Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hinted during a meeting with journalists at company headquarters on Monday that it’s working on a new bundle of software for consumers. The remark appears to be Nadella’s response to a question regarding Microsoft’s plans to serve consumers in the near future.
Microsoft is reportedly focusing less on Windows for smartphones, and more on selling Office subscriptions, in addition to renting out the Azure public cloud to meet businesses’ computing needs. However, Nadella made it quite clear at the Monday event that it, of course still cares for its consumers. And because of this, a new software package is part of that, CNBC reports.
“It’s very fair to say, as I said in the very beginning, that we started after all on the consumer side and then over-indexed to the IT side, and we definitely are very focused on bringing that back,” Nadella said.
Nadella continued, referencing Microsoft’s collection of Surface devices as an example. “Surface is doing well because ultimately people do have a special connection with the device they use,” he said. The company’s Surface revenue totaled $4.7 billion in the most recent fiscal year, amounting to nearly four percent of total revenue.
“We have all kinds of strategic flexibility to do things that would perhaps be more amenable to both the end users as well as the advertisers and publishers, so we expect to do things even in that space,” Nadella said.
He even hinted at the potential of a Microsoft 365 collection of products for consumers, but he cut himself off when it came to what it might include, when it will be available and the price. “So I would say Surface is a brand, what we are doing with Office 365 or what we will soon be talking about as Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions, those would be again completely consumer businesses,” Nadella said.
CNBC reports that gaming is also a possibility within the package, as Nadella mentioned this during the Monday event. Microsoft currently has a subscription business called Game Pass, meanwhile its preparing a service for streaming games from the cloud.
“We have a structural position in that we have both a console business as well as a PC business which happens to be in fact bigger than the console business when it comes to gaming, and the idea is to aggregate those sockets with a subscription service,” Nadella said. “We won’t be the only ones, there will be competition just like with other content, there may be a few subscriptions that will be successful, so we are going to go after it.”