Microsoft outlines its plans for the next year

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella's big ideas for FY2015




New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has issued a letter to company employees outlining its plans for the next year.


The broad open letter outlines the company’s ambitions for the new financial year and Nadella is definitely looking to make some big changes within all of Microsoft’s divisions.


Former CEO Steve Ballmer made the company’s focus about “devices and services”, but Nadella says although this was “helpful in starting our transformation, we now need to hone in on our unique strategy.”


As for that unique strategy, Nadella is sticking to his recent emphasis on cloud and mobile services.


“At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more,” said Nadella.


Following the announcement of the Office for iPad suite, Nadella is obviously looking to really push its digital productivity experiences further.


“We will deliver digital work and life experiences that are reinvented for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. First and foremost, these experiences will shine for productivity.”


Recently Windows Phone developers have teased “something pretty amazing” is coming to the platform later this year, and Nadella does the same, promising that its first-party devices (which now includes Nokia) will “light up digital work and life”.


Surface Pro 3 is a great example – it is the world's best productivity tablet. In addition, we will build first-party hardware to stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem. That means at times we'll develop new categories like we did with Surface. It also means we will responsibly make the market for Windows Phone, which is our goal with the Nokia devices and services acquisition.”


If you were getting worried that Xbox wasn’t mentioned in Nadella’s letter, don’t fret. He says Microsoft is “fortunate to have Xbox in our family” and the company will continue to offer “unique and bold innovation.”


But it does look like he has some plans up his sleeve to make the Xbox One platform more of an investment for Windows users as a whole.


“We also benefit from many technologies flowing from our gaming efforts into our productivity efforts – core graphics and NUI in Windows, speech recognition in Skype, camera technology in Kinect for Windows, Azure cloud enhancements for GPU simulation and many more. Bottom line, we will continue to innovate and grow our fan base with Xbox while also creating additive business value for Microsoft.”


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