Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Corporation

[Music] so how many people here are familiar with Microsoft products ok so on February 4th 2014 you became the new CEO of Microsoft the third person to have that job since that time the market capitalization of Microsoft is up by 250 billion dollars as Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer ever called you to thank you for increasing their net worth by a great deal or they don't call you that trusted thank you let's just say that as long as they call and asked me to do more on the products that's a good sign ok so I assume your board has taken out a lot of key man insurance on you well I well they should okay so Steve Ballmer stepping down in I think was announced in 2013 and then a search was underway and I think it's fair to say that you weren't not number one in the search list initially as reported in the press they had a lot of candidates so were you thinking you were gonna get this job and when they called you after other people had maybe been interviewed for it and didn't either get it or be offered it did you think that geez you wanted to be offered it right away or did you think you were lucky to get it or did you think you were gonna get the job it's actually interesting because I remember you know the board obviously did the right thing in terms of really looking far and wide and saying who's the right candidate and in that process at one point they came to some of the internal folks and when my turn came they asked me you know you want to be a CEO and I said only if you want me to be a CEO and and the feedback was well if you really want to be a CEO you gotta really want to be a CEO you can't say only if you want to and I remember going to steam and telling him about this and he says yeah it's too late to change you are you are who you are and you know it worked out in the very end but the thing that I would say I had I'm consummate insider have grown up at Microsoft you have spent 25 years the thing that I did have is a point of view on what I would do as a CEO and that I think eventually is what the board you know basically chose well they obviously chose well so the stock is up by about over a hundred percent since you've been CEO so I wish I had bought a lot of stock I wish I had known it but can you keep doing this by the way so let's go back and how you came to this position so you grew up in India and your father was a well-known civil servant or civil servant so did you want as a young boy did you want to be in computers or technology what was your interest my interest was cricket oh my father as you said was a civil servant he was an economist with Marxist leanings my mother was a Sanskrit professor and they could hardly agree on anything and so they had their ideological Wars in fact I remember my father once put up Karl Marx's poster and my mom put up the goddess lakshmi as poster which stands for wealth and i put up a cricket poster and so I would say there was some strange mix of interlac intellectual curiosity in the house also a push to make up your own mind and do your own thing and that's kind of what I want to do I really didn't even until I left India I don't think it was even clear that I would ever want to come West but I grabbed onto the opportunities given so when and what age did you realize you were not going to be a professional cricket player pretty early on oh I went to a high school in in the middle of the country in Hyderabad where we had a you know a lot of cricketing tradition and then I you know it was great play for it and I played some junior cricket for the for the state but it was pretty evident that there was no way I was going to make okay so you went to high school in the same city that you grew up in which was a city in about eight million people in the southern part of India yeah okay then you went to college what did you study in college in India so I in India I studied Electrical Engineering alright this is at Mangalore University you got a degree and then you decided you wanted to come to the United States so there many colleges in the United States and you pick one that I could say is a very good school but it's not as well-known and how did you hear of it in India it's the universe yeah that's right it's like I've never been to the rest of Bombay and I showed up in Milwaukee and you know yeah how did you happen to pick that's a good school but University of wisconsin-milwaukee can't be that well-known India the I mean look at the for me the choices came down to where would I get my RA ship and it's pretty straightforward when you look at it that way alright so you went there and did you have a winter coat did you bring it they didn't realize it was different I didn't I remember I at first I remember landing in Chicago thinking wow it's so quiet and so beautiful huh and then I drove over to Milwaukee I think well how the lake it's just just awesome this is August obviously and and then the winter came and unfortunately I picked up this bad habit you know in in the 80s in college of smoking the best thing that happened to me in Milwaukee was you had to smoke outside the engineering department and the fall was fine but the winter I must say you know it was sort of I recount this in the book the Indians the Russians and the Chinese the first ones to drop out were all the Indians Chinese the only ones who could withstand it with the Russians so you kicked the habit yeah and you got a degree in computer science that's right so you had an electrical engineering degree a computer science degree and then your first job was with Sun Sun Microsystems and what did you do at Sun I I was a developer at Sun I worked on