While digital technologies have advanced meaningfully in the last decade, they have been most beneficial for a restricted ecosystem—businesses that run an aggregator or marketplace model. The new decade will need “broader productivity and cross-sectoral impact of digital technologies,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft, while speaking at the Microsoft Future Decoded–CEO Summit in Mumbai on Monday.

Nadella, chief of one of the world’s leading tech companies based in Redmond, U.S., was speaking to a banquet full of India’s leading company executives, technology analysts, and the media during his visit to India, which coincides with U.S. president Donald Trump’s trip to India.

“There is no question that the last decade was tremendous in terms of impact of the mobile revolution, consumer interest changed lives. But there is one criticism that it was pretty narrow. Consumer economy isn’t the only economy,” Nadella said. “The profit derived from all that progress was even more limited. The business models that were most successful were aggregators and marketplaces. In the next 10 years, we need broader productivity, broader cross-sectoral impact of digital technology.” Nadella said. Every sector, industry, and product was getting embedded with computing, he added.

In the tech-enabled event, where the verbal observations of speakers got transcribed real-time on a giant LED backdrop on stage, Nadella outlined the tectonic shifts taking place in an increasingly digital world and how India can “ride this wave to build tech intensity.”

The 52-year-old India-born American business leader observed that companies can’t be “stuck reinventing the wheel” and needed to build out their own technological capabilities swiftly. “Companies will never be cool by association. Just because you do a press release with us, you’re not really cool. You have to build your own tech capability and that will be one of the most defining things in the next decade,” Nadella said.

The $1.35-trillion tech company (by market capitalisation), the second most valued in the world after Apple, has been aggressively wooing Indian enterprises—across the public and private sectors and across large enterprises, and small and medium businesses (SMBs)—to adopt various technology solutions offered by Microsoft. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft, best known for its Windows operating system, came also to be known for new-age solutions like its cloud platform Azure and workplace productivity tool Office 365. His current India visit underscores the importance that Microsoft places on the Indian market, already one of the largest data and mobile markets in the world with 560 million internet users and 460 million smartphone users.

Highlighting the importance of democratised digital access for a more diversified ecosystem, Nadella, in his keynote address, said that software development is no longer the prerogative of the tech industry alone. He said that 70% of the new jobs being created for software engineers was outside the tech industry and making them productive wasn’t just a side business for Microsoft.

Through tools such as Visual Studio (which even Facebook uses for app development) GitHub, an open-source app development tool, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, Microsoft wants to enable and empower professionals of different hues marry their domain expertise with the ability to write code. Nadella stated that India had the second largest pool of developers after the U.S. and that he was excited about the prospects of GitHub which recently launched a hub in India.

While Nadella spoke of various branches of digital technology—like Internet of things, data analytics, cloud computing, and others—he peppered his talk with examples of how Microsoft has been working with Indian companies to make their businesses more efficient. Nadella let on that cab aggregator Ola may soon use the technology from one of Microsoft’s pilot projects in India, which uses sensors and the rear and front cameras of a phone to assess how safely a car is being driven. Ola, Nadella said, might use this technology to screen drivers and lease out cars to those considered safe.

aggregators

Tech needs to have a broader impact: Satya Nadella