Hit Refresh

In one sentence: Satya Nadella's 2017 memoir-cum-management-reflection is quoted verbatim in the opening minutes of Acquired's Microsoft Volume II episode — used to state, and then interrogate, the very "lost years, then Satya saved it" narrative the episode sets out to complicate.

Overview

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, co-written by Satya Nadella with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols, was published by HarperCollins (Harper Business) in 2017, with a foreword by Bill Gates. Its opening paragraph reads: "I joined Microsoft in 1992 because I wanted to work for a company filled with people who believed they were on a mission to change the world. But after years of outdistancing all our competitors, something was changing and not for the better. Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy, teamwork was being replaced by internal politics and we were falling behind." The book traces Nadella's path from joining as a Windows NT evangelist in 1992, through the little-known Tiger server/Cablesoft project, Dynamics, BizTalk, Bing, and Server & Tools, to Azure and then the CEO role in 2014, along with his thinking on reshaping the company's culture.

Why It's Worth Reading

David opens the episode by noting that the popular narrative of Microsoft's 1995–2014 stretch — "winning, then it sucked for a long time, and then it's winning again, thanks to Satya" — traces back to this book's opening paragraph, which he reads aloud in full. David and Ben then spend the rest of the episode testing whether that narrative actually holds up; in a sense, the frame the book sets in its first page is exactly the target the episode complicates. Beyond that framing role, the book is also where several under-the-radar details of Nadella's career come from — that he joined as an "evangelist" rather than a product manager, and that he worked early on an information-superhighway cable project called "Tiger server" that never shipped. When Ben asks where David dug up that trivia, David's answer is direct: "It's in his book... It's in Hit Refresh."

Sourcing

The Microsoft Volume II episode opens by quoting the book's first paragraph verbatim, using it as the target of the episode's central argument; the mid-episode details about Nadella's early, obscure roles at Microsoft — Tiger server, Dynamics, BizTalk, Bing — are also drawn directly from it.