Satya Nadella, who has been designated as the new chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft, is a man ready with answer to any question he is faced with – be it the timing of Microsoft’s entry into cloud operating systems or consumers’ preference or market opportunities.
As head of Microsoft’s server and tools business, he spoke to The Hindu during a visit to the city in September 2012. Nadella was here as part of the IT giant’s plans to deploy server software on Windows Azure platform and capitalise on applications that underpin the significant growth in consumption of data. An affable personality he is, people who interacted with Nadella remember the down-to-earth manner in which he presented himself. He explained how MS gained experience by launching services like Bing, Hotmail and Xbox and evolved an operating system that offered diverse features.
Consumers bought the applications, as they had “great capabilities” and offered security and auditability even as allowing end users to access them with ease.
Microsoft, according to Nadella, had set its eyes on tapping the “unbounded opportunity” offered by mobile devices, tablets and slates.
“There is a vast opportunity of 400+ million devices that far surpasses Android platform and iPhones. These applications are not standalone, and they are all connected,” he explained.
The company had then focussed on simulation of applications to see how they behaved with different sets of devices including the low-end ones.
