This month has been a roller-coaster at Microsoft — beginning with hundreds of layoffs and ending with blockbuster earnings. In a brand new message to staff, posted Wednesday afternoon on the corporate’s inside communications platform, CEO Satya Nadella struck a reflective tone, encouraging a long-term mindset.
The context: the fifteenth anniversary of Microsoft Azure. As soon as a distant challenger to Amazon Internet Providers, Azure has grown right into a key pillar of the Redmond firm’s enterprise, producing $75 billion in annual income — greater than 1 / 4 of Microsoft’s complete — as disclosed for the primary time in Microsoft’s earnings launch.
Within the new message, obtained by GeekWire, Nadella defined that he has been “personally reflecting on our Azure journey, having been there because the early days.”
“We’ve come a good distance since Venture Pink Canine!” he wrote, referring to Azure’s inside code title previous to its public unveiling. The message continued …
“I nonetheless keep in mind what it felt like to start with. We have been all in. We believed within the arc of know-how. There have been challenges, however we stayed the course, compounding small positive factors quarter-after-quarter and incomes our clients’ belief—and right here we’re including as a lot capability in a month as we did in our first 5 years!”
“That is what’s required to make long-term progress: have a daring imaginative and prescient, full the thought, and persist by means of all of the ups and downs. And that’s what makes Microsoft distinctive: our capability to assume in a long time and execute in quarters.
“That’s what nice groups and nice companies do. And that’s what continues to drive us ahead.
“So it’s value every of us asking: What are you engaged on right now that you’ve got such conviction on, that 15 years from now you’ll look again and say, ‘We obtained it proper!’?
“That’s the chance in entrance of us. Thanks for every little thing you do. I’m grateful to be on the journey with you.”
In a separate memo final week, made public by the corporate on the time, Nadella addressed the juxtaposition between the corporate’s current job cuts and hovering income, referring to the state of affairs because the “enigma of success.”
That message drew a wave of inside response — starting from appreciation to skepticism and frustration — as Microsoft staff tried to reconcile the corporate’s monetary power with its workforce restructuring.
Between ongoing hiring and up to date layoffs, the corporate is preserving general headcount flat — round 228,000 staff globally, in response to a brand new submitting. Wall Road analysts praised Microsoft for its working price self-discipline.
On the similar time, Microsoft is ramping up capital spending to unprecedented ranges, planning a report $30 billion within the subsequent quarter alone to increase its AI infrastructure — aiming partly to maintain Azure robust for the subsequent 15 years and past.
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