David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…That’s a fair pushback. But Azure came in with an aggressive point of view. We are Platform as a Service, which was distinctly different than AWS, which was we are Infrastructure as a Service. Now, interestingly, Office and applications and Software as a Service actually came pretty quickly thereafter, too. Famously they did a pilot program with Energizer, the battery company, selling just sort of, I don’t think it was the Office productivity suite, but it was SharePoint and stuff I think as a service, as Software as a Service. In 2010, Ray Ozzie actually leaves the company. But as he’s doing, he and Steve roll Red Dog—by this point in time renamed Azure—back into the server and tools business. Two of them go to the University of Washington. Steve gives a speech at the University of Washington. We are all in and we are betting the company on cloud and on Azure. The intended audience of course was Microsoft internally of like, hey, we are sending a message to the server and tools team, this is the future. After that, Steve replaces the division head of the whole server and tools division, who was Bob Muglia at the time. Bob would later go on to be the CEO of Snowflake before Frank Slootman came in; he did fine. Bob was great. Bob was crushing it as head of server and tools. Revenue was growing, I don’t know, 30%–40% a year. It’s a $12 billion business. But the reason that Steve made the change was he said, we need a new leader who’s going to come in, change this organization, and make it a cloud-first organization And not carry the baggage of all the success from the previous iteration.…

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