Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was interviewed by Bloomberg on the topics of cloud computing, Azure, the LinkedIn acquisition, culture change at Microsoft, and the globalization of technology.
Here is a subset of what he said about tech changes:
Is the cloud the big technological change that we’re going to see over the next five years?
I think the big move that is happening today for sure is the cloud move and the mobile move. They sort of go together. And when I say mobility, it’s not the mobility of one device, it’s the mobility of the applications and the data across all your devices, because it’s about the ability of the human experience, not the device.
But I see three other broad platform shifts. One is what I’ve called conversations as a platform. If we can teach all our computers human language, can we democratize computers even more so than we have done today? Think about it. The model today of, “Well, I’ve got to learn the shell, learn to download 20 apps, and navigate between these apps to get stuff done”—what if none of that was a cognitive load on me, but I was able to simply talk, text, or voice and get my things done?
That’s a much more natural way for computing to surface. It’ll work for an 85-year-old person in China, and it’ll work for a 5-year-old in Bellevue [Wash.]. That, to me, is the next frontier and what we’re doing with [voice-enabled personal assistant] Cortana, what we are doing with our bots.
I’m also very, very bullish about making AI capability or machine learning capability available to every developer, every application, and letting any company use these core cognitive capabilities to add intelligence into their core operations. So that’s something that we’re doing with Azure and our Azure cognitive services.
The third one that I’m also very excited about is what’s happening with mixed reality.
Image Credit: Satya Nadella from LinkedIn