Nadella asks his peers to keep an eye on competition around the world

iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-

In a recent interview on Bloomberg, on Wednesday, February 10, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella urged his contemporaries to pay attention to rivals around the world and not just the US, saying more competition is good for the tech world.

“There is no God-given right for US tech companies to take for granted that there cannot be other tech powers,” Nadella said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang.

He added, “All of us in the West Coast of the United States need to be more grounded because sometimes I think we celebrate our own advances far too much.”

Nadella highlighted that how in the last few decades the big techs from Silicon Valley have grown rapidly and crushed their competition, resulting in an unfair hold over the market. And how most of them are under heavy antitrust scrutiny from the US lawmakers.

“You need to have a business model that really is aligned with the world doing well,” Nadella said. “There are certain categories of products where the unintended consequences of the growth on that category or lack of competition creates issues.”

“Unilateral action by individual companies in democracies like ours is just not long-term stable—we do need to be able to have a framework of laws and norms,” Nadella said.

“Depending on any one individual CEO in any one of these companies to make calls that are going to really help us maintain something as sacred and as important as our democracy, in the long run, is just no way that at least I, as a citizen, would advocate for.”

Among the scrutiny that Microsoft’s peers like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google face for antitrust, the company has escaped major scrutiny in the US.

However, it is facing a possible antitrust probe of its own by the European Union. Last July, workplace chat app company Slack filed suit against Microsoft in EU, accusing it of engaging in anticompetitive behavior by linking its Teams chat app to the popular Office 356 suite.

Nadella downplayed Slack’s allegations, telling Bloomberg that Microsoft provides “the most open platform in Windows and even in Office 365.”