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If you sit down to rank the top leaders of big technology companies, Microsoft president Brad Smith would probably not even make your long list of contenders. However, although he is not a well-known name, Smith nevertheless plays a role as crucial as his boss, general manager Satya Nadella, as the world's envoy beyond Redmond.
A lawyer and Microsoft veteran for 26 years, Smith is intimately responsible for the company's relationships with customers, competitors, governments and NGOs. In other words, its role is Microsoft's place in society. And that means it goes far beyond the simple software and services market to encompass everything from fair elections to immigration policy, to the risks of artificial intelligence – topics that raise more and more important questions without obvious answers.
Now Smith has turned his thinking on these issues into a book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age, which he wrote with Microsoft's Director of Communications and External Relations, Carol Ann Browne. By expressing his ideas on paper, he is part of a long tradition Microsoft. In the 1990s, co-founder Bill Gates was twice on the list of bestsellers. The way to go and Business at the speed of thought. And two years ago, Nadella published her own tome that was partly about her efforts to restart Microsoft and partly from where the technology might lead us later.
In 2019, a book on the current and future impact of technology on humanity, which was constantly optimistic, would be deregulated by reality. But Smith's Microsoft experience has allowed him to examine in a measured way the main problems and possible solutions, a task he delights.
"Some people are steeped in technology but may not be immersed in the world of politics," Smith said in a recent conversation. "There are people who are immersed in the world of politics and politics, but they may not be immersed in technology. And most people are not really impregnated either. But these problems concern them. And they count more and more for them.
Bring the feds
Tools and Weapons is full of elements that Smith and Browne have already examined in Microsoft on the stakes, a surprisingly thoughtful business blog that does not just consist of the usual positions that you assume all the big tech companies. And the blog appears in the book, in a discussion of an incident involving a Microsoft contract with the US Department of Immigration and Customs (ICE) of the US Department of Homeland Security. Although the agreement is about a commonplace technology, such as the migration of email and calendar in the cloud, Microsoft's marketing materials have spontaneously evoked the possibility that ICE uses the facial recognition provided by Microsoft.
ICE separating migrant children from their families at the border, it resulted in an uproar over Microsoft's business with the agency, with some employees having asked the company to cancel the contract. This did not happen. But the controversy has pushed society to think about ways to prevent the use of facial recognition for damaging purposes. Smith ended up writing a Microsoft on the stakes post asking governments to regulate technology rather than relying on vendors such as Microsoft to ask what is best. He has since reiterated this position.
In blogging this position, Microsoft was at least slightly ahead of the controversy over facial recognition, which has intensified since then. "I do not think there has been another technology policy issue that has evolved as quickly and as quickly as face recognition in the last 12 months," Smith said. "Because when we published a blog last July, saying that this space would need government laws and regulations, most technology players asked us why we were talking about it. The problem was not on people's radar screen. And even if they did, they did not really see it as a problem that governments or other authorities should solve. "
In the absence of legislation, Microsoft must judge the ethics of the adoption of its technology by the government. For example, Smith revealed that he refused to recognize the face of California police officers, in part because the current algorithms are too vague to identify people who are not white men.
But Microsoft has chosen to judge every use of its technology with extreme precision and has refused to position itself as a global anti-trump force that some of its employees would undoubtedly like. As a result, the company simultaneously stated that it was "dismayed" by ICE's separation of children and continued to provide cloud migration services. Smith also said that Microsoft is looking forward to any opportunity to work with the Trump administration on cybersecurity measures.
According to Smith, regardless of the government entity, the philosophy of society is: "We will associate as much as we can and we will distinguish ourselves where we should. . . And it would be a mistake to refuse to associate on an issue such as cybersecurity, because we are not in agreement on a matter such as immigration. This is not a specific position of Trump: he points out that Microsoft has four times sued the Obama administration for government-related data requests for customer data.
The Nadella factor
Smith joined Microsoft in 1993, a year after Nadella, and spent 13 years as general counsel before becoming president. But almost every event he discusses in Tools and Weapons date from the time since Nadella became CEO in 2014, with the exception of Edward Snowden's leak of classified documents NSA in 2013, an act that Smith calls "a political earthquake". The book is therefore a chronicle of the Nadella era, in which Microsoft has become the world's most valuable society, while getting rid of its traditional lightness.
Nadella's emotional sensitivity has helped Microsoft find its way in difficult times, Smith said, "Leading a technology company at the end of this decade is completely different, culturally, from what a company's management was. early in this decade. The expectations of people, especially those of a new generation of employees, are very different. And that calls for new approaches and different leadership styles. He adds that Nadella is "of an almost unique openness and then deeply principled, in terms of her own leadership style".
Which is not to say that Microsoft thinks that leadership is always about making employees happy. In 2018, after employees protested a contract between Google and the company providing artificial intelligence services to the US military, it decided to let the agreement expire rather than renew it. Tools and Weapons mention this, among many references to other giants of technology and how they struggle with some of the same issues as Microsoft. But the book also explains why Microsoft, faced with its own internal uprising against defense contracts, chose not to reverse its course.
Although the dissident employees did not convince the leaders of Microsoft, Mr. Smith stressed that they had always played a constructive role in the thinking of the company. "In fact, it's more difficult to ask the right questions than to have the right answers," he says. "And so, if a group of employees has answers that you think are false, do not neglect the possibility that they nevertheless ask the right questions."
Look back and forth
For a book that sometimes has a topical character, Smith states that his co-author, Browne, had to scramble to get the latest details regarding topics such as the shooting of the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand in their final project …Tools and Weapons takes an unexpected long view. In an industry that sometimes seems to have trouble remembering the lessons of five or ten years ago, coauthors sometimes go back centuries looking for a context for modern problems, numbers such as Olga Kistler-Ritso, Louisan Mamer, Zellmer Pettet, Theodore Vail and John Wilkes – all you can Bing if their name does not ring like a bell.
Smith says he and co-author Browne love the story. They share this passion with Nadella, who often turns to the past to help chart the future of Microsoft. Once, while Smith and Nadella discussed the role of artificial intelligence in weapons, Smith referred to the lessons of the Civil War. Nadella, he says, has increased it a bit by referring to Cicero. And then, after further reflection, Nadella sent Smith an email that would take the conversation further back into Ancient India.
Related: In Microsoft's plan to fix the broken electoral system in America
For Smith, this dialogue was not limited to two geniuses of history. "I think that reflects part of the way we try at least in Microsoft to think about these things and the way we try to play our roles, which is really a broad perspective," he says.
Although Tools and Weapons This is a personal project of Smith and Browne rather than an official manifesto of Microsoft. Smith's role in guiding Microsoft's philosophy is so central that there is not much light between his take and that of the society he helps to lead. And indeed, when I asked him if he was personally optimistic that the technology industry would solve the biggest problems today, he started to speak for himself and ended up speaking for Microsoft.
"Usually, I come to the conclusion that being optimistic or pessimistic does not really matter," he told me. "Because your optimism or your pessimism is not going to change what's going on alone. What really matters is whether you are determined and persevering. And we are both. Microsoft is perhaps no longer the appalling bully that many have perceived as though it was at the time when the tech sector revolved around Windows, but it still pursues its goals with enthusiasm and patience. – and it will take a lot of things. each of them continuing to meet the challenges that Smith and Browne explore in their book.
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