Headline Feb 27, 2016/ ''' MASTER MICROSOFT : *THE NEWLY COOL* '''

''' MASTER MICROSOFT : 

*THE NEWLY COOL* '''

''IT WAS THE GREATEST COLLECTION OF IQ EVER  at Microsoft,'' says Satya Nadella, 48, who has been CEO of Microsoft since 2014.

You know what was big in 1994? INTERACTIVE TV. Seriously: Microsoft had all its  A-listers up in that business, and I mean the triple: As, the heavy hitters.

Nathan Myhrold  -later Microsoft's CTO-  was on the interactive-TV team. So was Rick Rashid  - [he founded Microsoft Research]-  So was Craig Mundie [currently senior adviser to CEO].  

There is a broad agreement that  personal computing  is shifting tidally away from desktops and onto mobile devices.

Apple's share of this crucial space is  16%. Android's is 81%. Microsoft is 2.2%, and that figure doesn't appear to be growing.

In 2013 Microsoft tried to buy its way in by acquiring Nokia's cell-phone business; last summer it wrote off $7.6 billion on the deal, almost the entire purchase price, and laid off thousands of former Nokia employees.

Even Balmer,   -somewhat bizarrely, was overheard criticizing Satya Nadella's,    [the CEO of Microsoft]   mobile strategy during annual shareholder's meeting in December.

The issue doesn't appear to fuss Nadella, but he doesn't have an overwhelmingly convincing solution either. 

His point, basically is that as long as Windows stays strong on other kind of devices, people will eventually turn to Windows Mobile so their phones can be part of that same ecosystem.

Likewise app developers will be turned on by the idea that they write one app and have it run on the whole suite of Windows devices. ''We recognize that in this form factor we have low share,'' he says. ''But we do have 110 million Windows-10  users who are on active devices today.

We just upgraded all of Xbox to Windows 10. HoloLens is a Windows 10 computer. And we believe that it's the network effect across all these devices. That's our strategy.'' 

When asked whether there's a marketing piece, whether Microsoft might just not be cool enough to sell a product as personal as phones, but he is unintrigued by this line of inquiry.

In fact, if there's one thing that makes Nadella the right person to stand watch over Microsoft's middle age, it may actually be that he's humbler and less ambitious than his predecessors. He's more hip to nuance and compromise.

He's not hell-bent on owning the world, because the world is too complex and fluid to be owned by anyone right now. It's a lesson Nadella first learned in his  interactive-TV phase. 

''These walled garden approaches, sometimes you can make it through, right?'' he says.

 ''You could say today Facebook is doing it successfully. But there is an alternative, where you have a strategy which is more to ride that wave and then differentiate. That is perhaps the best sort of meta-learning for me.''     

He's not too proud to hedge his bets. Microsoft is putting markers down at all points on the technology food chain. 

It's building phones and sticking doggedly with Windows Mobile, but it's also putting key apps like Office and  Cortana on iOS and Android, a heresy Nadella's predecessor never sanctioned, and meanwhile it's pushing HoloLens as the mobile platform of the future.

''I'll admit that we missed mobile as it's understood today,'' he says. ''I don't think we are going to miss mobile as it's going to be understood five years from now.'' 

And even if Microsoft gets Muscled out of the hardware, and the OS, and the applications, it can still own the cloud,where the data that all those things feed on lives.

Nadella is embracing the complexity of the moment : his fluid, flexible Microsoft  is a response to an increasingly fluid, complex computing environment, what Nadella calls   [with his engineer's gift for not coining a phrase] a  ''heterogenous device environment''.

Personal computing is no longer organized around a single solar center, the PC, orbited by subordinate planetary peripherals. Now it moves from device to device, from desktop to laptop to tablet to phone, and whichever you're holding at the moment is the center. 

''It's more going to be about the mobility of the human experience across devices  vs   just the mobility of any device,''  he says. ''This is the lesson learnt from our own PC past-

I think we were more perhaps obsessed with just one device being the hub for all activity for all time to come.''

The Honour and Serving of the  ''Technology Operational Research'' continues. Thank You all for reading and sharing.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Engineering and Technology. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and the Ecosystem  2011.

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