Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella | Full Interview | Code 2021

[Music] so we did your first interview that is right correct how did you think that went somebody um i remember the tweet uh right after uh that interviews i forget there was some founder i think right after me said oh that guy is a manager and there was a founder after him and i thought that's interesting okay and that grounded me i am a i'm a you know i'm somebody who grew up in microsoft i was not a founder uh but in some sense i think i tried to sort of make sure that i stayed grounded in what that meant and what i could do with it well you've done rather well you've done rather well the company is um you have to give credit for governor it was the most valuable company in the world it's now the second i think but it's in and out of that talk a little bit about that process for you there's a lot of ceo new ceos um ted just came in and netflix andy jassy just came in at amazon what's your advice to them um i mean if i go back to i think um this distinction of what does it mean to be a ceo what does it mean to be a founder ceo it's pretty distinct right i think uh one of the things uh the founders have that sort of amazing followership and they take a lot of things for granted rightfully so because they created something from nothing and for any ceo at least in my case even though steve technically was not a founder he had found a status in our company and so i felt i was the first non-founder ceo and to be able to ground yourself on re you know what reid hoffman called refounding is a great metaphor which is to be able to recommit yourself to what's the mission and sense of purpose of the company to be able to articulate that though in your own words um and and then build the new the culture the capability and at the end of the day you've got to get a lot of things right around strategy and the new concepts so the best advice i ever got after becoming ceo is to be yourself versus try to fill someone else's shoes yeah but doing so respecting what came before you but at the same time to be able to shape what comes after to be truly something you believe in not because something you know has done before what is a mistake you can make i'm just thinking the new ceo of disney insulting scarlett johansson probably is not the best move but what is something that you did that you what what are some of the refounding principles that you thought were critical not to mistake besides the strategy yeah i mean the the thing that maybe as an insider because in fact it's interesting cara i don't really think of my microsoft career or my even my tenure as ceo of the last seven and a half years i think about it since 1992 right so what i'm it's sort of one continuous uh film if you will so the the mistake at least is to you have to objectively look at yourself and it's hard you know because and especially as an insider it was it was perhaps even harder for me but the biggest benefit at least was when i criticized i was criticizing myself when i criticized what we were doing as a company it was not like i was critical of someone else i was critical of all of us including myself and it it really did give me perhaps the best shot at being able to then work the issues versus feel like i'm just criticizing for criticizing say so the mistake i think if someone can make is not to respect the place that you sort of that was created you've got to go in there um and understand what made you successful in the first place and there must be lots of patterns that you need to renew so not throwing everything out like for example one of the things my father said to me once which he was he was a civil servant and he always had this thing about look when i work in an institution i want to make sure that the institution becomes stronger and it doesn't fall apart after i leave and that stood with me right so as a ceo i think the mistake you can make is it's all about culture personality it's about you and it's once you leave the thing falls apart so that after all if the previous ceo did a decent job they gave you so a platform respect that uh but then make it your own build and then leave it a better place for the next ceo i guess that begs the question did the previous ceo do a very good job i i as far as i'm concerned steve balmer made some of the biggest bets uh that i was able to build on if steve had not taken a bet on me running what was our cloud business if he had not taken a bet on me spending all the money i spent we wouldn't be where we are so i absolutely think that like all ceos he got a lot of things right we all get wrong things wrong the one thing i learned from steve uh all my years working with him i never sort of sat with him in a meeting where he said let me tell you satya about all the great things i've done he would only talk about all the mistakes he was making it's the greatest gift that somebody can give you right but many of the things you shifted let's talk about what you shifted because he made a lot of bets all over his list whether it was the phone all kinds of different things they did same thing aids you have really talked a little bit about your strategy because you've sort of honed microsoft into a much simpler setup i would say yeah i mean it goes back uh a little bit to sort of rediscovering what that core identity carrier for me was you see i i felt like at some point you know microsoft was doing a lot of things out of envy not because of things that things that we were meant to do right so that's sort of uh you know in some sense customers give you permission your brand gives you permission to do things and you should do those super well and maybe if you do that super well you get more permission to do other things and and so in that context if