interestingly enough a lot of that that's when I joined Sun in the in 1990 the ambition there was to be a desktop computer business and so I worked in fact at Sun I even spent a summer at Lotus and doing a bunch of their software for the Sun workstations ok so you did that for a while and then you got an offer to go to Microsoft but you also had applied to the University of Chicago Business School so how did you decide which to do Universe Chicago Business School or Mike Microsoft yeah in fact I was going to leave to go to business school full time just during that time I got the job offer from Microsoft and for a while I was it was unclear to me whether I would want to join Microsoft but the guy who I eventually went up and went to work for how convinced me saying look if you're going to go to business school only to come back to high tech you should drop out now and and so somehow during all of that I figured out that yeah let me go give this Microsoft thing a shot and then you know in a very convoluted way haven't even finished up my degree much later so you were actually working in Microsoft while you were going to the universe cago Business School but did you tell people at Microsoft you were doing I didn't know huh you know because I felt that hey the you know that would just confuse things as to how does one do this but if you were you know they said here's an assignment for a weekend or something you would say well I have to go to school how did you hide the fact that you were going to school I did the assignments got Dodd okay so you rose up you get your degree from university cago Business School and you rise up and at one point you're running the business solutions part of Microsoft what is the Business Solutions in fact in the mid 90s or so or late 90s Microsoft bought a couple of companies there are some of the largest acquisitions Great Plains was one it was headed by a gentleman who sort of currently the governor of North Dakota Doug burgum and so we formed this group to get into business process automation basically ERP CRM and so that group and Doug then decided to leave Microsoft and eventually got that job okay and then later they come to you and say the online search business needs somebody and you say Google has that business we can't compete or do you say no I can beat Google right I'd finally got this you know when Doug retired from Microsoft I was like looking forward to running a business unit and that was you know the job I had and so Steve comes to me once and says you know hey look we have this need for some real strong engineering leader to go and take over this online services place where we have a real competitive challenge and he says and the chances are low whether he'll succeed or not and if you don't succeed there's no parachute so this may be your last job nothing wrong what I think you should do it hahaha and with an offer like that you know how can one refuse so you took that job and then later he comes to you and says I'd like you to take on another business which is the cloud business where you're also way behind another company you're way behind Amazon at that point so did you want to take on that business as well yeah for sure I mean that that you know I had working in our online group perhaps in fact Steve saw the connection more so than anyone else which is I developed a keen sense of what is the cloud business or how do we take the business which we had which is a very strong server business even though Amazon had the early lead of how can we catch up and in fact do better and that was the intuition that Steve actually had and that led him to move me to what now is our cloud business explain this to an outsider Amazon was thought to be a retailer or seller of books over the internet and other products how did they build a gigantic cloud business and they're in the same city as you and you're a big computer company and you missed the cloud business for a while how did that happen you know it's a it's one of the classic issues were there all of us in business right which is when you have a business that's growing super well it's got great gross margins you don't look around and say oh here is another business that krummy gross margins and that's what we should do next it's sort of the hardest challenge in business which is for you to be able to in fact technology or adapting to technology changes easier than business modeling so as you were rising up in Oklahoma your offer the top job because you did a good job in building the cloud business you're also dealing with personal issues in your bio it often says that you have an Indian arranged marriage but that's not the case right yeah I guess itself it's a little more complicated than that uh-huh because my wife and I grew up together both our parents or our fathers who were in the Civil Service together and somewhere along the law and we went to the same schools and colleges and so on and so eventually I you know both of us you know decided to get married we went and told our parents so they blessed it for sure but it was definitely not an arranged marriage okay so you then as you you're married your wife was trained as an architect that's right so I your first child is born and then when your child is born it turns out he has a severe case of cerebral palsy so how did you realize how severe his problem was and what's his situation now yeah you know both a mom my wife on you and me were only children of our parents and so I was 29 years old when Zane was born and if you had even asked me a couple of hours before Zane was born because there's a lot of anticipation in the family and the household of the first son and was all about he's the nursery going to be ready