I wrote that productivity for us goes well beyond documents, spreadsheets, and slides. We will obsess over helping people who are swimming in a growing sea of devices, apps, data, and social networks. We will build software to be more predictive, personal, and helpful. We will think about customers as “dual users,” people who use technology for their work, their school, and their personal digital life. In the email I inserted the image of a target and in its center appeared the words, “digital work and life experiences,” surrounded by our cloud platform and computer devices. Soon there will be 3 billion people connected to the Internet, sensors, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Yes, PC sales were slowing, and so we needed to convert Nietzsche’s “courage in the face of reality” into “courage in the face of opportunity.” We needed to win the billions of connected devices, not fret about a shrinking market.

With the energy of thousands of colleagues pulsing through the auditorium, I stood backstage rehearsing how I would present our new mission and the imperative to transform our culture. Microsoft people are infamous for presenting a ton of PowerPoint slides when they speak, but I don’t like to rely very much on slides or notes. So I was free to just channel what I was thinking and feeling, to let it flow. A computer on every desk and in every home, which Bill and Paul had introduced forty years earlier as the company’s mission, was actually more of a goal—an inspiring one for its era. The more I thought about it, the more I questioned what it was that had motivated us to create personal computers in the first place. What was the spirit behind the first line of code ever written for the BASIC interpreter on that primitive computer, the Altair? It was to empower people. And that was still what motivated all of our efforts: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We are in the empowerment business, I said as I took the stage, and not just to empower startups and tech-savvy users on the American West Coast, but everyone on the planet. Helping people and their organizations achieve more is our sweet spot. That’s what informs our decisions and inspires our passion; it’s also what makes us different from other companies. We make things that help other people make things and make things happen.

Third, we needed to move people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows by creating more personal computing. Just as we would transform business and society through cloud computing, we also needed to revolutionize the workplace to help organizations and people be more productive. We launched Windows 10 with a new concept—to enable Windows as a service, continuously delivering value across all of our products. We engineered Windows 10 to enable innovative and more natural ways to interact and engage with devices—ask a question with your voice, draw with the flick of a pen, and secure your most important things with a smile or a touch. These experiences place users at the center so they can move seamlessly across all devices—from the PC, Xbox, phones, and Surface Hub, to Microsoft HoloLens, and Windows Mixed Reality.

First, we needed to obsess about our customers. At the core of our business must be the curiosity and desire to meet a customer’s unarticulated and unmet needs with great technology. There is no way to do that unless we absorb with deeper insight and empathy what they need. To me this was not something abstract, but rather something we all get to practice each day. When we talk to customers, we need to listen. It’s not an idle exercise. It is about being able to predict things that customers will love. That’s growth mindset. We learn about our customers and their businesses with a beginner’s mind and then bring them solutions that meet their needs. We need to be insatiable in our desire to learn from the outside and bring that learning into Microsoft, while still innovating to surprise and delight our users.

To encourage the shift toward a learning culture, we created an annual hackathon during our OneWeek celebration, a time for everyone to be on campus simultaneously to make connections, learn about what others are doing, find inspiration, and collaborate. Playing off the notion of growth mindset, the hack made perfect sense. Within the subculture of computer programmers, hacking is a time-honored tradition of working around limitations and creatively solving a difficult problem or opportunity. In that first year, more than twelve thousand employees from eighty-three countries entered more than three thousand hacks ranging from ending sexism in video games to making computing more accessible to people with disabilities to improving industrial supply-chain operations.

Even though I am ambivalent about questions from outsiders about how the culture change is going, it’s easy to see there is a tangible shift happening inside Microsoft. If you want to understand the culture inside a software company, show up at a meeting that includes engineers from different parts of the company. These are very smart people who are passionate about building great products. But are they plugged into what customers need and want? Do they include diverse opinions and capabilities when writing code? And do they act like they’re on the same team, even if they work in different groups? Answers to questions like these serve as a great barometer for the culture we need. Demonstrating a growth mindset. Customer-centric. Diverse and inclusive. One company.

On launch day, Apple’s Senior Vice President for Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, teased the audience as he set up the next demo at the iPad Pro launch. “We’ve been lucky to have some developers come in to work with us on professional productivity. Who knows productivity more than Microsoft?”

Nervous laughter filled the room.

“Yeah, these guys know productivity.”

In today’s era of digital transformation, every organization and every industry are potential partners. Consider the taxi and entertainment industries. Ninety percent of Uber riders wait less than ten minutes for a driver, compared with 37 percent of taxi riders. Netflix costs its viewers $0.21 per hour of entertainment compared with $1.61 per hour with the old Blockbuster video-rental model. These are some of the higher visibility examples of digital transformation, but it’s happening in every industry. We estimate the value of these transformations over the coming decade to be about $2 trillion.

Our emphasis on strategic partnerships isn’t really new. It’s actually another example of how we have been rediscovering the soul of Microsoft. When I look at our founders, Paul Allen clearly saw the power of new computers and Bill Gates saw the power of software. Together they were able to create magic and, more importantly, democratize computing. I sometimes wonder: If Bill and Paul had not succeeded with Microsoft, what would the world look like? Would we have independent hardware manufacturers, independent software vendors, system integrators, and others? Our original business model was built on an ecosystem of partners—independent software developers like Adobe and Autodesk, video game makers like EA Sports, hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Lenovo, and retailers like Best Buy. I don’t think Google would have existed but for the PC browser. Microsoft enabled Google to build a toolbar for our Internet Explorer, making Google services more visible and accessible. As a result of these and other partnerships, Microsoft and the PC helped nurture a host of billion-dollar companies—and Microsoft attracted millions of additional customers in the process.

These experiences have taught us a lot and refreshed our partnering spirit. Microsoft already has the largest ecosystem of partners in the world. Hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide build and sell solutions that support our products and services. In addition, millions of customers in every sector have built their businesses and organizations using Microsoft technologies. My ultimate goal is to be the biggest platform provider underneath all of this entrepreneurial energy, with an unrelenting focus on creating economic opportunity for others.