you think about at least three layers of what we perhaps got right first is we were able to take the big inflection points like the cloud and re-do our entire server infrastructure in fact it became more expansive we i used to grew up in our server space and i used to think it's a big business except we now have a bigger business than we ever built in the client server era we wrote the sas wave and reinvented office 365 i mean we were all saying oh wow can we ever build a bigger business than the traditional office and office 365 is orders of magnitude bigger than what we were doing or same thing with dynamics we had lots of chaos in the client server era because we had grown there by acquisition whereas now we have a complete cloud native news business sas which doesn't even have the encumbrances of the first generation sas guys so it was fantastic to be able to reinvent even xbox xbox is part of microsoft but it was sort of this thing on the side whereas today xbox is much more central to microsoft it's built on a cloud the social network is critical to microsoft and it's much more expansive what was built out of envy i'm just curious what you think you know it's entering to me if i think about it's not even like you know doing things even in windows right windows is a device uh it is an operating system that was built for productivity and communications um and to be able to reinforce that or windows is the to today in fact if you think about it right it's the most open platform i mean it's it's ironic that you know it is sort of uh a i used to think the you know both aol da you know was killed by the the web or the internet and guess what we now have what five aols thriving and so that's 25 years of progress for you so therefore uh we're saying no let's get back to what windows is fantastic at it being an open platform and being leaning into that uniqueness i'm not saying it's out of some great virtue out of us but it's just about how competitive keeps you from not moving into those envy areas like i don't see microsoft studios anymore although you had done msn search is not as big a focus for you all it's there but that was certainly a bigger focus um the phone how do you stay out of those things without wanting to move into them yeah i mean if i look at the the new areas we've gotten into uh the first thing i always think in terms of strategy is before you go into something completely new make sure you don't miss line extensions so the adjacencies um whether it is uh building out our security business i mean they're securing the platform and building security products we now have an end-to-end security suite that's best in class it's a basically a new big business for microsoft of course it has the adjacency to what we've always done uh or developer sas right with github and what we've done with vs code uh we are into developer productivity you could say we were always into it but we've now reinvented ourselves in that or our new automation suite called power platform uh that's i that's another complete line extension uh or getting into new spaces like linkedin linkedin is a fascinating one for me because it is these are acquisitions you've made linkedin get up linkedin github and minecraft are the three large ones they all sort of center around building communities around something we had permission it right minecraft is very different than all the other games it's not sort of the same as halo or whatever my kids play minecraft um and minecraft just got us new permission in gaming which we were a primary on linkedin is about professionals and after all offices about professionals and knowledge workers but we didn't have 800 members just choosing as consumers to use you know to network so it's sort of both an adjacency and a different business model how do you think of acquisitions because you've made several other large ones yeah so that's kind of how i think about it like the primary thing i asked myself uh is will we be able to create the platform for that entity to thrive in other words the classic question is are you a better owner you're only a better owner if the mission for a linkedin or a github or a minecraft uh could be realized better with microsoft as a platform in fact in all three one of the interesting things for me is we had other people who were bidding for those assets and all three founders chose to sell to microsoft are you surprised i was not surprised but i feel like we got it right because that choice that the founder was making is to make sure that whatever it is that they've built will can thrive and not just high price right so um talk a little bit about that approach to buy discord that was one that didn't work um what extent do you see acquisitions uh as important versus creating original things within microsoft how do you balance those two i think fundamental bet is organic uh i mean when i look at our r d budget today uh the inorganic things that you do which is more episodic seem you know they get the press they get the headline number uh but when i look at the year over here are the increases its most i would say 80 percent of or 90 percent of what a company does at least at our scale has to be about organic growth and inorganic things are definitely going to be key what did you want to do with discord what is discord no no look i mean um don't make me laugh you know the the thing that i feel that we're in the business office to sort of look at anything that is in the core communications and whether it's entertainment or communications and productivity we want to be a primary and and we will definitely keep working on our own and we'll keep looking at assets well then i just sort of have to ask about tick-tock tell me what happened there it's the strangest thing i've ever sort of worked on figure