'The guy who gave me permission to do all this was Steve Ballmer' - Nadella on how he built the Azure business

Microsoft boss gives his view on cloud, sustainability and privacy

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has credited his predecessor Steve Ballmer for sparking the vendor's cloud-led renaissance.

Nadella is widely considered to have revived an ailing Microsoft by reducing its reliance on Windows and centring its business on cloud capabilities.

He had previously led the vendor's Azure unit and, speaking to CNBC, the chief exec revealed that Ballmer played a key role in the refocus to cloud.

Microsoft's share price has since quadrupled, and the firm now vies with Apple for the title of the world's most valuable company.

"The guy who gave me permission to do all this was Steve Ballmer," Nadella said. "He wanted us to be bold and go at the cloud very aggressively and that is what we did.

"One of the key things was that we didn't even think about Azure as separate from Microsoft 365 or Dynamics 365, or even Xbox Live.

"We had a vision; after all, we're a computing infrastructure and platform company, so what is that next generation?"

Nadella went to say that the vendor's bet on a hybrid world has ultimately paid dividends, despite the consensus a few years ago being that the vast majority of IT would end up in the cloud.

"I was always grounded on the fact that it would be a distributed computing infrastructure. It is the cloud and the edge," he explained.

"I used to talk about the edge probably four years ago and people said 'what is he talking about?' but now it is conventional wisdom.

"That is what it takes. You have to have conviction on where the world is going, you have to make your bet long before the world gives you credit for it and then you have to execute. That is what we have done at every layer of the stack."

Nadella also commented on Microsoft's lofty sustainability ambitions which were announced last week.

He said that the global economy "will fundamentally be in jeopardy if the planet, which is the resource that has fuelled our capitalist society, is in danger".

"That is the existential priority," he added.

The CEO also fired a warning shot to businesses that are not taking steps to reduce their carbon emissions and have a positive effect on the planet.

"If you are creating a lot of profit and creating more problems for planet or people, I think it'll catch up with you," he said.

Freedom vs security

The Microsoft boss also briefly touched on privacy, in the context of how much power governments should have to access private data stored in hyperscalers' datacentres.

The debate has been bubbling under the surface for some time, but re-emerged last week when Apple was asked to unlock two iPhones owned by the perpetrator of the Florida shootings in December.

Apple is reportedly preparing to fight the request in court, drawing comparisons to a similar incident in 2016, which never reached its conclusion because the phone in question was unlocked by a third party.

Nadella said that the issue is ultimately a balancing act between privacy and public safety.

"Both things matter," he said.

"Both of these have to be in balance and I think we have to come up with legislative mechanisms for that. Things like backdoors and so on are bad ideas.

"The CLOUD Act, which is in a completely different realm, is actually a good first step in terms of a legal framework of how we can protect the privacy of anyone who has data in the cloud, and yet have a law enforcement agency issue legal warrants.

"We now need to have a technical and legislative breakthrough around personal information that is not in the cloud. That is something we have to work out; we can't take hard stances on all sides but we have to recognise that privacy is a human right."