Nadella gives light-hearted glimpse into Bill Gates' present Microsoft involvement

CEO takes to stage on third day of Microsoft's Inspire conference in Las Vegas

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has offered a glimpse into founder Bill Gates' involvement at the vendor, joking that he regularly emails lists of things that need to be done.

Nadella (pictured) took to the stage on the third day of Microsoft's Inspire conference in Las Vegas, rattling through a list of the vendor's newest products and innovations.

The chief exec said, in a light-hearted anecdote, that Microsoft's new hyperscale database in particular has caught the eye of founder and former CEO Bill Gates.

Microsoft says that SQL Hyperscale brings "really limitless" scale to SQL Server.

"This limitless, transparent scale-out has been a dream for a long, long time," Nadella explained. "Bill Gates recently met with the team that was building all of this and he sent a mail.

"Usually, when you get a weekend mail from Bill, you kind of wait and see, "Do I really want to open it now?" he said, to laughter.

"And I opened it, and I've been working with Bill for a long time, and it started by saying, ‘Wow'. I've never seen that word from him, I've never heard that word, and he was really thrilled to see us make progress. Of course he had a long list of other things we need to be working on as well," he added, to more laughter and applause from the audience.

Nadella talked up adoption of Microsoft 365, claiming that 95 per cent of the 475 Fortune 500 companies are using the bundled-up offering.

He added that enterprise adoption of Window 10 has been Microsoft's fastest-growing area over the last year.

The chief exec also declared the last 12 months a "breakout year" for Microsoft's Teams collaboration product.

"It defies even the category definitions that are there out in the marketplace, and that's what's driving this tremendous momentum," he said.