he's only going to when is she going to go back from a maternity to her job as an architect how long weekends change but of course that night pretty much everything changed and and then I watched a son who recovered from her c-section she would spend all her time basically she decided that she's not going to go back to work as an architect but Zain the every chance he can she was driving up and down to every therapist and whereas I was more about completely shaken because of what had happened and mostly thinking about why did this happen to me what happened to all those plans I had and this is not what we planned for and quite honestly it took me maybe multiple years and without being schooled directly by just watching my wife and how naturally she took to her responsibilities I eventually came to the realization that nothing actually happened to me something happened to my son and I needed to step up and see life through his eyes as a father and do my job and that in some sense you know when it's part of this writing this book is where I'd reflected a lot more it was not a linear thing it was not a one-time realization but perhaps most shaped my thinking as obviously a father but then as well as a as a leader and in a company your son is now 21 he's a quadriplegic he's lived at home that's her entire life you also write in your book that you have two daughters but one of them has severe learning disabilities and your wife had to deal with that as well and what did she do they try to yes oh by the time our youngest daughter came along we were you know one of the great blessings we had going you know with Zane and Seattle was we had a great community whether it's the hospital's the therapists and the special needs community that we knew very well so I would say as parents we were much more well equipped to be able to deal with any of the challenges that come your way as parents of special needs kids and so one of the things that we discovered was the school up in Vancouver BC which was more based on the plasticity of the brain as a way to help students not just compensate but to essentially do these exercises that could rewire essentially the brain circuits and so we just took a bet on that particular program we again did the crazy thing of having my wife and the two daughters spent time in Vancouver during the school week and thus my son and I would be in Seattle and we would sort of commute over the weekends and we did that for a good five years okay so let's go back to Microsoft for a moment you are becoming the CEO again in 2014 and you decide you want to change the culture of the company so how do you go to Steve Ballmer air Bill Gates and say the culture that you put into this company it's not good enough and I want to change it it was that an easy conversation or you just go ahead and do it you know one of the things that both bill and Steve were really clear as I was getting into becoming the CEO saying the best advice and the best and all the confidence they gave me is look don't try to be like us Steve very distinctly said like you know don't try to be or don't even try to please us be your own person do what you you know it takes for you to lead the company and and and in some sense that's what they prepared me for I mean it's not that I was waiting to be CEO but I would say the challenges that came my way along my 25 years at Microsoft essentially prepared me to have my own point of view not just on culture what to do in terms of our mission our products and culture and that's what sort of eventually I you end up by doing so one of the ways you wanted to change the culture was to provide more what you call empathy now your personal situation gave you a greater empathy but what do you mean by changing the culture to have more empathy in the company yeah I mean the two things that I focus the most on was that sense of purpose or mission and culture and the reason I felt we needed to do that is I feel that they're necessary conditions to then pick the right strategy because ultimately you got to put build products in our case and innovation that customers love but what I wanted to dig a little deeper and say okay what helps us do that on the culture front the if I sort of step back one of the realizations I had was when a company is successful what happens is the product that makes you successful the capability around that product and the culture all getting to this beautiful war to áslaug right and round and round it goes but ultimately the product that made you successful stops growing and you need to come up with a new concept a new product a new idea that's when culture will matter because the culture cannot fight the creation of that new concept and so I felt we needed to move to a learning culture and this is where a couple of years before I'd become CEO I'd read this book by Carol Dweck or a Stanford called mindset which was more in relation to my kids and the simple concept in that book which I loved a lot was it's better to be alert at all even if the know-it-all has more innate capability because they learn it all ultimately will do better and I said well that applies to CEOs that applies to companies made up of people and I said what if we introduced that as the meme to have the cultural dialogue at Microsoft okay so Microsoft was famously siloed you know one part of Microsoft didn't talk to the other and so of course so how did you get people to change and actually want to cooperate with each other well I mean look I think this it goes back to it it's not that we didn't want to cooperate we had a structure that reinforced how we thought about our products how we did accountability for products I mean so that's what we're you