14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just launched a new series of products, including Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, Lumia 950 and 950 XL, and Band 2, and the company used this to reiterate its commitment to the hardware business, which can obviously generate incredible amounts of cash if you get a device right.
But Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new CEO that took over from Steve Ballmer in early 2014, says the Redmond-based software giant isn't so interested in cash and profit these days because the success of the company is better measured in customer love.
"We no longer talk about the lagging indicators of success, right, which is revenue, profit. What are the leading indicators of success? Customer love," Nadella was quoted as saying by BI, while also adding that they're now working on "getting an entire organization to fall in love with these leading indicators of success."
The hidden message
Nadella said pretty much the same thing as he did in January when he talked about the love for Windows for the very first time.
"We want to move people from needing Windows to loving Windows," he said at that time, explaining that in this new era, Microsoft doesn't want its customers just because they need it, but thanks to the fact that it's the right choice and works just the way they want.
Obviously, this might seem to be pure marketing talk to impress the audience, but Nadella isn't entirely wrong with this. By convincing customers that their products are good enough to deserve the love the CEO is talking about so often, Microsoft can win something more important than short-term profitability: long-term profitability.
Basically, if people actually fall in love with Windows and Microsoft products that are running it, be they Lumia or Surface, not only that they buy the existing devices, but they also come back when new versions are released. This means that instead of buying one particular Windows product just because they need it, customers might actually buy it and the one after it because it loves it.
This surely sounds like paradise for Microsoft and this is probably what Satya Nadella hopes to achieve at Microsoft, but there's no doubt there is a very long road ahead before it happens. Time will tell if Windows 10 has what it takes to make customers love it.