Satya Nadella on a Mobile-First, Cloud-First World

You hear Mobile-First, Cloud-First all the time.

But do you ever hear it really explained?

I was listening to Satya Nadella’s keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, and I like how he walked through how he thinks about a Mobile-First, Cloud-First world.

Here’s what Satya had to say:

“There are a couple of attributes.

When we talk about Mobile-First, we are talking about the mobility of the experience.

What do we mean by that?

As we look out, the computing that we are going to interface with, in our lives, at home and at work, is going to be ubiquitous.

We are going to have sensors that recognize us.

We are going to have computers that we are going to wear on us.

We are going to have computers that we touch, computers that we talk to, the computers that we interact with as holograms.

There is going to be computing everywhere.

But what we need across all of this computing, is our experiences, our applications, our data.

And what enables that is in fact the cloud acting as a control plane that allows us to have that capability to move from device to device, on any given day, at any given meeting.

So that core attribute of thinking of mobility, not by being bound to a particular device, but it’s about human mobility, is very core to our vision.

Second, when we think about our cloud, we think distributed computing will remain distributed.

In fact, we think of our servers as the edge of our cloud.

And this is important, because there are going to be many legitimate reasons where people will want digital sovereignty, people will want data residency, there is going to be regulation that we can’t anticipate today.

And so we have to think about a distributed cloud infrastructure.

We are definitely going to be one of the key hyper-scale providers.

But we are also going to think about how do we get computing infrastructure, the core compute, storage, network, to be distributed throughout the world.

These may seem like technical attributes, but they are key to how we drive business success for our customers, business transformation for our customers, because all of what we do, collectively, is centered on this core goal of ours, which is to help our customers transform.”

That’s a lot of insight, and very well framed for creating our future and empowering the world.

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