Here’s What Satya Nadella Really Said About Windows Phone and Regret (Premium)

In a heavily cited recent interview, Satya Nadella allegedly claims that killing Windows Phone was his biggest regret. But that's not true. Instead, he had to be prodded into going down that rabbit hole.

Oddly, Nadella's two predecessors did both make this claim. Steve Ballmer in 2017 expressed regret for not making Microsoft a "world-class hardware company" and Bill Gates in 2019 claimed that Windows Phone was his biggest mistake. Both people made horrible, horrible mistakes while leading Microsoft, but in both cases, these transgressions were not among them: Microsoft was never going to lead in hardware, and trying to do so would have distracted it from the cloud computing transition that turned it into the second-most valuable company on earth, setting itself up for its latest transition as an AI superpower. I appreciate being self-critical more than most, but for crying out loud, let's identify the real problems first.

Speaking of which, every Windows enthusiast blog on earth is claiming that Nadella just did the same thing, claiming that he said in an interview with Business Insider that killing Windows Phone was his biggest regret. The diehards will clutch this testimony to their chests until their dying day. But there's just one problem. He did not say that.

Here's the quote all those stories are based on.

"The decision I think a lot of people talk about---and one of the most difficult decisions I made when I became CEO---was our exit of what I'll call the mobile phone as defined then," he answered. "In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones."

This has been misquoted, misinterpreted, and over-analyzed. But let me set the record straight. Because there is much more going on there.

First, and I think this is important, the transcript of this interview is over 7,300 words long---questions and answers---and it touches on an amazingly broad set of topics from Nadella's early life to Microsoft to AI to consciousness. And yet what the saddest little part of our enthusiast community is dwelling on constitutes just 63 vague words of that interview.

Worse, this was not the answer he gave when asked about his biggest regret. This is what he answered:

"I wish I could say there was one mistake, but I've made many, many mistakes," he said originally. "I would say that my biggest mistakes were probably all about people."

The interviewer then asked for clarification. Did he mean "not picking the right people or keeping the wrong people?"

To this, he answered "Yes," by which I assume he meant "both." He then blabbed on about culture and being a leader for another 85 words, longer, I will remind you, than he discussed phones.

In other words, Windows Phone is not Satya Nadella's biggest regret. The first thing he blurted out when confronted about this, was to talk about bad personnel decisions. Not phone...