it's the strangest thing i've ever reported it's unbelievable i mean it's i learned so much cara about so many things and so many people uh give it to us i mean one of the things uh first of all you got to remember tick tock came to us we didn't go to tick-tock right sort of i think the way you know people talk about it is as if i went looking for tick-tock i mean tick-tock was caught in between a lot of issues they were having it crossed two capitals and they wanted a a partner and neiming whom i had met a couple of times before and fundamentally came to us and said hey can you be a cloud provider who can help us with these security things that we seem to be hearing about and that's kind of how it started um but i was pretty intrigued i must say it's a great property obviously they you know uh everybody seen their growth and what have you and uh and and and then i guess the rest is history well tell me i don't know what what you know it's what part i mean about your discussions with donald trump he's gone now for a little while at least you know president trump i think had sort of a particular point of view on what he was trying to get done there and um and then it just i just dropped off i mean it was interesting there was a period of time when i felt that the usg had some particular set of requirements and then they just disappeared yeah and i i mean i i'm i don't i'm not part of the usgs so you'll have to ask someone there interesting lack of execution that's interesting quality but what what did you want it for tell me what you were thinking about it yeah to me um you know if we had a chance to both quite frankly the place where even if you you know you go to yemen and ask him like the thing that attracted him to even talk to microsoft was all of the stuff we had done around child safety uh for example whenever i think about uh the investments around um social media in particular what we are doing in content moderation and child safety is what would have given us even permission right uh what we were doing with that very few companies who could have done this correct i yeah i mean there are a few companies who can i think do uh bring a lot i mean there's a cloud platform there's the security infrastructure that is very much required because if you remember the at least at that time what was the conversation was the complete fork off the code base which you then it's do we have the engineers to be able to take over a code base and then to secure it on an ongoing basis that required competence and on top of it you better know something about running a social media which we know with either it's through xbox live or linkedin and and so it is it is an interesting product and also the way it was engineered you know quite frankly appeals a lot more to me and microsoft i think the way it's about design and ai and i like that so were you surprised oracle showed up i mean oracle's a is a very competent company and i think that the partnership uh you know i i mean at this point it's all moot right i mean i have no idea what's happening now i have no idea have you called i no okay all right would you like to acquire tick tock at this point i'm happy with what i have okay all right okay so i want to talk a little bit about um are you looking at anything else i'm happy with what i have all right okay well let's talk a little bit about cyber security because you mentioned it um one of the things you were involved in was the jedi project of jeff uh showed up um he's suing elon now so don't worry about it for you talk a little bit about that process and then a little bit about uh solar winds and what happened there yeah i mean on jedi i think at this point uh the department of defense has decided themselves that they want to go multi-cloud quite frankly we were advocates of a multi-cloud strategy across all of the federal government on and so it is what it is and we are happy to compete for each contract and we were proud to win it first time we wanted second time and now hopefully we'll uh get to execute on it going forward and then on solo wins it's a it's a nice answer question for jedi was it is it a bad thing that they haven't moved forward more quickly on this for national security absolutely right i mean any it's one of the things that i feel the united states in general all up uh you know the federal government is probably a little better off than a lot of the state and local governments because we do need to modernize our infrastructure as rapidly because it even you know touches upon the cyber issue which is what is our biggest we were after all there was significant penetration of let's call it the client server error technology inside of our government and inside of our private sector and so it's more incumbent on people like us or a country like ours to modernize faster and it does require capital investment like the run cost in fact it was stunning to me i was meeting with one of the state cios and the run costs of most of the cio still is predominantly mainframe i mean in 2021 when you have that that's a problematic thing so you need to modernize microsoft's point of view how important are defense department contracts or government contracts it's you know we've been you know department of defense has been a big customer of ours from day one and they're important but they're not the only customers we're look we're not a defense contractor we are a company that builds uh commercial technology that's broadly used and we've been very very clear that we want to make sure that there is uh the the department of defense can use the same technology we built for commercial customers all right so tell me talk to me about cyber security yeah the the fundamental thing i think we're hitting upon is we can talk a lot about what are the specifics