Microsoft

In two thousand and fourteen, Satya Nadella became CEO and made a decision that terrified the board. The company sold licenses to enterprises. Windows and Office generated ninety percent of profit. Nadella wanted to build Azure, a cloud platform to compete against Amazon. Margins would collapse. Only survival logic mattered and he pursued it. The economics inverted slowly. Enterprises paid annually but owned nothing. Cloud customers paid a tenth as much but their entire business now ran on Azure. A company running ten thousand servers had rebuilt operations around Microsoft infrastructure. Migrating meant rebuilding everything from scratch. Nobody migrated. They expanded deeper and spent more every year.