Satya Nadella

The thing that, you know, I feel which was fantastic is what Bill sort of when he started MSR back in 95, I guess, you know, it's like, look, I think in the long history of these curiosity-driven research organizations to just sort of just do a research org that...

is about fundamental research.

And MSR over the years has built up that institutional strength.

So when I even think about capital allocation or budgets or what have you, you kind of sort of first put the chips in and say, hey, look, here is MSR's budget.

And we got to go at it each year, knowing that most of these bets are not going to pay off in any finite timeframe.

It may be the sixth CEO of Microsoft who will benefit from it.

And that's, I think, that's kind of in tech that is, I think, a given.

The real thing that I think about is when the time has come

for something like quantum or a new model or what have you?

Can you capitalize?

So as an incumbent, if you sort of look at history of tech, it's not that people didn't invest.

It is like you need to have a culture that knows how to take an innovation

and scale it.

That's the hard part, quite frankly, for CEOs and management teams, which is kind of fascinating.

It's as much about good judgment and it's about good culture.

And sometimes we've gotten it right, sometimes we've gotten it wrong.

I mean, I can tell you the thousand projects from MSR that we should have probably led with, but we didn't.

And I always ask myself, why?

And it's because we were not able to get enough sort of conviction

And that complete thought of how to not only take the innovation, but make it into a useful product with a business model that we can then go to market with.