On Thursday, February 4, Satya Nadella will celebrate his second anniversary as the CEO of Microsoft.

It's been an eventful couple of years.

Microsoft has grown its crucial cloud business, released Windows 10 to a much better reception than its loathed predecessor, launched a bunch of great apps for iPhone and Android, and generally made people like it a lot more.

But the real victory of Satya Nadella — the truly monumental shift — has been within the company. Under Nadella, Microsoft is pointed in one direction for first time in modern memory.

"There is something only a CEO uniquely can do, which is set that tone, which can then capture the soul of the collective. And it's culture," Nadella said in an interview late last year.

One Microsoft

The Microsoft of old was a cutthroat kind of place.

Under Steve Ballmer, Microsoft had become a place where product groups warred with each other for attention and influence, even as products like Windows 8 saw the company's star wane rapidly.

Extremely promising and future-looking products were killed just because they didn't help the Windows business, seen as the center of the company, while rising competitors like Apple and Google were either mocked or ignored until it was too late.

The end result was a lot of warring, independent product groups, all doing their own things. A great example is the Microsoft Xbox video-game console, which started off as a project to improve Windows and get a PC in the living room, but which turned into an autonomous part of the company that Wall Street couldn't make heads or tails of.

That trickled over into the company's popular perception, as Microsoft customers and developers came to think of it as a company focused on strong-arm sales tactics, not innovation.

"When I came over here, it was just a disaster," Microsoft Technical Fellow John Shewchuk, head of the company's developer-experience team since 2013, told Business Insider.

Steve Ballmer recognized the problem. In July 2013, he announced a company-wide reorganization called "One Microsoft," in an attempt to rally the company and get employees focused on turning the company around. But it was too little, too late, and Ballmer, under pressure from the board, announced his resignation less than three months later.

Taking off the blinders

This is where the real genius of Satya Nadella comes in — and you can see it reflected in conversations with the company's highest echelons.

Microsoft's mandate, under Nadella, is to help people "achieve more," if you buy the corporate-speak. In plainer terms, Nadella likes to make sure that Microsoft is focusing on making things that people actually enjoy using, no matter what kind of device they're using it on.

"Revenue is a lagging indicator, usage is a leading indicator," Nadella likes to say, according to Microsoft CVP Brad Anderson.

And the company's executives and developers all love it. Without having to worry about worshipping at the altar of Windows, it can do all kinds of stuff it could never even consider before.

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"A muscle we're developing at Microsoft is determining the soul or essence of these products, and developing accordingly," Microsoft Corporate VP of Outlook Javier Soltero, who came to Microsoft in the acquisition of startup Acompli, told us.

A great example: The Microsoft Azure cloud-computing platform now supports Linux, the free operating system that developers love, but Ballmer once referred to as "a cancer" and "communism."

"Part of the new Microsoft is being given the permission to meet customers where they're at," Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told us in 2015. "We're no longer bound by an arbitrary rule."

It's touched Microsoft Office, too. Under Nadella, Office has expanded from a set of document-editing tools into a whole range of products and services that people actually enjoy using, from Microsoft Outlook on the iPhone to the funky futuristic GigJam work-sharing app.