From Office for iPad to Open licence: How Satya Nadella is transforming Microsoft

Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella, finds himself the centre of much attention. In a short period of two months, he’s made quite a few key announcements for the company.   The first, of course, was the announcement of the Microsoft Office app for iPad, which was long overdue. For many iPad users, the lack of an official Microsoft Office app was quite annoying and alternative apps such as QuickOffice, etc had gained popularity.   But Nadella hasn’t just restricted Microsoft to launch a new app. At the BUILD conference, the company also announced that the Windows Phone OS license was going to be free on smartphones and smaller tablets. Microsoft also announced new mobile partners for Windows Phone, including India’s Micromax.   According to a Wall Street Journal piece, “The flurry of changes reflects Mr. Nadella’s appreciation of Microsoft’s lost empire. The Windows operating system dominated the computing landscape for decades, luring programmers to write applications, from payroll tools to flight-simulator videogames, that kept Microsoft as the hub of business and personal computing.”   By talking about a mobile-first, cloud-first Microsoft, Nadella has shown that he understands that computing has undergone a drastic change in the last couple of years. And Nadella isn’t just repeating this as some of sort of empty slogan.   As the WSJ piece points out, “Microsoft announced a said a partnership with Xamarin Inc, a San Francisco startup, lets developers more easily re-work Windows software code to apps for Android and Apple devices.” Clearly Nadella has understood the role of cross-platform apps and that Microsoft can no longer afford to stay behind.   Another service that was shown off at Microsoft’s BUILD conference was DocuSign. The report says that this, “is a service for digital legal documents, has a iPhone app built with a backbone of Microsoft’s Azure computing service and linked to Office.”   With Nadella stressing on cross-platform and mobile, there’s no doubt that what we are seeing is a different Microsoft. Whether  the mobile bet will pay off with Windows Phone 8.1, of course remains to be seen.