Satya Nadella: belief

Transcript context

…Can you tell me a little bit about how you make these research decisions which, in 20 years time, 30 years time, will actually pay dividends, especially at a company of Microsoft's scale? Obviously, you're in great touch with the technical details in this project. Is it feasible for you to do that with all the things Microsoft Research does? How do you know the current bet you're making will pay out in 20 years? Does it just have to emerge organically through the org, or how are you keeping track of all this? The thing that I feel was fantastic is when Bill, when he started MSR back in '95 I guess. I think in the long history of these curiosity-driven research organizations, to just do a research org that is about fundamental research and MSR, over the years, has built up that institutional strength so when I think about capital allocation or budgets, we first put the chips in and say, "Here is MSR's budget. " We gotta go at it each year knowing that most of these bets are not going to pay off in any finite time frame. Maybe the sixth CEO of Microsoft will benefit from it. And in tech that is I think a given. The real thing that I think about is, when the time has come for something like quantum or a new model or what have you, can you capitalize? So as an incumbent, if you look at the history of tech, it's not that people didn't invest. It's that you need to have a culture that knows how to take an innovation and scale it. That's the hard part, quite frankly, for CEOs and management teams. Which is kind of fascinating. It's as much about good judgment as it is about good culture. Sometimes we've gotten it right; sometimes we've gotten it wrong; I can tell you the thousand projects from MSR that we should have probably led with, but we didn't. And I always ask myself why. It's because we were not able to get enough conviction and that complete thought of how to not only take the innovation but make it into a useful product with a business model that we can then go to market with. That's the job of CEOs and management teams: not to just be excited about any one thing, but to be able to actually execute on a complete thing. And that's easier said than done. When you mentioned the possibility of three subsequent CEOs of Microsoft, if each of them increases the market cap by an order of magnitude, by the time you've got the next breakthrough, you'll be like the world economy or something.…

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