Microsoft in 2014 was a company people had stopped worrying about. It had missed mobile, missed search, and was widely treated as a legacy business collecting rent on Windows. Satya Nadella took over that year. A decade on, Azure and an early bet on artificial intelligence have put it back among the most valuable companies in the world.
He started with the culture, not the products. Know-it-all out, learn-it-all in — his phrasing, repeated until it stuck. The internal product wars were called off. Microsoft began shipping software for platforms it had spent years fighting, open source among them.
He replaced a culture of knowing everything with a culture of learning everything. The market rewarded the difference.
Then he bet the company on cloud. Azure took the capital and the attention, Office became a subscription rather than a purchase, and enterprises that had been drifting toward competitors were courted back one contract at a time. Revenue followed. So did the share price.
The OpenAI partnership put Microsoft at the front of the generative-AI wave, with copilots pushed into every product it sells. Whether an early lead converts into a durable one is unsettled. Every rival is spending heavily to make sure it does not.