
By Jnan Dash | Article Rating: |
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January 7, 2017 09:00 AM EST | Reads: |
4,758 |

Clearly Satya Nadella has made a huge difference at Microsoft since taking office in 2014. The stock in 2016 hit an all time high since 1999. So investors are happy. Here are the key changes he has made since taking the role as CEO:
- Skipped Windows 9 and went straight from Windows 8 to Windows 10, a great release. However revenues from Window is declining with the reduction of PC sales.
- Released Microsoft Office for iPad. Also releasing the Outlook product on iPhone & Android.
- Embraced Linux by joining the Linux Foundation, previously anathema to Microsoft’s window-centric culture.
- Spent $2.5B to buy Mojang, the studio behind hit game Minecraft.
- Introducing Microsoft’s first laptop, The Surface Book.
- Revealing Microsoft HoloLens, the super-futuristic holographic goggles.
- New partner program to provide Microsoft products on non-Windows platforms. Hired ex-Qualcomm exec Peggy Johnson to head the bus-dev group.
- Enhancing company morale and employee excitement.
- The biggest gamble was the purchase of Linked-In last June for q whopping $26.2B.
It’s important to understand the significance of the Linked-In purchase. Adam Rifkin (I worked with him twelve years back at KnowNow, a smart guy) recently wrote an article on this topic. I like his comment that in a world of machine learning, uniquely valuable data is the new network effect. The right kind of data is now the force multiplier that can catapult organizations past any competitors who lack equivalent data. So data is the new barrier to entry. Adam also makes a statement that the most valuable data is perishable and not static. I like his comment that software is eating the world and AI is eating software meaning AI is eating data and popping out software.
Now let’s map what this means to the Linked-In purchase by Microsoft which sees the network effects of Linked-In’s data. What Google gets from search, Facebook gets from likes, and Amazon gets from shopping carts, Microsoft will get such insights from Linked-In’s metadata for its CRM services. Adam makes a point that the global CRM market in 2015 was worth $26.3B – almost exactly what Microsoft paid. It is the fastest growing area of enterprise software. Hence Marc Benioff of SalesForce was not very happy with this acquisition.
The new Microsoft is ready to fight the enterprise software battle with incumbents like SalesForce, Oracle, SAP and Workday.
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Published January 7, 2017 Reads 4,758
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Jnan Dash is Senior Advisor at EZShield Inc., Advisor at ScaleDB and Board Member at Compassites Software Solutions. He has lived in Silicon Valley since 1979. Formerly he was the Chief Strategy Officer (Consulting) at Curl Inc., before which he spent ten years at Oracle Corporation and was the Group Vice President, Systems Architecture and Technology till 2002. He was responsible for setting Oracle's core database and application server product directions and interacted with customers worldwide in translating future needs to product plans. Before that he spent 16 years at IBM. He blogs at http://jnandash.ulitzer.com.
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