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The arrival of our son, Zain, in August 1996 had been a watershed moment in Anu’s and my life together. His suffering from asphyxia in utero, had changed our lives in ways we had not anticipated. We came to understand life’s problems as something that cannot always be solved in the manner we want. Instead we had to learn to cope. When Zain came home from the intensive care unit (ICU), Anu internalized this understanding immediately. There were multiple therapies to be administered to him every day, not to mention quite a few surgeries he needed that called for strenuous follow-up care after nerve-racking ICU stays. All this entailed Anu lovingly placing him in the infant car seat and driving him, day after day, from the early hours of the day, from therapist to therapist, not to mention frequent visits to the ICU unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Children’s became a second home for our family as Zain’s medical file grew to over a foot high. We are today, as we always have been, so indebted to the staff at Children’s who have loved and cared for Zain throughout his life from infancy to young adulthood.
During one ICU visit, after I took on my new role as CEO, I looked around Zain’s room, filled with the soft buzzing and beeping of medical technology, and saw things differently. I noticed just how many of the devices ran on Windows and how they were increasingly connected to the cloud, that network of massive data storage and computational power that is now a fundamental part of the technology applications we take for granted today. It was a stark reminder that our work at Microsoft transcended business, that it made life itself possible for a fragile young boy. It also brought a new level of gravity to the looming decisions back at the office on our cloud and Windows 10 upgrades. We’d better get this right, I remember thinking to myself.
My son’s condition requires that I draw daily upon the very same passion for ideas and empathy that I learned from my parents. And I do this both at home and at work. Whether I am meeting with people in Latin America, the Middle East, or one of the inner cities of America, I am always searching to understand people’s thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Being an empathetic father, and bringing that desire to discover what is at the core, the soul, makes me a better leader.
But it is impossible to be an empathetic leader sitting in an office behind a computer screen all day. An empathetic leader needs to be out in the world, meeting people where they live and seeing how the technology we create affects their daily activities. So many people around the world today depend on mobile and cloud technologies without knowing it. Hospitals, schools, businesses, and researchers rely on what’s referred to as the “public cloud”—an array of large-scale, privacy-protected computers and data services accessible over a public network. Cloud computing makes it possible to analyze vast quantities of data to produce specific insights and intelligence, converting guesswork and speculation into predictive power. It has the power to transform lives, companies, and societies.
Traveling the globe as CEO, I’ve seen example after example of this interplay between empathy and technology.
Both in the state where I was born and the state in which I now live, schools use the power of cloud computing to analyze large amounts of data to uncover insights that can improve dropout rates. In Andhra Pradesh in India, and in Tacoma, Washington, too many kids drop out of school. The problem is lack of resources, not lack of ambition. Cloud technology is helping improve outcomes for kids and families as intelligence from cloud data is now predicting which students are most likely to drop out of school so that resources can be focused on providing them the help they need.
Thanks to mobile and cloud technologies, a startup in Kenya has built a solar grid that people living on less than two dollars a day can lease to have safe, low-cost lighting and efficient cookstoves, replacing polluting and dangerous kerosene power. It’s an ingenious plan because the startup can effectively create a credit rating, a byproduct of the service, which, for the first time, gives these Kenyans access to capital. This innovative mobile phone payment system enables customers living in Kenya’s sprawling slums to make forty-cent daily payments for solar light, which in turn generates data that establishes a credit history to finance other needs.
A university in Greece, leveraging cloud data, is working with firefighters in that country to predict and prevent massive wildfires like the one in 2007 that killed eighty-four people and burned 670,000 acres. Firefighters are now armed with intelligence on the rate of the fire’s spread, intensity, movement of the perimeter, proximity to water supply, and microclimate weather forecasts from remote sensors, enabling them to catch fires early, saving lives and property.
In Sweden, researchers are using cloud technologies to ensure that children are screened earlier and more accurately for dyslexia, a reading disorder that impacts educational outcomes for millions. Eye movement data analyzed at schools today can be compared with a data set from those diagnosed with dyslexia thirty years ago. Diagnostic accuracy rates have increased from 70 to 95 percent, and the time to get a diagnosis has decreased from three years to three minutes. This means students, parents, and schools are prepared earlier and struggle less.
In Japan, crowd-sourced data collected from hundreds of sensors nationwide helped the public monitor radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant to reduce risks to food quality and transportation. The 13 million measurements from five hundred remote sensors generated a heat map that alerted authorities to threats to local rice production.
And in Nepal, after the devastating earthquake there in April 2015, disaster relief workers from the United Nations used the public cloud to collect and analyze massive amounts of data about schools, hospitals, and homes to speed up access to compensatory entitlements, relief packages, and other assistance.
Today it’s hard to imagine devices that are not connected to the cloud. Consumer applications like O365, LinkedIn, Uber, and Facebook all live in the cloud. There’s a great scene in Sylvester Stallone’s Creed, the latest of his Rocky movie series. The champ jots down on a piece of paper a workout regimen for his protégé, who quickly snaps a photo of it on his smartphone. As the kid jogs away, Rocky yells, “Don’t you want the paper?”
“I got it right here, it’s already up in the cloud,” the kid replies.
The aging Rocky looks skyward. “What cloud? What cloud?” Rocky may not know about the cloud, but millions of others rely on it.
Microsoft is at the leading edge of today’s game-changing cloud-based technologies. But just a few years ago, that outcome seemed very doubtful.
By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business.
The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution.
Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers