Seattle and Microsoft have one of the great symbiotic relationships between a city and a corporation—it’s in the same category as Atlanta and Coca-Cola, Ford and Detroit, Minneapolis and Target—but their relationship is much younger, just barely growing into middle age (Microsoft celebrates its 40th anniversary this year).
Driving into the city, you pass giant billboards advertising an exhibition of original Star Wars props and costumes at the EMP (Experience Music Project) Museum. The EMP is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s museum—he had starchitect Frank Gehry design it to look like a smashed guitar—and Allen is one of Star Wars’ most famous fans. (Have you ever done a search on eBay for a vintage Darth Vader action figure? Yeah, well, Paul Allen supposedly owns his original helmet.) The billboard is evidence that beginning in the late 1970s, when Allen and Bill Gates brought their tiny BASIC software start-up to these parts, the company and the city have grown up together.
Seattle came of age as a logging and mining town, but since Gates and Allen demonstrated that you could make billions writing computer code, the city has attracted a different sort of prospector. The Microsoft campus is located about 13 miles from Seattle proper in Redmond, across a toll bridge over Lake Washington. The campus is as lushly evergreen as you would expect a Pacific Northwest corporate campus to be. There are big, perfectly manicured athletic fields where software developers are taking early morning circuit-training classes or playing afternoon cricket. There is a mall area called The Commons, with a pet store, cellphone stores, a food court and what seems to be an ultracompetitive solitaire tournament in session.
You notice right away that Microsoft is more diverse than Seattle itself. Information technology department aspirants from every corner of the globe have come here to wear the developers uniform of jeans, cross trainers and a T-shirt with slogans such as “I’m Here Because You Broke Something” (sold for $12.95 at the gift shop in the Microsoft visitor center). This is the big leagues for the computer geek; The Show for any kid from Peoria to Southeast Asia with a PC and a dream.
Microsoft’s CEO is one of those people. Satya Nadella grew up in Hyderabad, India, and earned his electrical engineering degree from Mangalore University before coming to America to get his master’s in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, followed by a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago. He joined Microsoft in 1992. “There aren’t too many places you can work where you can honestly say that what you do touches the lives of more than a billion people,” he says via an email interview.
Nadella is only Microsoft’s third CEO—Gates was the first, and Nadella succeeded Steve Ballmer in February 2014. He has a huge summer in front of him: Microsoft is launching Windows 10 on July 29, and it could use a hit. The Zune music player is still verging on punch line. The Windows Phone is lagging in the mobile market. Microsoft did have a solid game changer in the Xbox, the video game console introduced in 2001, and the apex of the do-everything home entertainment center version, Xbox One, hit stores in November 2013.
Nadella realizes that things have shifted in the past decade, and Microsoft is in the unusual position—especially for a company with total revenues of more than $86 billion—of playing catch-up. “The world that we live in is a mobile-first, cloud-first world,” he says. “It’s a world where the mobility of the experience across all of your devices matters, not the mobility of a single device.” Although Microsoft is active in both cloud computing with its Azure platform and with mobile—it bought Finnish behemoth Nokia in 2014—it isn’t currently leading either sector. “The key goal for us is to be able to build experiences that really take advantage of these two trends,” Nadella says.
When I visit the campus in Redmond, I’m met by Ben Tamblyn, an Aussie with blue eyes and a buzz cut whose title is manager of storytelling for Microsoft’s corporate communications team. We meet in Building 4 in the older east side of campus, the green glass and steel building where Gates used to keep his office. With his shades perched on his head, he looks like he’s either a surfer or a soldier. “Microsoft is a misunderstood company,” Tamblyn says, and Nadella is the man to open it up, to energize the culture, to spark new innovation. He says that great things are happening in these buildings—the best developers in the world are developing things. After leaving Building 4, Tamblyn asks me to pause by a pink rhododendron bush next to a gurgling pond encircled by firs and white pines. “We call this Lake Bill,” he says. He invites me to picture Bill Gates, who still spends about a third of his time here, walking on this path in the ’80s and breaking down a piece of code or walking side by side with Ballmer, two nerdy Jedis talking through corporate strategy.
Tamblyn tells me that the way they work is changing, and it’s not all coming from Nadella—a lot of it is just the spirit of the age. “Twenty years ago, developers produced in spaces locked away from the outside world,” he says. “Dedicated work spaces with refrigerators and microwaves where single male coders would stay for 11 or 12 hours straight just coding away.” Now, he says, most people leave the campus around 5 p.m, since a lot of longtime Microsoft employees have families now, and the younger ones work differently, seeming to crave work spaces that remind them of their early scholastic experiences. Many of the old campus buildings have been remodeled into open work areas with spaces that look like they belong in a cool ad agency. There’s an area called “The Garage,” where a science fair-style event is underway. “This is where SLACS can still happen,” Tamblyn says, invoking an acronym for “stay late and code session.” This is where 3-D printing and arduino board projects are developed.
