Five months after taking over as Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella today sent a lengthy memo to Redmond staffers in which he encouraged them to reinvent productivity, evolve the company's culture, and "obsess" about the customer.
The high-level letter reads like an extended mission statement. Nadella promised more specific details on Microsoft's recent performance during its July 22 earnings call, though he did acknowledge that "engineering and organization changes" are on the horizon for July.
Until then, Microsoft employees should be thinking about reinventing productivity "to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more," he wrote.
"We think about productivity for people, teams, and the business processes of entire organizations as one interconnected digital substrate," Nadella said.
Microsoft already has a "rich heritage" of producing productivity software. "We help people get stuff done," Nadella said. But he reiterated that "our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation," so Redmond can't assume that flagship products like Windows, Office, or Xbox will sustain it a cloud-first world.
An increasingly digital world "creates a unique opportunity for us," Nadella said. "We will create more natural human-computing interfaces that empower all individuals. We will develop and deploy secure platforms and infrastructure that enable all industries. And we will strike the right balance between using data to create intelligent, personal experiences, while maintaining security and privacy. By doing all of this, we will have the broadest impact."
When you think of productivity, you probably think of programs like Microsoft's Word or Excel, but "productivity for us goes well beyond documents, spreadsheets and slides," Nadella said. "We will reinvent productivity for people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data and social networks."
"Every experience Microsoft builds will understand the rich context of an individual at work and in life to help them organize and accomplish things with ease," he said.
Despite the focus on the cloud, Nadella did pledge to "build first-party hardware to stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem. That means at times we'll develop new categories like we did with Surface."
"It also means we will responsibly make the market for Windows Phone, which is our goal with the Nokia devices and services acquisition," he wrote.
Nadella also pledged to "continue to vigorously innovate and delight gamers with Xbox."
To accomplish this, Microsoft staffers must be open to change, he said. "Organizations will change. Mergers and acquisitions will occur. Job responsibilities will evolve. New partnerships will be formed. Tired traditions will be questioned," Nadella wrote.
Those new teams must then "obsess over our customers."
"In order to deliver the experiences our customers need for the mobile-first and cloud-first world, we will modernize our engineering processes to be customer-obsessed, data-driven, speed-oriented and quality-focused," Nadella said.
He promised to "be more effective in predicting and understanding what our customers need and more nimble in adjusting to information we get from the market" - likely a nod to Microsoft missing the boat on tablets and mobile.