know most people sort of saw in fact we needed to change the conception of these products or how these products are conceived more through the lens of our customers so we made some structural changes the cultural memes that we introduced both of those helped us break essentially what was inhibiting us from thinking about products differently because in in high-tech and I would say pretty much in all business no competition no customer respects your org chart right I mean nobody cares what they care about is are you serving them well and sometimes though when you create these you know when you strike these stable categories and you make them business units and you measure them you get disconnected from what customers expect and so you got to keep breaking those barriers down right so when you're doing that there's some people go around your back and say to Bill I'd by the way bill you know he's trying to change the culture the company you built he's trying to change it then it ever happen I mean these are tough questions they the the good news there was Bill and Steve were very clear I guess as having been sitting CEOs they understood the challenge of running a company on someone else is you know hovering around you so to speak and so they were in fact if anything you know Steve obviously left the board bill had been one step removed because Steve was the CEO after him they're very clear that who runs the company but they're also very happy to give me feedback okay so so let's talk about your products two of the products that you have that you may be referred to earlier office and Windows they are cash cows they were I guess they still are producing enormous profits and I guess very high margins so how do you are they still very important to the company absolutely absolutely but they're much less significant than they used to be right I mean one of the things that we've done is instead of even thinking about Windows separately or office separately or our management and security separately one of the big changes in Microsoft which is in fact the fastest-growing business inside the company is what we describe is Microsoft 365 so instead of thinking of any piece of software or any one device what if we conceived of this as the core communications productivity and security solution for modern work so that is the big change we made or by bringing I would say all of these different product categories and and making it even work on whether it's the Apple device or the Android device and obviously Windows and so that has helped us a ton both not only make these products more relevant in today's context but also a huge growth vector for us let's talk about some of your other businesses cloud which the business your ear on and now are you number two in that business number three or we're number two and in the enterprise will probably be very close number two and the core of what we have bet on is that let us in fact build a worldwide footprint of our data center so for example we are the only cloud provider that operates in China and the Chinese law we operate in Germany under German law we have 43 data center regions so that means we support the real-world needs of even large enterprises and multinational companies and that's really helped us a ton grow that business significant you think that'll continue to grow that's a great business I think the secular trend in computing is cloud but one of the other shifts which we are well positioned for is it's just not the cloud it's also the edge of the cloud in other words take a factory or take an automobile Bay the automobile is going to have more compute power then most computers and you want to be able once you have compute power you will collect data and you want to be able to reason over data so this idea of having the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge is going to be true whether it's a farm a factory an automobile and so we're very well positioned for that you mentioned cars everybody else seems to be producing driverless cars her are you in that business as well or you can't see in fact this is the other decision we made was it's super important for us to not just build trust in the context of the security technology or the products we build but also trust in business model in other words as every industry whether you're in the hospitality or whether you're in cars or whether you're in financial services everyone's becoming a software company it is important for us to be viewed as a provider of tools platforms enabling technology was is getting into their businesses so in our case we've drawn that line and we have fantastic relationships whether it's the American car manufacturers the Germans the you're not gonna produce your own cars we won't produce they're our own cars but we will provide anyone who is made either building autonomous or other you know connected cars real technology that can help them compete in fact with some of these Silicon Valley companies now it used to be that you were a software company but then you got into making some hardware when you got into the Xbox business is that still the business Xbox it is in fact it's a it's a very you know big business for us in fact one of the other things that Microsoft now is between Xbox this modern workplace our cloud business applications we have a very diversified portfolio which helps us in many ways be much more complete in what we can offer but to your point around hardware I think of hardware separate from my software if anything Xbox has taught us that it's a complete experience that we build and that's what we now are replicated with surface and surface studio and what we're doing with hololens and mixed reality so we