uh of the adversary in this case how they were able to penetrate uh the supply chain essentially um off this one company and thereby its uh blast radius was very very high but the the the thing and you came forward compared to other companies correct yeah i mean disclosure is another side of it right which is one of the key things in cyber security is we now need to make sure that whoever gets impacted so in our case basically yes we had an instance of solar wind interestingly enough the way we had designed our network is that instance obviously got the update from solarwinds but it stayed there and it didn't propagate and so but at the same time we wanted to make sure that everybody understood that our production servers or nothing was nothing was affected and we disclosed on that and the reality is a lot more people were impacted by it and very few people disclosed but it's up to them but the bottom line though is more than any disclosure or any headline around how this happened the the thing is trust there was a great paper by i think ken thompson and his is steering award um uh paper actually it's trusting trust i think is what it's called and it just i think it's the right thing which is you ultimately you can come in we can talk about technology and technology and technology ultimately you've got to trust the institutions from whom you're getting your software from and how do you ensure that that is where i think the role of governments and multilateral agreements uh and institutions is going to be the thing so you can't solve the cyber problem by just talking about right technology so what has to be done is it's as a public pride i interviewed um marina um ranking mariana hatsukato talking about public-private partnerships what is the problem in doing that because these have to these have to span government what is what is the challenges you face i think well the challenges are first to try and prioritize this as a domain that requires right we had a white house summit uh i think last month uh which is a great the the fact that the white house is prioritizing this is fantastic i mean multiple things have to happen new standards that nist uh puts in place uh which is department of commerce around let's say supply chain attacks uh that's something that i think raised the bar for everybody uh then the national security apparatus and the intelligence agencies right today i would say uh information sharing across both sides public and private that i think needs to happen uh then on there's a side to diplomacy as well right which is you do need to hold other nation states accountable uh when uh cyber attacks are being propagated by a nation state uh and we also need to have some moral equivalent of a geneva convention here because in some sense if you think about the people who suffer the most and under any cyber attack it's the small businesses and it's the individual consumers are you the most vulnerable and uh and so therefore you need a geneva convention work out with that but it goes back to how did the geneva convention work is we've got a bunch of people a bunch of countries that are coming together within some auspices of a multilateral not do this and within some governance of some multilateral organizations that can enforce uh the convention why would china do this china would do it because they have a stake in the world being safe right china i think cares as much or should care as much about cyber security for their own um you know economy because no one's uh going to be somehow um isolated from the and in fact if anything cyber doesn't have borders like the uh pandemic and so for of all things this is a place where i think the world does need to cooperate uh and in order to protect their own citizens and protect their own economy what is your hopes for that cooperation i mean today we're in that state where uh it's sort of a little bit of hey the globalization as we knew of it didn't work that well so therefore we should just all be about our countries first which by the way is is correct because after all every country does need to look after its national interest its national security and i subscribe to that as a ceo of a multinational company i feel i only have permission to operate in any country if we are meeting that country's national interest otherwise we should get kicked out and so having said that uh i think we now need to recognize that all of what globalization did can't be thrown out we in fact need multilateral institutions with some strength on big issues whether it's climate or cyber or pandemic response because without it the world's too connected to connected in capital markets too connected in climate too connected in many other dimensions are there national security interests you being one of the big tech companies i just talked to lisa sue about that are there considerations of nationalist protection i guess i think every country will in the united states yup i think there is for example i'm sure lisa touched on this there is real concern about like hey what is our silicon supply chain look like what is our dependence on other countries and perhaps what happens uh to our ability to continue to operate our economies and so on and that's good i mean after all you know you you may say that in the last phase of globalization the way the supply chains were organized may not be completely compatible with whatever are the national security considerations so then they need to be rearranged um and that will happen in time and so i think the question though is does that mean we can get disconnected that is i think is a fallacy you cannot disconnect yourself from the world uh you can take steps to make sure that you're more resilient if something happens like the you know whether it's the pandemic or it's