Four days, four
cities — Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad — a meeting with Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, meetings with at least two chief ministers, interactions with a
number of leading startups, companies and partners, and a spate of new
announcements for India. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's India visit suggests the
company is intensely energising its efforts here.
Nadella, who
grew up in Hyderabad and studied engineering at Manipal University, is being
hailed by many as having turned around a company that was seen as losing its
way, particularly through his cloud initiatives. Cloud is what excites him
about India too, because of its ability to put advanced computing resources in
the hands of ordinary people and small ventures. In an interaction with TOI,
Nadella uses the word 'amazing' multiple times to describe the India context.
Excerpts:
You spoke about
projects in which you are bringing technology to deal with issues of big social
concern in India — malnutrition, tuberculosis. You spoke in particular about
the Harisal digital village project in Maharashtra. For years, big technology
companies have been trying to put technology to use in areas of education,
healthcare in India, but hardly any have scaled. Have things changed now with
the India Stack (Aadhaar, Unified Payment Interface, etc) and may be a new
political resolve?
I have a
slightly broader aperture through which I look at what is happening in India.
If you look at our mission statement of empowering every person and
organisation, we take that seriously. Even our commercial model is very
dependent on others being able to do something with our digital technology to
impact their own success. Here is Flipkart competing against a real
multinational behemoth, doing a great job, and it sort of says, 'Let's now get
a technology edge by partnering with Microsoft so that we can outrun even an
MNC'. So the ambition level of the entrepreneurial class of India is great to
see. As for small businesses, they were not equipped to even consume a lot of
what we were producing a few years ago. Now, it's pay per use. So they can use
the best technology that the largest of companies use. That's transformational
for the lifeblood of any economy — the small- and medium-sized businesses.
Take large
businesses. I had meetings today with a lot of the financial sector folks. They
all want to make sure that the IT promise that they have is not being spent on
buying servers, putting IT. They might as well use our cloud infrastructure and
focus instead on financial inclusion services or credit services that will keep
them competitive.
Public sector
— it's stunning. I look at the example of poll monitoring in India, whether it
is in the Tamil Nadu or UP elections, they just put these cameras, collect all
the streaming data, monitor it using the cloud, and then when the election is
done, they bring the entire estate down, saving tax payer money. That's an
enlightened use.
Now let's go
to the place where you started. Take Harisal. The local university put in the
courses that are relevant for animal husbandry, for carpentry, auto mechanics
and other skills so that people there could get trained. It was the cloud
infrastructures that made this possible. Then we are helping measure the impact
it has had on human development index, local economic activity. Then we are
saying, 'Let us scale it'. It is happening. It is the most amazing thing to see
— how technology is being marshalled. It's not just about the social projects.
But the social projects, small business, large business, public sector.
For the past nearly
two years, we've been seeing companies like IBM, Cisco, Accenture, VMware
calling out India as one of their fastest growing markets. We have not seen
Microsoft do that yet...
To me,
overall, we and India are very excited about the amazing growth. If you think
about the worldwide growth we have in the cloud which we last reported, it's
over 94%; there are very few multi-billion-dollar businesses that are doubling
every quarter. If you think about the capital investment I made putting three data
centres in India, if we hadn't done it, we wouldn't be having these rich case
studies I have been talking about. The quality of the stories we are telling of
people using our technology — that's the leading indicator of revenue. So I'm
very happy to see the growth (in India), except in our case, the rest of the
world is also growing.
Can you say where
India is in the pecking order for you?
India's GDP growth
is undeniable. It's all correlated to that. But overall, our cloud growth rate
is a fantastic growth rate. It's in the same ballpark as the world average. And
in tech, if you are celebrating the old growth, that is not at all the way to
measure it. In fact, the key for anyone who has had success in the past is to
be very mindful of what they are celebrating versus what they are not. If I sit
here and celebrate licence revenue growth, that will be like forecasting our
death.
Skype Lite,
Sangam, Kaizala — are these all 'Made in India' stories as well?
In software and
digital products, you never try to pigeonhole yourself like that. If you say
it's 'Made in India' or 'Made for India', all you are doing is the local
maxima, versus the global maxima. But that said, the key thing here is that the
insights of the products came because of the use cases that are emerging in
India. Even the one pilot we did in Andhra, to manage a festival, is what
taught us how we should build a messaging app. So we built this chat-oriented
productivity tool (Kaizala) and now every conversation I'm having, whether it's
a bank or retailer or government, they all want to use these tools.
Same thing
with Sangam. We saw we were getting great traction with LinkedIn and we even
built three products specific to the India market. LinkedIn Placements is a big
interesting case study. There are many colleges in India, but the brands of
those colleges are not exactly such that people get jobs. So how do you
democratise it? After all, people are smart everywhere, except that they may
not come with a brand. LinkedIn Placements solves that problem. Those product
insights are the key.
But your
Hyderabad development centre would have played a role?
A huge role. But
it's boundary-less. One of the big cultural changes in Microsoft is not to say,
'I'm in this location, I'm in this product group, I'm in this P&L (profit
& loss)'. Innovation happens when people in Hyderabad can go to Beijing and
see the amazing bot work we are doing there. Go to Africa and see what things
we have done here are relevant there. The Sangam project is set to go to the
Middle East. That ability of the human capital of this country to be exposed to
others, that's the role of a multinational — we can create that opportunity.
You are passionate
about AI (artificial intelligence). But it's a technology that threatens to
accentuate the problems of job losses and inequalities that many governments
around the world are struggling with. Bill Gates (Microsoft founder) appears
very concerned. He spoke about, in some context, the need for socialism. He
spoke recently about a robot tax. How do you see this?
Any time new
technology takes away existing jobs, it's a huge challenge. I would go back to
history on this. It's not the first time that we've faced these challenges. In
the industrial revolution, when the rate of return on capital and labour
diverged, that is when the labour movement, the minimum wage, the social
security systems were born, and so also taxation to support all of that. There
is a way for liberal democracies to be able to address issues where surplus is
still being created, but it's not evenly distributed. So to me, what Bill's
saying, others are saying, is, 'Let us address the real issues here. How should
we think about the surplus that gets created?' No one's saying the world's in
great shape so we don't need any new technology. We need new technology to
solve for our climate, for the pressing problems of the world. So now that we
have the new technology that might displace people, let's do our very best in
skilling. In India In India, I think the services industry will still be a huge
source of employment. How do we skill people for all of these jobs? As a
society, as an economy, we have to work together.
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