Book Review - Hit Refresh, Satya Nadella

Mr. Satya Nadella begins the afterword of the book with some serious questions of existential nature. He uses questions like, why am I here, why Microsoft exists and so on, to explain his points. Wish he had asked a similar question about the purpose of this book, clarifying himself before even penning the foreword, for this book is a potpourri of thoughts and ideas, all lying disorganised across the pages.

What is one allowed to expect from a book written by the CEO of a tech giant like Microsoft? Imagine. Microsoft rode to the pinnacle by leading the PC revolution. Then lost their reputation due to questionable, predatory business practices. They also lost revenue by not taking the explosion of market for mobile devices seriously. It was Microsoft that produced a ‘tablet’, well before Apple was even a force to reckon with. But they were not able to make enough people interested in it and lost out. The whole world was switching to mobile devices from PCs, but Microsoft sat basking in the past success, entering the market only at the point of saturation. Just as people were starting to write off Microsoft as another giant about to bite the dust, it turned the tables and rode to the forefront of the Cloud revolution. Today Microsoft has caught up with Amazon and provides cutting-edge cloud solutions to the customers, on par with Amazon’s AWS.

When a company has such eventful history, you expect the CEO to churn out a book full of management wisdom and interesting anecdotes. But this book happens to be a damp squib. This book is not a memoir/autobiography, since very little and only the essential information is shared about Mr. Nadella’s childhood in India, his migrating to the USA for studies and eventually for a job at Microsoft. This book deals about his elevation to the role of CEO and his attempts at changing the ‘culture’ – a word hackneyed to the point of irritation – in only a superficial manner. The book then delves into the future of computing – Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Mixed Reality and Quantum computing – again as an overview without offering much to take in. The book ends by exuding positive beliefs about the future of technology and the co-existence of humans and AI. Trying to convey all these things at once, this book ends up being dull, uninspiring, repetitive and boring.

Incoherently and insipidly written, this is a book that you can safely skip.