for the long haul and be relevant more and more.
The most exciting thing which Microsoft is driving the world towards is democratization of AI. Through Azure, it is bringing out AI accessible for common man through simple API calls. So you don’t need to be a data scientist to do AI in your organization, leverage Azure and let it do the heavy lifting. This to me is truly dramatic development and I feel it is going to be a game changer for Microsoft if it executes it well. After being away from Microsoft world for all through my career going through this site, makes me try Microsoft and explore the world of AI.
The book is also sprinkled with nuggets of wisdom, a few of them goes like this
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
“He who has ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’”
“Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layer of the product or service”
Overall, I just have a big thumbs up for the Hit Refresh, Satya Nadella and Microsoft.
