View: Microsoft goes vocal for local for big tech

Microsoft chairman Satya Nadella’s statement in an interview to ET that ‘our licence to operate in any country fundamentally exists because we create local surplus’ is an admission of interdependence by the maker of platforms on which enterprises across the world are parking chunks of business. It is in Microsoft’s interest to seek deeper engagement with local businesses to push cloud solutions, which it has done in India through its biggest play in development centres outside the US. The company is building products for the world in India. Nadella also makes the point about the rate of technology diffusion and India having the human capital to accelerate it. All of this is good for business for a company that derives close to half its revenue from Office, its productivity software, and its cloud platform Azure.