whether it's a supply chain um one of the things i want to talk about two areas one the pandemic you just mentioned it how has it affected running your company in terms of with the work from a home obviously you benefited teams benefited zoom and other companies tech has never been more valuable how do you how are you thinking about this your policy is um hybrid right correct how did you think about this yeah i mean the first thing cara would say is um we for sure have seen tremendous amount of growth i mean you know being a software company being a cloud company at a time when uh the most uh malleable resource that was available for people to continue to operate was digital tech uh and so obviously the adoption curves went up across all uh sectors of the economy and yeah i mean so there were clearly beneficiaries of it the one thing though interestingly enough before we come to sort of our own policy the interesting thing was during even the early sort of months of the pandemic in 2020 as we were going remote we needed to really ensure that we were scaling all of our cloud for all the front line people whether it was in health care or retail or critical manufacturing uh because those are the folks who needed uh in fact i always say we are the first responders for all the first responders out there and and even today in fact you know we talk about the hybrid policies of a few tech companies or the tech sector but in the overall labor market it's still a very small percentage because most people are actually at work and uh working so that said to your point right now at least there's a real structural change right uh some of the poll data in our own employee base it's pretty clear yeah i i describe it sometimes as the hybrid paradox right which is there is uh 70 of the people want to say they want uh more human connection right and 70 of people say they want more flexibility and so therein lies the challenge what do you do yeah the best thing is to sort of make sure that we build the tools that allow for that flexibility in fact the other thing at least in my own opinion and the policy at microsoft is let's not try and make too dogmatic a decision right now uh on we found the future and this is the future let data over time not data today but like what are people's expectations of employees has changed let's accept that have your employees been more productive in in in fact all of the metrics in fact this is what i feel even where all the metrics will say they've been very productive in fact if anything we want to make sure that things like wellness uh we're really being careful because there is all you know productivity can lead to burnout how are you managing that therefore the role of a manager has become more important interesting enough when you get to a workplace say one bad manager could be compensated by the just the work environment and a lot of people around the person whereas when you're remote you're very dependent on managerial excellence at all levels so i do feel that um our employees have been very productive but what is productivity in the long run right you just can't say oh patents filed or code written or pull requests those are all interesting metrics but i think that you know it's too early to tell right uh whether productivity or innovation so i want to i want to make sure that we do take uh i'll tell you one place where we were not that productive game studios uh we were very very very clear that um they need to be it's interesting we learned a lot about which functions need to be gathered for what so we now have i think a bit deeper understanding of what people need to be together for what and so to your earlier question i think we then now need to make sure that we have enough flexibility but at the same time new norms will emerge which bring people together in order for your instinct for yourself i think i'll do what we have now stated as our policy that's at least where i'll start which is at least work you know maybe three days a week in person two days uh a week um you know remotely but which three days in two days that's going to be the one that we're going to basically allow individual team norms to implement this is a big area of business for you you have teams obviously tons of other things some of it worked a lot of the tech education just didn't anyone with children knows what a disaster it was no matter where you sat um yeah i mean the the thing if you sort of do this simple two by two quadrant and you say there's synchronous communications asynchronous communications and then there is collaboration happening that people are together and remote you could get away in the past perhaps by being good in say a couple of cells in that four two by two or the four quadrants you now need to be great at all four so to your question is this a good business for us because it's a tools provider and a platform provider it's a good business but your point the practice whether it's in education whether it is in health care uh or whether it's in retail i think we i'll have to accept that we don't need to be able to deliver whatever service or content in more ways than we did in the past and improve its effect education is probably the place where we have suffered the most because the core pedagogy has to evolve in order to support the different ways people learn yeah absolutely so in seeing the opportunity one of the things that's happened is as we said your company's never been more valuable all of tech has never been more valuable someone i think scott who said i should ask this how have you escaped scrutiny of regulation because we were scrutinized a lot i understand that i recall but talk a little bit about that your company is one of the most powerful companies you there's two ways you can go here one is we're