can kind of continue to innovate to invent new categories all the way from silicon to the cloud so Xbox do you play xbox games are you really an expert in that how do you how do you deal with new new games like I watch Xbox games so we now have the most you know the most amazing phenomenon in the last I would say three four years has been that there are more people watching people play games then people playing games and it's a good business let me tell you people on but the people that produce these Xbox game are they'd be very young I mean what do they look like they own your campus you can spot them and they're walking around they're just different looking or there's a particular edge to them you know we have ver organized very differently we have these studios but even Xbox like for example some of the teams that are producing the new Xbox it's gonna have seven billion transistors so there are people who are doing silicon and ASIC work on one end and then there is the studio edge on the other end now a surface you mentioned if you walk down one of your officers you have a lot of buildings in in Redmond but and somebody's using an iPad what do you say to them it better be using Microsoft software on it okay so but you you what do you use do you you don't use an iPad right I don't you use I think I love my surface you know you circus you really want a device that actually can do something I think a surface is a great device but just to check out what the competition is doing you don't want out on the side just look at what they're doing absolutely I mean I look I love Microsoft software on all devices okay what about what are you use for like a mobile phone do you have a mobile phone what kind of you use not an iPhone I presume no I I mean I use an iPhone and Android and I also use a Windows Phone but most importantly again my main focus is to make sure that we're not device centric my vision is very straightforward it's about the user it's the mobility of the users experience and as long as we have our software on any endpoint or in any device that's that's sort of what our what about your retail stores do you have are they growing is that an important part of your business having retail stores you know retail stores for us have become a very critical part of just getting people to be able to both understand the product offerings that Microsoft has whether it's the Xbox on one side or even small business solutions on the other side so they're very much part but it's not the only channel we have many other avenues to reach customers but it's an important critical part of it so when you came in you were coming in right after the acquisition of Nokia mobile telephone company and you had to ultimately close that down and it took took a seven or eight billion dollar write down was it hard to do that and go to your in fact your predecessor and say that was not a good acquisition or was that a tough decision you had to layoff in effect 20,000 people I mean that the last part is the tough part I mean it'll be the strategic call and so on at that point I decided that it is important for us to think more about the mobility of the experience versus define our future in mobile by just our own device share I mean if you look at it we have you know hundreds of millions of people using our software on all of the phones and there aren't all Windows Phone so we needed to amplify that but that said the thing that weighed the most heavily on is the impact on Pia I think that and these kinds of shifts are hardest when you have to care you know you make those kinds of changes but we did okay so the biggest acquisition you've made under your leadership is LinkedIn I think you paid about twenty six billion dollars for it what is LinkedIn got to do with Microsoft I didn't understand that what's the logic behind it not that you need to explain it to me but I assume your board was happy with it but what is the reason you wanted to buy I mean there are two acquisitions minecraft and LinkedIn were the two big acquisitions with LinkedIn it's very straightforward in the sense we have a billion users of Windows and office together the commonality of that is professionals of the world use our software to get things done LinkedIn is the world's professional network and the vision was to bring these things together to help people as they're doing their work to even have their social network in fact one of the new integrations we have is right in Outlook to be able to as if you get any piece of email from someone that you don't know outside the organization you can now see their LinkedIn profile not just that but you can even see the people inside your organization who are connected to that person and that's going to help you if you're in sales for example one of the other integrations we have is between Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn so that you can be very effective in b2b sales so anyone who is doing business to business sales this becomes an indispensable tool talent management LinkedIn is in another place where you start with recruiting but you don't end with recruiting because you can go into dynamics and finish the entire process so whether it's office 365 or Dynamics 365 the integrations with LinkedIn I think can add significant value and are already playing out okay so those who live on the East Coast it seems as if there are five companies that are more or less on the west coast that are running everything in the United States more or less so you've got Microsoft Apple Facebook Google and Amazon Amazon so they're running everything you have three Chinese companies Baidu $0.10 and Alibaba so everything is these eight companies now is that pher