This week, Satya Nadella, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft talked with thousands of entrepreneurs, startups and large companies about technology and where we’re headed as an industry.
Discussing The Next 10 Years, Nadella spent his time talking about the new ideas Redmond sees from startups around the world and how their work is shaping the future.
"Today software intermediates — and digitizes — many of the things we do in business, life and our world," says Nadella, speaking at LeWeb’13 in Paris.
"New technologies help businesses engage with customers in more meaningful ways, connect us to our friends and families, and allow us to see, interact with and share our world in ways never before possible.
"But we’re only at the beginning."
So much so that Nadella, widely tipped to become Microsoft's next CEO, believes that over the next 10 years we will reach a point where nearly everything will become digitized.
"This will be made possible by an ever-growing network of connected devices, incredible computing capacity from the cloud, insights from big data and intelligence from machine learning," he adds.
"Developers, with access to these technologies and simplified development frameworks, will create new applications and services that help us transform what we do at work, and life, into digital equivalents.
"Historically, there’s been a lot of attention focused on the digitization happening in Silicon Valley, but what’s even more interesting to me is what’s happening around the world."
Nadella claims that in every corner of the globe, new innovations are bringing this digitization of everything one step closer.
"That’s incredibly important as this transformation should be — it must be — a global phenomenon for it to reflect the needs of our distributed and diverse world," he adds.
"Ushered in by innovations from startups and investment from the enterprise in this new era, every business will be a digital business, everyone can be a developer and nearly everything analog will be digitized.
"We’re investing in this new era through programs like Microsoft BizSpark and Microsoft Ventures, and we’re committed to helping our customers get there with our enterprise cloud products and services.
"Whether you’re just getting started or further along your journey, Microsoft will be here to help."
To read TechDay's exclusive interview with Microsoft valued partner Stephen Forte, Chief Strategy Officer of the venture back company Telerik, click here.
During Microsoft's NZ Tech Ed conference earlier this year, Forte spoke at length of how to make your start-up succeed, offering advice for Kiwis across the country.