Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday delivered a "State of the Union"-like address to his employees, discussing the upcoming Windows 10 launch and how to achieve "inter-connectedness."
In an email obtained by GeekWire, Nadella laid out a roadmap for the new fiscal year, reinforcing changes and revealing a new mission statement.
"Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more," he wrote. "This mission is ambitious and at the core of what our customers deeply care about."
Between executive-speak and motivational sentiments, the CEO set a tone for the year ahead, and reiterated Microsoft's focus on mobile. "Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world," Nadella wrote.
In July 2014, five months after taking over as Microsoft CEO, the company chief sent a lengthy memo to Redmond staffers, encouraging them to reinvent productivity, evolve the company's culture, and "obsess" about the customer—many of the same points he mentioned this week.
In particular, Nadella's latest email talks about continuing Microsoft's four-decade evolution, with programs like OneWeek and Hackathon, customer feedback loops, and attempts at diversity.
"We will need to innovate in new areas, execute against our plans, make some tough choices in areas where things are not working and solve hard problems in ways that drive customer value," he continued. "I really do believe that we can achieve magical things when we come together as one team and focus."
Those tough choices likely include the departure of four top Microsoft executives, who left as part of an effort to "drive engineering alignment." That came barely a month before Redmond releases its brand new operating system, Windows 10, on July 29.