Microsoft’s Nadella Talks About the Future of Office

REDMOND, Wash. — “Getting stuff done.”

That’s become a favorite catch phrase of Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, to describe broadly what Microsoft’s products are all about. He used it in an email he sent to Microsoft’s workforce in July a few months after he got the top job. Last Thursday, in a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters with a small group of journalists, Mr. Nadella used the expression no fewer than seven times in a 15-minute span as he talked about the purpose of products like Office, one of the pillars of Microsoft’s business.

“To me that’s the broadest definition of productivity, which is for us to empower individuals and organizations to be able to make things happen and get stuff done,” he said. “That to me is what we need to aspire to, and everything we do needs to add up to it.”

What is Microsoft?

It’s in a lot of businesses, too many by some accounts. It competes with Sony and Nintendo in video game consoles; Google in search engines, Apple and Samsung in smartphones and tablets; Oracle and Salesforce in corporate software and services; and Amazon in cloud computing. A big criticism of the company under Mr. Nadella’s predecessor, Steven A. Ballmer, was that Microsoft became unfocused, fighting battles on too many fronts.

Mr. Nadella has not, as of yet, exited any major businesses, as some analysts had hoped. Instead, he is seeking to define the company’s identity more clearly to both employees and the outside world, explaining how its sprawling technology assets are not a disjointed jumble but rather reinforce each other. With the exception of Xbox, which he has praised but admits is outside the company’s core mission, Mr. Nadella believes Microsoft’s focus on productivity is what distinguishes it from competitors.

“To me Apple’s very, very clear, and, in fact, I think Tim Cook did a great job of even describing that very recently where he said they sell devices,” Mr. Nadella said last week, sitting in an armchair. “That’s what Apple is all about.

“And Google is about being — you know, it’s about data or it’s about advertising, it is about serving you ads in a tasteful way, and they’ve done a great job of that business,” he continued.

Microsoft’s identity, in contrast, is about making products that empower others in their work and personal lives, he said. “From the creator of a document to a developer writing an app, to anyone else” who is in the business of actually producing their own creation, he said, “we want to be the tools provider, the platform provider. That’s the core identity.”

The challenge with this approach is that Microsoft’s competitors help people get stuff done, too (only they tend to avoid words like “productivity” to market their efforts). Apple, for instance, released its “Your Verse” television commercial earlier this year that depicted people using iPads — marine biologists, Kabuki actors, hockey players, videographers, storm chasers and engineers on wind turbines — in their work.

Microsoft, though, is thinking more seriously about the future of productivity than just about anybody else. Mr. Nadella and a handful of top Microsoft executives demonstrated and discussed a range of projects in various stages of development that take its suite of applications way beyond ordinary word processing and spreadsheets.

It showed Office Sway, an application that reimagines PowerPoint for an era of dynamic web and multimedia storytelling. Here’s a Sway promotional video:

The company demonstrated how two people who don’t speak the same language might communicate using Skype, its Internet calling application, showing real-time German-English translation. (A German-speaking reporter in attendance said the translation was clunky in parts.) Here’s a demonstration from September of the technology:

Microsoft has more motivation than anyone else to make sure it, and not a competitor, invents the future of productivity. Office alone is about a $26 billion a year business.

Last week, Microsoft made a bold move to increase use of Office on mobile devices by announcing free iPad, iPhone and Android tablet versions that do the same basic chores as Office for computers. Microsoft’s move was a concession to the fact that Apple and Google mobile products are where the masses are, not Microsoft’s products.

Even if Microsoft is still struggling to establish its credibility in mobile, Mr. Nadella insists no other company is as preoccupied with productivity applications.

“Who else will care as much about the craftsmanship of these tools and obsess about it to give it to everybody on the planet so that they can get stuff done?” he asked.

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