RANCHO PALOS VERDES, California —Standing backstage at the Re/code Code Conference on Thursday night next to actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Microsoft CEO said it was pretty surreal.
"I was backstage with your mystery guest, [and thought] god, this is crazy: from the dusty cricket pitches of the Deccan Plateau is quite a journey I must say," Nadella told Re/code's Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg.
Nadella, who was born in India, said he never dreamed of a life like this, "I grew up not even having the ambition to get to the west of Bombay," he joked. But Nadella did make it to the U.S., first to Wisconsin and, eventually Microsoft where's he's been for the last 22 years. "I've pretty much grown up at Microsoft," said Nadella.
Since being named CEO in February, Nadella has quickly established himself as the face and voice of the company, replacing co-founder and former CEO Steve Ballmer’s salesman's bluster with a technologist's precision. Nadella does not come across as cold, though. He funny, sharp and open, or at least as open as the CEO of one of the World's biggest and most important technology companies can be.
When Mossberg and Swisher questioned Nadella repeatedly about Microsoft's missteps in key areas like mobile, Nadella managed to both deflect and look past these stumbles to focus on future opportunities.
"We're at the beginning of a post-post PC area," he said.
Nadella thinks Microsoft has the culture and capability to focus on the next big concept. He also reminded Mossberg that Microsoft now has 4% global mobile market share.
So, yes, the company is slowly climbing back in to the mobile game with exciting products like the Surface Pro 3 and Windows Phone 8.1. Nadella, though, knows the company and technology as a whole are at a critical inflection point, and he does not want anything getting in the way of Microsoft capitalizing on new opportunities.
"One of the things we really have to make sure of is that people in the organization are not there to say no, but there to say yes to others," said Nadella.
What He'll do
As enamored Nadella is of "yes," he made it fairly clear the things he'll still say no to.
On the subject of Bing search, Nadella characterized it as "very important technology" and noted that a lot of the innovation in Microsoft's enterprise-level cloud platform Azure comes directly from Microsoft's work in search. As for the possibility of selling to Yahoo, Nadella more or less dismissed the idea, "We are very happy to partner with Yahoo to serve search results."
As Nadella tries to redefine the company, some have wondered if Nadella would opt to, even as it buys hardware companies like Nokia, spin off other components like, perhaps, the Xbox group. Once again Nadella pushed aside the notion, "I have no intent to do anything different on Xbox than we do today," he said and reminded Mossberg and Swisher that Microsoft used its Xbox hardware capabilities to build the first Surface tablet.
Microsoft will remain, Nadella said, a company that spans the enterprise and consumers and not, as some have surmised, switch to a business-only company.
The vision of the company may be Nadella's but he admitted that he meets with founder and former CEO Bill Gates often and Gates recently spent a whole day immersed in meetings. Nadella added though that he runs the place and "Bill's helping."
Nadella couldn’t be goaded into direct assessments of competitors Apple and Google and while he's happy to compete with these "all very capabilities companies," he believes
"Competition is not going to kill us, it’s our own ability to go after an idea and create something."
The Road Ahead
Nadella will certainly have his work cut out for him. The technology space is more dynamic than ever. The short version is that everything is going mobile, but the longer version is that the cloud, data and intelligent devices may drive the future of innovation. It's unclear if Microsoft, which excels in cloud services and data, but has not been very involved in the Internet of Things movement, is fully prepared to compete.
"It's time for us to build the next big thing," said Nadella somewhat cryptically. No one really knows what that is, but we'll all be watching the new CEO.
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