Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Axios on HBO that he is not focused on cutting costs in the face of the coronavirus crisis, but instead aiming to meet “new demand” for Microsoft Teams and other Office applications as more employees work from home.
Asked if he was contemplating layoffs or slowing in investments in certain areas, Nadella said that’s not where he is putting his energy.
“So for now, what I’m focused on is … what I would call new demand,” Nadella said. “I don’t think, you know, one month ago I would have thought of ‘work from home’ as a complete new scenario with the type of spikes we have today. Overall activation of Microsoft 365 is increasing significantly.” (That’s a mix of new paid users and free trials, though.)
While the spike in demand has led to some challenges — Microsoft Teams had an outage in Europe last week — Nadella said that, overall, the shift from company-based servers to the cloud has prepared the economy to handle a large population of employees working from home.
Some video.
