Satya Nadella, Devendra Fadnavis pitch for empowering India

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday echoed the sentiments of Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis by saying that his company’s ambition was to empower the people. Speaking at the Microsoft Future Unleashed event, the India-born CEO said there is going to be more computing in our lives in the coming decade.

“Computing will be everywhere, but what will be key is our mobility of our human experience through all this computing. That is where the cloud is important.”

And there is a reason why the event, the largest by Microsoft in India and what will be an annual feature from now, is being held in Maharashtra. The state houses two of Microsoft’s three data centres in India. The company is also working with the state government in setting up the first smart village at Arisal.

In fact, Fadnavis said there was no doubt that creating smart cities is creating efficiencies. “Unless our cities become efficient we will be exploiting nature. But then we can also create smart villages,” he said, adding he had discussed with Nadella the possibility of setting up 50 more digital villages in 2016.

Giving a hands-on demo, Nadella explained how Microsoft has three interlocking ambitions: reinvention of productivity and business process and bringing them together; building an intelligent cloud and more personal computing. He showed how Microsoft was helping to take the continuum experience across devices and services so that the experience remains the same.

Kicking of the event, which curator Lakshmy Patury said it would be about stories and ideas instead of numbers, Anand Mahindra highlighted how Mahatma Gandhi was in his thoughts the messiah of Digital India by talking about localization and self sustaining communities.

Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd.