Hit Refresh, by Satya Nadella

Microsoft helped put personal computers on desks around the world through Windows. Hit Refresh asks what a company can do when the product that made its name is no longer enough to define its future.

Windows had given Microsoft the resources to enter many other businesses. After Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella became the company’s third CEO.

A route to the top through cloud computing

Nadella studied engineering in India before moving to the United States. He earned a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He joined Microsoft in 1992 and went on to lead its Cloud and Enterprise group.

His experience running that business formed part of the background to his appointment as CEO in 2014.

A book written from inside Microsoft

Nadella wrote Hit Refresh with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols while running Microsoft. The Korean edition appeared in 2018, four years into his tenure.

The book is more interested in the direction of the company than in presenting a full account of his life.

When Microsoft’s reputation lagged behind its reach

Windows had once put Microsoft at the center of the technology industry. Over time, Apple’s iPhone and Mac came to represent innovation for many of the same consumers.

Microsoft remained one of the world’s most valuable companies, but it began to look like an established incumbent in a market associated with newer ideas.

Apple had its devices, and Google was trying projects such as Glass and self-driving cars. Microsoft was still best known to many people for the products it had been selling for years.

That reputation helps explain why its role in bringing generative AI to businesses and consumers later drew so much attention.

The technologies Microsoft was preparing for

While competitors drew attention with new products, Microsoft was making longer-term bets of its own.

Nadella singled out artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and quantum computingas three areas that could shape the company’s future.

Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI brought the first of those bets into sharper focus. After ChatGPT reached a mass audience, Microsoft began integrating generative AI into familiar tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint through Copilot.

OpenAI’s first previews of the video generator Sora offered another example of how quickly the range of generative tools was expanding.

These developments help explain why the emphasis on AI in Hit Refresh has held up as one of the book’s most consequential points.

Cloud computing and Azure

Microsoft’s second bet was cloud computing. Azure is aimed chiefly at organizations, so the people using services built on it may never see the Microsoft name.

Cloud services also give businesses a way to connect devices and analyze data collected from them.

For many software companies, renting computing capacity saves them from having to run every server themselves. That demand has made cloud infrastructure a major business for Microsoft.

Azure competes with Amazon Web Services and other providers. At the time I first reviewed the book, I had not used Azure myself, although this site then ran on AWS.

Quantum computing

The third bet is further from most readers’ everyday experience. Conventional computers work with bits, while quantum computers manipulate quantum states.

That gives quantum computers a different way to approach certain problems. Any speed advantage depends on the task and on whether the hardware can be made sufficiently reliable.

Empathy and organizational culture

One idea keeps returning throughout the book: empathy. Nadella sees it as something an organization can encourage, not just a trait an individual brings to work.

The book links empathy to the reasons people build technology in the first place. Technical progress matters when it helps someone do something they could not do before.

That concern for what technology makes possible in people’s lives gives the book its most human passages.

Nadella looks approachable on the cover, but a photograph can only tell you so much about how someone leads. The book is more revealing when he explains which values he wants Microsoft to practice.

Hit Refresh captures how Nadella described his priorities a few years into the job. It gives readers a point of reference for looking at the direction Microsoft took afterward.

Book details

Hit Refresh

Authors

Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, and Jill Tracie Nichols

Korean edition published

March 16, 2018

ISBN13

9788965962502

View the book on YES24

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