Cloud Computing: Nadella looks to future beyond Windows
February 21, 2015
Grazed from BusinessStandard. Author: Editorial Staff.
"Our industry does not respect tradition. It only respects innovation," Satya Nadella said in February 2014 when he was appointed chief executive officer of Microsoft. After 39 years, the company Bill Gates co-founded had come to be perceived as an out-of-touch behemoth that relied too much on its Windows operating system and failed to move into new markets, like mobile.
Key products such as Microsoft Office – the suite of applications that includes Word and Excel-had been designed around Windows, with only parts converted to work on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android systems. Nadella’s accession would be a chance to reorient the company, getting it to introduce products that looked outside Windows and to develop new business models…
Nadella has aggressively pursued this course. Since December, Microsoft has bought two small companies that focus on mobile productivity apps for iOS and Android phones and tablets. To appeal to younger users, the company last September purchased Mojang, maker of the popular Minecraft video game, for $2.5 billion, and it’s adding features to Windows such as 3D holograms that users view through a headset and control with hand gestures. The newest version of Microsoft’s Power BI (business intelligence) product-a dashboard for data analysis-was released in January, first for iOS systems. "Microsoft hasn’t really shown any sort of vision like this in a long, long time," Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner and longtime Microsoft watcher, said in January when it unveiled the holograms. "All it took was replacing the senior management."…
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