Corporate doublespeak or inspiration?

Maybe I've been out of the corporate world for too long. And I do wish Microsoft well because Google and Facebook and others need competition so they don't totally ruin our world. So I read with interest Satya Nadella's email to employees which is available for all to read.

The first thing that caught my eye is this abuse of logic and English: "We live in a mobile-first and cloud-first world…." This phrase is all over the place. Do you see the problem? [Maybe I am too nerdy in my parsing of English.

The second thing I caught my eye was that the salutation is "Team," Microsoft has around 130,000 employees. I guess that's a pretty big team. But also, I may be wrong about this. But all the examples (2) of emails from Bill Gates to all employees didn't have any salutation. Hmm. I think the first time I saw that salutation was in emails from Steve Jobs to Apple Employees.

Final annoying nit picking point from the Natella email: "At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more." Hmm, that singular focus looks like a 2×2 matrix, so there are four most important things.

I know that a document like this that will be released to the universe past, present and future, is a heavily choreographed piece with many authors. I always had a hard time with corporate mission statements and such. And if I received this as a way to get me excited and feeling that there was renewed focus in the company. Well, meh.