“I always make this case, which is if it was not for Microsoft’s openness, the web wouldn’t have happened. I was talking to [web creator Sir] Tim Berners-Lee yesterday and I sort of said: ‘Think about the current ecosystems and how closed and how walled gardened and riddled with all kinds of ways they’ve rigged it, [compared] to where we were.’

“Every company will need to go through and ask itself: ‘Are you creating surplus around you or are you extracting surplus for yourself’. When that equation gets unbalanced I think things just have to correct.”

When pressed on whether tech giants like Facebook and Google have too much power, Nadella insists it is not his job to remark on others. “The people whose job it is to think about who is creating what value, is there value creation or value extraction, is there something that is creating more competition or less competition, is I think the job of others to opine.”

Nadella recently described privacy as a “human right”, a well-timed remark as sweeping new privacy rules come into force in Europe. He describes the GDPR as “robust” and creating “the right value around how users should think”.

The current debate around privacy also gives him a chance to burnish Microsoft’s own privacy credentials. Unlike Google or Facebook, its services are paid for directly.

“Our business model is based on our customers being successful, and if they are successful they will pay us. So we are not one of these transaction-driven or ad-driven or marketplace-driven economies.

“I don’t think I am necessarily saying one business model is better than the other but I do believe right now Microsoft is probably on the right side of history.”

Nadella says many smaller businesses are confused over whether large technology companies are out to help or destroy them. Millions of companies and start-ups, for example, rely on Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Web Services, but the wider company often represents an existential threat to many of them.

Although Nadella does not name Amazon, he indicates that the lack of such conflicts helps Microsoft.

“Customers are unclear [about] ‘oh this is somebody I can go to for cloud computing but they are also competing with me, they also have this other system which is essentially a taxation system on all transactions.’