We missed…the biggest business model on the web: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Microsoft chief executive officer (CEO) Satya Nadella reflected on a missed opportunity, saying the company failed to recognise “the biggest business model on the web,” which Google successfully leveraged – search engines.

“Who would have thought that search would be the biggest winner in organising the web?” remarked Nadella remarked a podcast with Indian YouTuber Dwarkesh Patel.

Reminiscing, he acknowledged that it was an opportunity Microsoft overlooked, while Google recognised and executed it effectively.


“So that's one lesson learned for me: you have to not only get the tech trend right, you also have to get where the value is going to be created with that trend. These business model shifts are probably tougher than even the tech trend changes,” Nadella noted.

Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough

Nadella and Patel also discussed Microsoft’s latest achievement—Majorana 1—the world’s first quantum processor built on topoconductor rather than semiconductor. Nadella described it as the “transistor moment” of quantum computing.

“All the world’s current computers operating together can’t do what a one-million-qubit quantum computer will be able to do,” the company claimed.

“To think that we are able to build something like a million-qubit quantum computer in a thing of this size is just unbelievable. That’s the crux of it: unless and until we could do that, we can’t dream of building a utility-scale quantum computer,” he said.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk praised Microsoft’s breakthrough in a post on X, saying, “More and more breakthroughs with quantum computing….”