'Without Intel, I don’t know if Windows would have happened… without Mac, I wonder whether Office would have happened' says Microsoft CEO

Long-time Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been surprisingly candid in a recent chat with Morgan Stanley, highlighting, in as many words, how much the company has to thank both Intel and Apple for.

This came in response to a question—well, more of a statement than a question—commenting on Nadella "embracing openness". For instance, regarding Microsoft's stance towards Linux on Azure and its relationship with OpenAI.

Nadella responded: "There are very few zero-sum battles, and I think we overstate that a lot… somebody else’s success doesn’t need to be your failure if you can ride it. It’s sort of a thing that needs to be talked about more… Like, without Intel, I don’t know if Windows would have happened, right? Without Mac, I wonder whether Office would have happened."

"I’m always looking for, first, what’s the non-zero sum, where we can add value to our customers? Then, of course, there are zero-sum battles, and we’ll compete."

It's clear that the Microsoft CEO is referring to the origins of Windows and Office rather than any kind of ongoing dependence. In the case of Windows, there's a reason "Wintel" was, for a long time, common techy parlance. MS-DOS was made for the first IBM PCs that were running Intel CPUs, and thereafter for quite some time Microsoft's operating systems were the de-facto for home computing, in Intel machines.

The Mac-and-Office link is a little weaker but still pretty strong, because Excel was originally released for Mac computers, and the first version of Word with a GUI was also released for Mac before Windows. This was most likely because the original graphical Mac OS, System 1, was more user-friendly and popular than Microsoft's first graphical follow-up to MS-DOS, Windows 1.0.

Oh how far we've come... I suppose? Take a Windows 11 room temperature reading, and you'll most likely find it lukewarm at best, thanks in part to the all-out AI PC rebranding and redesigns and seemingly perpetual privacy creep. On the former front, that topic and related ones took up the bulk of the Morgan Stanley discussion—surprise, surprise—with a brief respite for this candid admission.

There have recently been some rumours that an AI-laden and "modular" Windows 12 might land this year, too, but this is heavily disputed. Either way, 2026 is seeming increasingly like the year of Linux, and I'm not sure Nadella will be as thankful for that as he is about yesteryear's Intel and Mac. But that's enough snark from me, let's leave a good comment be.

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