not doing anything that would attract scrutiny and the other is they're so bad that that they're focused on that do you think should you mush everybody together i always say i think that's the issue right which is what is the tech company today um i i here's my my thesis i i and i think that it's sort of very important interestingly enough the regulators at least today seem to whether it's in the united states uh whether it's in europe um even china uh everyone seems to recognize that there seem to be two forms of tech this is now not even saying let's not get into financial services let's not get into health tech let's not but even in what is considered core tech i would say there is platform technologies which act as factors of production so that is their input for someone else so that they can create new products and services so things like cloud fit into it productivity suites business application suites a lot of microsoft business is that factor of production and there is also what i'll call factors of distribution so these are marketplaces whether they're app stores whether they are uh you know news feeds in social media or search which is the biggest of them all uh as an organizing layer and so all of those and or e-commerce marketplaces so i think finally people are coming and saying oh you know this idea that and both by the way have a place under the sun after all these marketplaces reduce transactional costs which i think all of us can do with and platforms are commodities ultimately if these markets are competitive and the issue though is measuring the social impact of these basically factors of distribution are what everybody is evaluating right first of all is their competition i mean one thing that i sort of look at hey when was the last time sort of lots of funding went into search yeah other than good old microsoft you know where we spend billions of dollars trying to compete without microsoft it's like we're going to be at it because that market has to get competitive uh i mean it's kind of like the most ridiculous thing that is the biggest market uh in the world is just a complete monopoly and they deserve anti-trust scrutiny no i i just want we need you're just saying i'm saying the onus is quite frankly on ask to compete i mean they've done a fantastic job let me just not should regulators come in here i i let the regulars do whatever they need to do but the bottom line is for us to sort of say let's make these factors of distribution more competitive right and if they become more competitive than even the unintended consequence of any one thing will be less yes uh and i think that's the simplest way so i'm not sort of saying let's wait for regulators on any side uh i think you know i think we should just compete in lots of these what about facebook are you glad you didn't get into social media we are in social media we love linkedin you are okay linkedin is the only social media company anybody likes correct snapchat snapchat look i mean i think in social what do you think is happening over there what do you think of all the scrutiny they're getting the criticism i think in uh in the case of you know we we kind of run i mean obviously we we have linkedin we also have um xbox live yeah so the thing though what at least we have learned is context matters in other words as a as a platform in this case of a social media network you need to use the context of that network to enforce the standards of discourse on the network that's sort of what the terms of use all are about it's a hard problem i mean disinformation is a hard problem there is no ai that solves for it there's no amount of just even moderators that solve for it but the best thing though is for us to recognize our responsibility and govern by using the context of the platform what is allowed like on linkedin we know ultimately why is anybody on linkedin to find economic opportunity right that's the context so we want to curate everything we do all the mechanics how would you run facebook if they said you're the ceo i mean there is i i'll let you bring mark in and have that confidence never coming back here it's three for three with him and me so i am not going to talk about any other ceo's problems all right what about epic epic and apple and google hey look first of all let me put it this way i think app stores are absolutely important assets right after all if you think about like even on windows we have an app store yeah um and if anything when we didn't have an app store some of the security challenges were remembered and so therefore i think app stores are a necessary mechanism each platform the way like xbox has a an app store windows is an app store the economics of xbox are very different so i i i don't sit here in judgment quite frankly as someone who competes and cooperates with all these folks that one person is doing something right and the other person is doing something wrong and i think they all have to sort of both listen everyone including people like us have to ultimately listen in fact that's probably the biggest thing he's complaining about the windows app store yeah but i'm just saying if i think back at 1990s right the biggest thing lesson learned from microsoft's own sort of history here is when there's a lot of people sort of complaining about something that you're doing then there must be something that you're doing that's bothering people that you need to reflect on and that's it i mean and and so therefore to me that's what i like to look at and so in every every company and every ceo probably in history okay i have two last quick questions i'm gonna get audience questions simply come up we've gone a little bit over but i think it's worth it because you're fascinating you suspended microsoft pack donations to politicians who pose