We walk past Buildings 32 and 33, where Nadella and his team have their offices. For some reason, there’s a DeLorean outfitted like the Back to the Future car that’s part of a film set, with a woman carrying a smoking bowl of what appears to be dry ice. Next is a plaza covered in tiles, each one commemorating a piece of software in that distinctive Microsoft font—Microsoft Excel ’95, Julia Child: Home Cooking With Master Chefs, Microsoft 3D Movie Maker, etc.—and a big round one in a shape of a globe that reads, “Every time a product ships it takes us one step closer to the vision: A computer on every desk and in every home.”
Tamblyn tells me that with 1.5 billion people currently using Windows, Microsoft’s mission of PC evangelism has been accomplished. “A PC on every desktop was achieved 10 or 15 years ago,” he says. “Now the question is: What’s next?”
Tamblyn wants to show me his favorite building, Building 20. From the outside, it looks like a suburban credit union. Tamblyn tells me that this is the building in which Microsoft hopes to orchestrate a change in its perception. Inside, the first thing you notice is the names on the meeting rooms: FRING, SCHRADER, WHITE. Oh, I see . . . Breaking Bad. I walk around trying to find PINKMAN. This is where Microsoft hosts participants in its Ventures Accelerator Program. “We invest time more than huge sums of money,” says Tamblyn. “We’re looking for start-ups and we offer them access to Microsoft tech and Microsoft people.”
For all the talk about openness, I don’t get to see a lot of the cool stuff going on in so many of these buildings. There are clues: I walk by whiteboards with notes about machine learning, and I see a poster for the HoloLens, Microsoft’s virtual-reality visor.
One of Nadella’s favorite quotes is by the great management consultant Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And walking around, past “Geek Crossing” traffic signs in the parking lot, through Breaking Bad-themed meeting rooms in the buildings, it’s easy to get a grasp on Microsoft’s culture. It was called out in Apple’s famous ad campaign in 2006—the nerdy “I’m a PC” guy in a sensible suit—and then Microsoft decided to own it (the company spent $300 million on its own “I’m a PC” campaign in 2008). Years later, there are office doors here festooned with “I’m a PC” stickers. There’s cool stuff going on behind those doors, but it’s pretty obvious that Microsoft doesn’t really care if you think it’s cool. It’s been made fun of by the cool kids and has decided it wants you to think it’s “useful” and “empowering.” But the Xbox gaming culture is beginning to really change things.
“The thing that I value and look for in other leaders really circles around the notion of: Are they creating clarity and energy and are they a learner?” Nadella says. “If you’re not curious, open to learning, raising your own game, admitting your own mistakes, then I think you stop doing useful things at some point.”
Microsoft does seem as if it’s more comfortable embracing fun these days. Tamblyn says that “separating the idea of fun from productivity is wildly outdated.” He still talks about the Xbox as a “productivity tool,” even bringing up applying game play as an education strategy through the recent Microsoft acquisition Minecraft. “It can help you understand space and structure using these building blocks,” he says.
The best example of this change might be the use of Cortana in Windows 10, basically Microsoft’s version of Apple’s Siri. “One of the most exciting things that’s changed my life, for example, is Cortana,” Nadella says. “Which is our intelligent agent that’s on our Microsoft phones today and will be in Windows 10. I find myself speaking a lot more to my phone. It remembers things about me and it reminds me about all the important things that I need to get done.” But Cortana isn’t just another slice of disembodied AI with a feminine voice—“she” comes straight out of the Xbox blockbuster Halo. In the world-beating science fiction franchise, she’s the digital Tinker Bell to the cyborg superhero Master Chief. Microsoft is releasing Windows 10 for free on all qualifying Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 devices, and they hope that someday 1 billion people will be talking to Cortana. This is Microsoft taking a chance on being cool.
Which doesn’t alter Nadella’s focus on empowerment: “Microsoft has always been about empowerment,” he says. “At the core of the company, from the days when Bill [Gates] and Paul [Allen] wrote the first BASIC interpreter for a personal computer and aspired to put a PC on every desktop to the holographic computer with HoloLens today, we want to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Technology has changed a lot in the past 40 years, but our focus on empowering others is enduring.”
Tamblyn says Microsoft is keeping its eye on the prize. “I don’t see tenacity and competitiveness and collaboration as being mutually exclusive,” he says. “If anything, we’re more competitive: We’re going to compete for cloud dominance with Amazon and compete on devices with Apple.”
We shouldn’t be surprised by Nadella’s seriousness of purpose. This is, after all, a guy who loves poetry because of its efficiency. “All poetry is efficient because it’s about compressing human experience into its essence,” he says. “I personally find 19th-century Urdu couplets to be most expressive, perhaps because I grew up reading them. I also often wonder what it would look like if Keats or T. S. Eliot wrote code, such as JavaScript or C#. How would it differ from, say, Bill Gates?”