The Miracle Of Microsoft

Microsoft, that blue screen of irrelevance, is bigger than Apple (slightly), Amazon, and everybody else. How’d that happen?

- Austin Carr and Dina Bass

The congratulatory texts and tweets started the last week of November. Microsoft had overtaken Apple to become the world’s most valuable company, a stunning climax in a year that also saw it pass Amazon and Google’s Alphabet Inc. Longtime employees, who’d grown accustomed to thinking of Microsoft as far removed from its glory years, when it was run by Bill Gates and feared as the “Evil Empire,” were flooded with messages from friends and family.

Yet not a word of this achievement was uttered when Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella gathered his senior stafffor their weekly meeting that Friday. In an interview at Microsoft Corp. headquarters in Redmond, Wash., Nadella appears irritated by questions about the company’s ascendancy. “I would be disgusted if somebody ever celebrated our market cap,” he tells Bloomberg Businessweek. He insists the valuation—which passed $1 trillion on April 25 and is up more than 230 percent since his watch began in February 2014—is “not meaningful” and any rejoicing about such an arbitrary milestone would mark “the beginning of the end.”

The no-nonsense rhetoric is part of his shtick. Nadella, a 51-year-old engineer with multiple degrees who grew up in Hyderabad, India, is known for his librarian’s temperament. “At Microsoft we have this very bad habit of not being able to push ourselves because we just feel very self- satisfied with the success we’ve had,” he says. “We’re learning how not to look at the past.”