In my opinion, Satya Nadella completely reversed the proprietary software culture of Microsoft, something that definitely needed to be done, and at the same time something that's difficult to achieve. The Office suite of products was nearing the end of its life cycle, and the industry trends, towards mobile, open source software, has accelerated. Microsoft was, in a sense, a victim of its extraordinary success. Excel is the most successful program ever marketed (over 500 million users) but Microsoft seemed to have made many false starts in trying to adapt.
Nadella's purchase of GitHub (and LinkedIn before that), as well as the development of Azure, has turned this lumbering ship around.
Watch this CNBC interview to understand why the GitHub purchase is worth the 8 billion dollars Microsoft paid for it. Just about all cryptocurrency projects, including steem, use GitHub for source control. GitHub will be to information technology what Excel is for businesses in general - all programmers will need to know it.