certification of the 2020 results how should big tech work in this highly partisan environment that's a great question i mean it's it's i i get very very of individual ceos individual companies in a democracy like ours make decisions to sanction sort of our own political system and its constituents it just bothers me i mean after all i mean as an immigrant to this country one of the greatest things about the united states is its democracy it's its vibrancy uh and so for me to take or for our company to take stance it seems quite frankly silly uh because after all we're all companies are not meant to do that individuals do but that said i think we will need to have certain grounding in some values uh like protecting our democracy so when those lines are crossed how can you be clear that you will use your voice and it's you got to be sparing on it you just can't be out there just trying to act as if you are somehow the replacement so when people say business leaders are now the people who are going to somehow solve what i mean i don't want to live in a country where i have to depend on ceos to govern us uh same time ibm was at the forefront of um integration apple was at the forefront of gay and lesbian rights and that's fantastic we can definitely lend our voice lend our support push for legislation after all we sued the us government on many issues around privacy and those are all instruments of our democracy that i think that we should what happens when you get faced with the texas abortion laws or trans issues and voting rights like take the the texas issue we are very very clear at microsoft that we will support the women's choice uh on you know their rights on their you know any medical decisions they make and so therefore our insurance will cover them wherever they want to go and uh exercise that right so we will make sure we do protect our you know our employees that's our responsibility and we'll be clear on that do you get tired of the political partisanship i mean you got sucked into the tick tock thing that was lunacy the um yeah i mean i think the way it's currently characterized because if it's debate that allows us to truly get things done ultimately by compromising after all democracies do function uh in that form but right now i think yeah we think we can i think we can all do better and i think we can do even as individuals as well as organizations uh like a private company on how to take any issue just completely ignoring every nuance and making it as if it's just two decisions it's just not going to help us and so i'm actually you know at least president biden and his approach saying look i want to talk this through and perhaps bring people together and compromise i hope it sort of leads to more less partisanship more action and more benefits because there are real points on both sides except those points have to be reconciled in a way that is very very different than at least current state of play all right speaking of you know this is coming do better the bill gates situation can you talk a little bit about the impact on microsoft and what your role was in that look bill bill's a founder and and and remains our founder he's very engaged on things that he cares about there are certain technologies uh he deeply cares about and uh even though he now is not on our board um you know he remains uh in close contact with the company on those issues and and the microsoft of 2021 is a different place that i am responsible my leadership team where the lived experience of any person in the company is our responsibility and we shape it every day we're not perfect by any stretch but we care deeply about all topics of our culture and we're working it every day was it that's a lot of good words i appreciate them but was it right to take him off the board was it important it was as bill stated and restated bill left the board it was not about the board asking him to leave and he decided that in fact that he had a lot more things to do with his you know his climate work and his philanthropy but did it have an effect within microsoft you know look i mean bill has been you know he was ceo and then he was uh he was on our board but he was not full time at microsoft so in some sense bill's transition uh has been many decade i mean maybe more than a decade in the making so the impact on microsoft at this point is more about the people at microsoft and what we do for the future right i'm gonna let you off the hook i think the fact that he was left from the board he left is great that was probably the right thing to do same time disclosure is also important so it's a difficult it's a difficult situation but i appreciate your you're um answering that rob yeah oh yeah great to see you guys great to all be live in the same place uh i had a question about ransomware which is something that uh i guess a lot of us have been thinking about it seems to me that between better tracking of zero to exploits uh secure cloud backup for enterprises uh helping with enforcement there's a big role for microsoft since microsoft's platforms are generally involved in all the big cases not not unilaterally by any means i'm curious how you're thinking about that and how important that is as like a it's almost like a mission for microsoft's platforms to be secure yeah i'm so first of all it's great to see rob and um and it's i i 100 agree with you i think what we were able to do with say botnets is what i would like us to do even with ransomware because starting if you think about the bot network it is one of the to going back to that public private that is a place where the public-private partnership works superbly right i mean the even the judicial system and its support of takedowns uh on the botnet i think the same thing needs to happen uh on the ransomware