In Two Sentences, Satya Nadella Explains What Microsoft Will Do Better Than Any Other Tech Company In The World

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella loves poetry, loves words. Ask him about Microsoft's future, and you'll get an earful, such as his 3,187-word manifesto memo to employees in July.

But that earful often comes across as a convoluted message about cloud computing, Windows, Office, other platforms, a "data culture" and something about "reinventing productivity."

Come again?

In an interview with Vanity Fair's Bethany McLean, Nadella, flanked by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, has boiled all of that down to two fairly digestible sentences:

"... what is scarce in all of this abundance is human attention. And whoever does the best job of building the right software experiences to give both organizations and individuals time back so that they can get more out of their time, that's the core of this company - that's the soul."

So, Nadella wants to move Microsoft away from yesteryear's operating system wars (Windows versus Macs, iOS or Android). He wants Microsoft to make software that runs on all of them and helps us automate things to get more stuff done, somewhat like the operating systems in the movie "Her."

Nadella and Gates imagine a piece of software for having meetings. Walk into the room, and the devices use their cameras to recognize you and log you in. Whether people in the meeting use smartphones, PCs, tablets, or videoconferencing units, everything that needs to be done, from sharing notes to scheduling followup meetings, can be done by a single app, shared across all devices, all operating systems.

"That's a very cool thing, and it does kind of trump what's come before," Gates says.