Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the 'one lesson he learned' from Google

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has recently talked about a significant oversight: failing to anticipate the dominance of search as the web's most successful business model, which Google capitalised on, and has said that it is “one lesson learned” for him.
“We missed what turned out to be the biggest business model on the web, because we all assumed the web is all about being distributed,” he said during a recent podcast with Indian YouTuber Dwarkesh Patel.
“Who would have thought that search would be the biggest winner in organising the web? And so that's where we obviously didn't see it, and Google saw it and executed super well,” he added.
This miscalculation, they admitted, led them to miss out on a massive opportunity, one that Google capitalised on with remarkable success.
“So that's one lesson learned for me: you have to not only get the tech trend right, you also have to get where the value is going to be created with that trend. These business model shifts are probably tougher than even the tech trend changes,” Nadella noted, underscoring the difficulty of predicting how emerging technologies will translate into sustainable and profitable ventures.

Nadella explained that he has been a part of four major technological transformations. The first was the shift from mainframes to personal computers and then to client-server architecture.
“It was very clear to me. I remember going to what is PDC in '91, in fact I was at Sun at that time. In '91, I went to Moscone. That's when Microsoft first described the Win32 interface and it was pretty clear to me what was going to happen, where the server was also going to be an x86 thing,” he added.
The next major transformation was the emergence of the web, during which the Mosaic browser was released shortly after Nadella joined Microsoft, followed by the Netscape browser.
“We had the browser moment, and so we had to adjust. And we did a pretty good job of adjusting to it because the browser was a new app model,” he added.