impression I mean you all kind of ruled the world these companies and I like to sort of separate myself from all the other seven the and and I say that in all seriousness because I think we're different even in our business models you know I used to love the Fang thing because luckily we were not part of Fang and unfortunately now we're part of this five and I would hide I would love to get out of that the reason I say that is because we are we are about creating technology platforms and tools so that not only the East Coast to the United States but every part of the world can use digital technology to create surplus in their company in their industry in their region because this notion that there'll be like five or six Silicon Valley companies that are going to basically make profit is an untenable unstable situation and so our business model our approach to markets is to create more surplus outside as opposed to just inside of Microsoft now in your book hit refresh and how long did thing come up to take the title for that did that come to you naturally or exactly you know it's it's it's I must say it took a long time but Bill captures the essence of what I guess was the message of the book which is why when you are pushing yourself through this uncomfortable process of transformation you need to have that browser logic that smart smartness to sort of say okay what is the stuff that needs changing and what should remain because if you change everything all the time you're not going to make much progress and so that's why this hit refresh and how did you have a chance you're running the company and you've got all these other things you're involved with how did you have time to write a book and how am I going to take you know that's a great question because in some sense it most lot harder than initially when I signed up to do it and you run out longhand or do use surface - I use the surface for something and I had good help but the two two stanzas which is the Microsoft's own transformation because the entire purpose of writing the book was not to most business books or a look back right off grand successes or grand failures the entire purpose here was to write about essentially the meditation of a sitting CEO while going through this process with all these existential questions and really half answered half answers you've discovered so therefore that was the idea and that's my day job I think a lot about these questions whether it's the Microsoft's own mission purpose culture our strategies technologies or even the broader implications in society the only chapters that work hard where the look back of my personal life but you know I somehow made it happen it's so did somebody say on your board it's a little presumptuous you only been here two and a half years and you're gonna write a book about your life yeah and and that and obviously I didn't position it as a book on my life or anything and and it's clear I mean I'm very very clear that this is not about trying to claim any victory it's not about claiming that will reach any destination and if anything this should be more viewed as okay what's that tough process of continuous renewal and I should point out all the profits are going to go to philanthropy right that's right like so my dad threw up Microsoft lamp is okay so there are three parts of the book at the end where you talk about the future and let's go through them one is I would say artificial intelligence do you think artificial intelligence is something that we should worry about some people say artificial intelligence will end human race as we know it because the robots or others will outsmart humans are you worried about that I think first of all hey I is just not an honour the piece of technology it is I think perhaps one of the more profound technologies there's going to shape all our lives or our economies and societies but here's the way I want us to grab the opportunities AI gives us to empower people first and then be very clear-eyed about some of the broader implications of AI whether it is displacement or even this challenge which I think a lot of people against which is the runaway AI or the opt-in a runaway optimization problem or the control problem but I'll give you one example at Microsoft we launched an app called seeing AI that's available on the App Store which uses the most cutting-edge computer vision technology in our cloud to be able to recognize objects see people and now people with visual impairment can use this app to navigate through their life in fact one of my colleagues at Microsoft Angela Mills whom I worked with very early on in my Microsoft career was telling me a few months back when she first you know started using the app and how she can walk in with confidence into our own cafeteria and order food because she can see the ingredients in the Met read the menus using this application she can go into the conference rooms with more confidence knowing that this is the right conference room that's empowering her to fully participate similarly we put some AI power tools into Word so that anyone with dyslexia can start reading the latest release of Windows 10 I in fact we were inspired by Steve Gleason and in the ALS community where a group of very passionate Microsoft employees and across research and the windows team came together and now we have AI gaze as an input because if you are an als patient the only muscle you in some sense have is the eye gaze and now you can use that to be able to communicate so I bring up these examples mostly to illustrate that AI can in fact help more people be part of our economy part of our society and then we have to deal with all the tougher issues then you don't think that