Microsoft Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella, who is on a two-day visit to India on Tuesday in an interview with a leading daily talked at length about various topics rangings from Demonetisation, cricket, Silicon Valley and more. When asked about his views on PM Modi’s much debatable move to order a note ban, Nadella said that in the long term it will bring down transactional costs. As quoted by the Times of India, the Microsoft chief said, “In all fairness, I’m not an expert on the specifics of how it played out, the impact on the economy. But if I step back and look at the idea that on a long-term basis you are going to bring down transactional costs by using digital technology, I think it’s fantastic.”
While further talking about the same, he added, “For a country like India, it will create a more economic surplus. If I look at the core courage of the legislative process of this country, I admire that. It’s always hard for democracies to take non-linear steps, but sometimes these are the steps you need to take by building consensus so that the country as a whole can move forward.” The India-born CEO of Microsoft then went on to talk about mixed reality, AI, quantum computing to shape future. Nadella stated that the computing history has so far been about enhancing the man-machine interface, Nadella articulated that ultimate computing experience will be “mixed reality” that blends the real and the virtual world.
As quoted by PTI, in a free-wheeling conversation with former cricketer Anil Kumble, Nadella spoke about matters close to his heart – his family, cricket and the potential that new-age technologies hold for organisations and the society at large. Nadella also cited examples of how the company’s ‘HoloLens’ is being used across sectors like education. Recounting his own experience, Kumble said that he had tried the HoloLens and “walked on Mars and it felt great”. ‘Teleportation’ is no more just Star Trek, Nadella said to a packed hall. “If you take Microsoft 43 years into our existence and I look at it every five years, we have had some new existential threat,” he said. He added that while people wrote that some company would “kill” Microsoft, it hasn’t happened because the US based company “must be doing something right to stay relevant, to continue to question the status quo”.
