One of the key learnings from the current crisis is that the level and quality of your IT has a huge impact on your resilience, the robustness of your processes, and sometimes even on your changes to survive. The question is if you are working with the right strategic IT vendors today. Are they financially strong enough to continue the heavy investments in the ongoing innovation of their products and services? Relevant questions, right? So, let’s see how Microsoft is doing.
Around 2013, Microsoft was regarded as a kind of old-school IT vendor. A big vendor with a strong position and a large customer base, for sure! But also, a pretty slow organization, that often responded late to changing market demands. And an organization that was not very effective in creating innovative products and services, despite the huge annual R&D investments.
The appointment of Satya Nadella as the company's new CEO in 2014 turned out to be the start of a radical change. On the product side, he introduced the ‘cloud-first, mobile-first strategy that was pretty progressive those days. But Nadella’s best contribution was in the domain of company culture. He challenged the entire organization to move from a 'know-it-all' culture to a 'learn-it-all' culture.
His leadership was effective in the demolition of internal silos, and he was a strong promoter of better cooperation between the departments. Nadella implemented a 'growth mindset' at scale.
The first results of these efforts and new strategies were quickly visible. The pronounced choice for a Cloud-First strategy created a huge growth in cloud revenue. Lucrative collaboration deals were signed with former sworn competitors like SAP, Salesforce, and Apple. And many of the strong ‘single-category products’ became gradually part of an attractive intelligent cloud platform.
Revenue and profit grew spectacular what transformed the shareholders into happy investors. In the 7 years since Nadella took over as CEO, Microsoft’s market cap grew from $ 300 billion to $ 1.9 trillion. That is 6 times as much in only 7 years – an unprecedented achievement!
Today, Microsoft is widely perceived as a real leader in Digital Transformation. The company’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And that’s exactly what Microsoft does. The company is still the undisputed industry leader when it comes to investments in Research and Development, but they also have the guts to act quickly when it comes to acquiring valuable pieces of technology. Strong innovations are brought to the market at a rapid pace, all strengthening the powerful Microsoft intelligent cloud platform. A recent example of product development is the launch of Microsoft Viva, an integrated employee experience solution. Another example is the recent acquisition of the Artificial speech tech business Nuance Healthcare for almost $ 20 billion – the second-largest acquisition in the company’s history.
Microsoft is ready to help your organization becoming a winner of digital transformation in the years to come. Now, what are you waiting for?