Satya Nadella and Microsoft’s Very Good Day - The New Yorker

Final paragraphs from a review of Microsoft's hardware news

"Much of the energy in the hardware business has been directed toward phones in recent years. But Microsoft’s strategy is sort of the opposite. The company will never catch up to Apple or to Google’s Android, where phones are concerned, at least in the developed world. So now it’s trying to make all the other devices—namely tablets and laptops—exciting again. You probably won’t buy your next laptop from Microsoft, but the company hopes to have demonstrated to other laptop manufacturers, particularly ones that preload Windows, how to make their devices exciting again. “Here’s my main point that I filter by,” Nadella told me. “Does the world need something like it and does it need it from Microsoft?” With the new laptop, he said, Microsoft was willing to take the risk of spending wildly on R. & D. to show that laptops could be exciting again—perhaps as exciting as phones.

After the event, I wrote to Gerbasio to ask him if he was, in fact, going to buy anything. He told me that he’d pre-ordered the Surface Pro 4, but was thinking of maybe switching to the laptop. Either way, he said, he was happy with Nadella and the new Microsoft. For the first time, he thinks, the company genuinely cares what he, a normal consumer, actually wants."

Satya Nadella and Microsoft’s Very Good Day - The New Yorker