Quieter than before, but as innovative as ever: Microsoft reinvents itself
Written off a few years ago, Microsoft is now home to some of the most important future technologies in the world. A visit to the research lab Building 99.
What is at stake
Microsoft was written off a few years ago: it had missed the mobile era, exhausted Windows and spent its innovative energy. A visit to the research building “Building 99” in Redmond tells a different story. Some of the most important future technologies in the world are being developed here – quietly but consistently. A pavilion of 895 3D-printed nodes and 1,274 fibreglass rods greets visitors in the lobby. An AI adjusts its colours based on the mood of the people in the room. A symbol for a company that is reinventing itself.
The man in the background
Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, radically rebuilt Windows, laid off many employees and shifted the focus to cloud and enterprise software. The results speak for themselves. Azure is today the world’s second-largest cloud platform; Teams became indispensable to millions of businesses during the pandemic. And behind all of this, Microsoft Research is working on technologies that will only be market-ready in five to ten years.
What is being built in Building 99
Johannes Gehrke, director at Microsoft Research, says: “I think about the biggest problems facing our world and believe that technology and science hold the answers.” Climate change, health, education. It sounds over-ambitious, but it is backed by concrete projects: quantum computing, new materials for chip cooling, AI-assisted diagnostics, robotics for production lines. Microsoft is investing billions in research that is not designed to rescue next quarter’s earnings report, but to help shape the next generation of the economy.
The quiet company
What sets Microsoft apart from Meta or Tesla: the company talks about itself less. No keynote-stage theatrics, no Elon Musk tweets, no Mark Zuckerberg metaverse videos. The company delivers infrastructure – often invisible but reliable. That posture is Nadella’s signature. And that is precisely the surprise: the world’s most valuable software company is suddenly once again the one thinking furthest ahead technologically – and saying the least about it in press releases.
I wrote the full piece for Handelsblatt.