hey I will eliminate human two jobs for example some people think AI will eliminate the need for some people to work or therefore they won't be jobs for people you're not worried about that no III worry about that as well and so for example let's take that challenge and talk about what is all the things that we can do the first thing I think we should do is really focus on education and skills whether it's in schools or whether it's even for anyone who's been displaced at work in that context LinkedIn and LinkedIn data since there are many people who are public officials here I think this is perhaps one of the places where we should have a fantastic feedback cycle so instead of talking about all jobs going away what if we had a network which allowed us to digitize all the jobs the skills required for the jobs and the training required on a continuous basis so that we could in fact use private money as well as public money to then cultivate those skills so that's one thing that we should do the second thing that we I would say is let's not fall complete victim to this lump of Labor fallacy that all jobs that are going to be there in the future have already been created let us in fact work to see what can be these new jobs whether they are digital artisanal jobs I'm so inspired by what these Minecraft generation does or even people on people jobs we may have to support some of these jobs with wages but that's a set of policies I think that we can come up with to give everybody some assurance you don't think AI will eliminate the need for Congress right because we've those jobs will still be here right I I think that Congress is you know I think it can be rest assured that no AI is going to replace them they need to do their job okay so another thing you talk about is mixed reality or virtual reality is that coming soon it's to me the ultimate computing experience because just imagine if you can your field of view was essentially both what you see and also our digital artifacts right there in front of you so the mix of analog and digital what people call virtual reality and what people call augmented reality to me is just a dial you you want to be fully immersed in the digital world or do you want to see the real world with digital artifacts so I think you know the first time I saw this NASA demo the NASA scientists were always dreaming of how can we be on Mars along with the rover and see the Martian surface and lo and behold with the hollow they were able to do that because you can essentially see the Martian soil right next to you and now of course this mixed reality and what we're doing with hololens and vr is changing even how people collaborate them into the one recent example we showed was ford you know the way they would design cars would be to make the car and make a clay model which you know weights something like five thousand pounds and people will have to sort of move it from place to place so that engineering and sales could comment on it but now the ability to have presence which is now mixed with these holograms completely changes collaboration so I'm very excited about what mixed reality can be and you also mentioned the possibilities for quantum computing what is quantum computing so here's you know I was talking about how the Xbox has seven billion transistors and in fact the early supercomputers had something like 13 thousand transistors so in some times you could say wow we have so much compute power we talked about the cloud the clouds got millions of machines and you can just elastically call that apart but if you look at the some of the unsolved computational problems even today as we sit here in 2017 we don't know how to model the enzyme that's part of natural food production we can't model the catalyst or build a car you know develop a catalyst that can absorb carbon we can't you know envision a material that's superconducting at high temperatures so these are unsolved computational problems in fact if you sort of try to solve these problems using classical computers it would take as much time as time there was from Big Bang to now and obviously we don't have that kind of time and that's where I think quantum computer comes in and just to kind of give you the simplest intuition of a what a quantum computer does is you assume a corn maze or take a corn maze and you wanted to trace a path through a corn maze and you started it in a classical computer you'd start tracing a path you'd hit an obstacle you would retrace taking another path and you would go on and on and on but the quantum computer is that ultimate parallel computer you can take all these paths simultaneously so it'll really give us I think the compute capacity we need quite frankly to solve some of these most pressing challenges so you still enjoy the job I love it okay and how long would you anticipate doing it in other 10 years 20 years how long I mean my lawyer is not here but I think that's a public disclosure isn't it okay so let me ask you a final question in my business if I increase the value of something by two hundred and fifty billion dollars I would get 20% of those profits see that's why you have capital I'm right right so have you ever thought about the joining private equity because 20% of the profits xt-1 said this to me after retiring he said I finally figured this out I'm capital your labor and you know there's something to be said about it thank you for the great job you've done for Microsoft I thank you so much

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Views: 38,804

Keywords: Satya Nadella, Microsoft Corporation, David M. Rubenstein

Id: FEOLi0fRfxs

Length: 44min 1sec (2641 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2018