including this is one place where the crypto rules should be very very clear so that the incentives are uh you know placed in the right place so we are definitely going to go after this this is definitely a topic of discussion even in the white house and what they want to do but it will require microsoft we are making it our mission as you said the best thing we can do immediately is on the black backup restore uh in fact the detection the interesting thing is you know what set of activity uh anybody who is involved in ransomware does which is first delete backup so we need to get better at being able to sort of see that first activity and then uh to you know do the mitigating thing so absolutely the right call and we're on it right are you interested in the cryptocurrency markets or you know i i'm watching it i mean when i say like you know the there's multiple things there i'm very definitely interested in the use cases of what's the distributed database underneath crypto but we've got to get out of this pow thing in the sense that um there needs to be a better than proof of work so that we don't have the energy use problem and what have you so i think it's a great general purpose technology there uh that i think can have many use cases i was recently learning about settlement of our own accounts payable across all the banks across all the countries oh my god it's sort of it's so pretty antiquated and so some new infrastructure for that would be fantastic and then on the currency side my own feeling is that nation states and i know you had a great conversation uh just before me but um i think nation states are going to find it very very hard for just some decentralized infrastructure to completely take over so i see that that's what i'm not an expert on crypto and so therefore we're watching to see what equilibrium do we reach between what is an alternative infrastructure for how the world ascribes value and how value gets transferred and then good old nation states yeah they're not going to go away see china this week the united states right here in the united states but a little slower right here hi uh terry kawaja luma partners uh question about advertising uh as kara mentioned uh you've had sort of fits and starts with businesses in and around advertising from search to msn etc uh that was back when advertising was more of an art today it's much more science right you've got a it's a trillion dollar global industry you've got ads coming to gaming you've got advertising being far more data software and cloud related so i guess my question is might that change per your comment about product extensions given the scale of that opportunity that vertical your your approach yeah i mean first of all advertising as a business model is a very powerful business model as you described it and um we definitely want uh we we do have you know like linkedin has a significant advertising uh business uh and then bing and uh what's happening in gaming or and our news feed both all of those add up so we would probably be i forget now fourth uh largest advertising business there's a huge distance between one two and uh four so we do have aspirations to grow that uh and i think that the opportunities today of being able to take a fresh take at it uh i think are there and we're you're going to see us take a run at it all right sacha has an eight o'clock flight so i'm gonna have one more quick question sacha how you've made great leadership in many areas that you work on can you comment on the future role of microsoft in healthcare in the context of leaders like tim cook saying that's going to be the most important work apple will ever do where do you stand at microsoft in terms of your work in healthcare and life sciences yeah i know look i mean i think in general i would say i think the next stop you know if we come back here at code let's say 10 years from now or five years from now i'm gonna be in hawaii with my children we will we will be talking about for sure uh you know what's happening in healthcare what's happening in energy what's happening in financial services as if it was just stack in our case we're very very excited about our nuance acquisition which is still pending but uh what for example what nuance has done to take the cutting edge ai work and apply it to where some of the biggest problems are which is physician burnout uh and to be able to really help them focus more on the patients less on the administrative tasks as just one example so yes i you know i ascribe to that which is we're doing a lot today with uh you know in healthcare being a provider to all the providers the pairs the life sciences companies with the cloud tech i think drug discovery will fundamentally get super accelerated uh with some of these large-scale ai models and their ability to simulate even the biochemistry and so therefore i think there's tons and tons of things that we as microsoft are investing in and looking forward to sort of seeing that lots to do lots to do for you look like you're having fun i am i am and it's it's you know look there i think one of the things i i think is it's such a privilege to be in this industry at a time where its impact um is so you know visible and so broad and i also think to the many questions you asked it's also incumbent on all of us is to really make sure that as we scale this the unintended consequences of scale is something that we invest uh the time not you know don't take care of the issues before they become scale issues right some of them are intended some of them are intended but i really enjoy interviewing someone i actually like anyway thank you so much you

Channel: Recode

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Length: 51min 44sec (3104 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021