Innovation, Not Tradition

From Satya Nadella’s first-day-as-CEO email to all Microsoft employees, February 4, 2014 (archived on Microsoft’s news site). The line was the email’s blunt frame for the pivot the new CEO was announcing.

The kind of tradition Nadella was pushing against was specific. By 2014 Microsoft had spent three decades routing most new product bets through the Windows-and-Office franchise, and as mobile and cloud reshaped the industry around it that posture had become a liability. The line is less a value statement than a directive: tradition gets no credit going forward, even when it built the company you are running.