Microsoft’s C.E.O., Satya Nadella, espouses a philosophy that is, in many ways, the opposite of the old Microsoft.

This morning, at Moynihan Station, in midtown Manhattan, the C.E.O. of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, offered a crowd of reporters and fanboys a little nugget of Zen: “As devices come and go, you persist.” Nadella, dressed in dark jeans and a dark T-shirt, was speaking to people who’d been knocked into something of a haze by throbbing AC/DC riffs, by demonstrations designed to evoke sex alongside bezels and pixels, and by the introduction of new Microsoft hardware that the tech press would quickly declare highly satisfactory. Nadella’s proclamation may have sounded like techno-malarkey, but, actually, it signalled a very interesting way that the soft-spoken forty-eight-year-old C.E.O. has changed America’s third-largest company.

Afterward, I wandered up a couple of flights of stairs, through Moynihan Station’s cavernous halls, and sat down with Nadella to ask him what he’d meant by his remark. “The lesson we have learned is that there’s going to be more personal computing in our lives,” he replied. Forms will change, functions will change, devices will change, he explained, and so, “You can’t fall in love with this one thing becoming the hub for all things and for all time to come.”

That philosophy is, in many ways, the opposite of the old Microsoft. The company under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer was a hyper-competitive, cutthroat organization focussed on getting as many people as possible to run Microsoft software on personal computers. The company was so in love with P.C.s (the hub for all things and for all time to come) that it came late to the Internet and much, much too late to mobile phones. Windows used to run on ninety per cent of computing devices; now, with the rise of Android and Apple phones, it runs on eleven per cent.

Nadella, who took over as C.E.O. in February of 2014, is changing the company both strategically and by personal example. His predecessor, Ballmer, was loud, bombastic, and had the look and air of a man angry that his empire was receding. The company’s internal culture was, at times, poisonous. Nadella is quiet and sincere; he seems to have made the culture much friendlier, and he talks about Microsoft as someone might discuss a cause. When I asked him to tell me how he would convince a young Stanford graduate to work for him, he said, “I want you to choose Microsoft because you get a kick out of building things that others can build on and make things out of.”

Nadella had clearly had a good day, and his event had clearly been something of a success. Before the doors opened, reporters lined up around the block, creating a bit of advance buzz. We entered to a dark room, passing through a hallway filled with images of technology doing what advertisements for technology show being done: sonograms in distant lands, prosthetic hands, a beautiful tattooed woman working on something artistic in a loft somewhere.

In the main auditorium, I sat down and started talking to the man in the seat next to me, who seemed closer to the embodiment of the real Microsoft than the fabulous conductors, graffiti artists, and rock climbers who would soon be appearing on screens and on stage. His name is Mike Gerbasio, and he lives in New Jersey and works as a consultant to construction companies. He’s a self-professed hardware geek who’s active in Microsoft Internet forums and was thrilled to get an invite from the company to come to the event. He uses a Surface tablet and a Microsoft Lumia phone. He used to prefer Google products, but he’s now fully on Microsoft because, he said, it makes his job easier. “All the companies I work with use it. Like it or not, Microsoft Office is still king.” His biggest hope for the event was that the company would introduce a Surface Mini. He’d never been much a fan of Apple. “I didn’t like Steve Jobs too much,” he said. “Who would want to work for a prick?”

The program soon began, building up slowly. We learned how many devices are running Windows Ten (lots!) and then we saw HoloLens, Microsoft’s lauded foray into virtual, or mixed, reality. A man stood onstage and battled robots that were projected as holograms onto the device he wore over his eyes, and then shown on screens to the audience. It looked like either a moment of brilliant innovation or a crazed dude having an hallucination. For three thousand dollars, starting early next year, developers will be able to order a set.

The company then introduced an update to its fitness tracker, the Microsoft Band, a curvy device that fits over your wrist and will, among other things, tell you your VO2 max. As a Microsoft employee explained how it’s helping her train for an ultramarathon, Gerbasio leaned over and told me, “I barely leave the couch, but I’ve got one.”

The company then introduced its new Lumia phone line, the most promising remnant of Microsoft’s disastrous acquisition of the Finnish device-maker Nokia, a stink-bomb deal that Ballmer pushed through right before retiring. The phone’s coolest feature is the ability to use it as an actual Windows computer, by tethering it to an external monitor and keyboard. Or, as the presenter said, breathlessly, “These are fully transparent PNGs that I just brought in from a thumb drive powered by my phone into PowerPoint that looks like a desktop, cuz I can be productive like a boss wherever. It’s kind of cool. It’s kind of cool.” The audience cheered wildly. “I’m glad you’re excited,” he said. Later, Nadella pointed out that this function will be particularly useful in the developing world, where many people have phones but not desktops.

Next came the product line that everyone had been waiting for: the Surface. The company’s tablet has been a slightly incongruous success. When it débuted, in 2012, it was lampooned. And the category was lampooned, too: Apple’s iPad had been a huge success in the wake of its launch, in 2010, but sales gradually levelled off and then declined. The Surface seemed like a confusing version of a device that had no future. “It’s not very useful on your lap, unless you like to struggle,” one review read. But then, with the Surface Pro III, released in May of 2014, the product started getting good reviews. Surface sales so far this year are more than double last year’s sales. Just a month ago, Apple paid Microsoft a high compliment by seeming to have copied the device with its new iPad Pro. So how could the company follow this success, the charismatic m.c. of this part of the program, Panos Panay, asked. “What do you do? Do you double down? Do you bring the thunder? Or do you reinvent the category again? I’ll tell you what we chose.”

If you’re choosing between thunder and reinvention, you pick the latter, obviously. But then, we heard the wild guitar picking of Angus Young. Microsoft had apparently decided to bring the thunder, or, at least, to improve the device’s RAM and add a new stylus (which, the company noted, has an eraser, unlike the Apple Pencil). The Surface Pro 4 has the thinnest glass ever shipped on a tablet, Panay declared, and the best pen and touch experience anyone with a tablet has ever felt.