July 2013: Steve Ballmer announces "One Microsoft" vision
In July of 2013, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a sweeping reorganization of the company. This reorg was meant to unify the company's notoriously divided sectors and create a more cohesive, unified "One Microsoft." The shift was to optimize the talents and resources of each division and to make cross-collaboration within the company more efficient. The desired outcome for customers was that there would be a more organic and integrated synergy of Microsoft's products and services.
Ballmer's successor Satya Nadella embraced this, and Ballmer's vision became the catalyst for a major cultural shift that propelled the company forward during the last decade.
Some Microsoft employees say the past atmosphere of fear has been replaced with a culture that encourages taking risks with new things and learning from failures.
This new culture is evident in many of the bold moves the company has made in the past decade, such as decisively cutting investments in areas where the company could not compete, prioritizing cloud computing over Windows, investing heavily in other platforms, and pushing tech innovation with products like HoloLens are just a few examples.
