I’ll never forget the day I was handed Microsoft’s entire publishing portfolio and a monumental request: get the world’s largest publishers—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more—to build dedicated apps for Windows 8. The Windows 8 App Store was a brand-new platform with limited users and low engagement. Quite frankly, it was a tough sell for these news giants who could already reach audiences via their own websites. As I quickly realized, this challenge would demand something more than standard sales tactics—it would require a level of creative collaboration that spanned all corners of Microsoft.

A New Approach: From Vendors to Partners

In those early days, publishers viewed Microsoft as a collection of isolated vendors—think Office here, advertising there, scattered licensing deals—and none of that pointed to a compelling reason to invest in a Windows 8 app. But Satya’s fresh One Microsoft mandate gave us a powerful umbrella under which to unify. For the first time, every part of the company that interacted with publishers (from Azure to advertising to Xbox) came together around a shared goal: how do we help publishers thrive in the new digital era?

To that end, we looked for win-wins. We offered co-marketing opportunities that let publishers tap into Microsoft’s considerable global reach. We drastically improved our advertising products to ensure our partners had new avenues to monetize their content effectively. Then we elevated these conversations to the highest levels of both organizations. Suddenly, it wasn’t just our sales team talking to their ad team; we had c-suite alignment on both sides, discussing how to reshape digital reading experiences for a broader audience.

Game-Changing Wins and Early ML Innovations

One of our proudest achievements came with The New York Times Crossword—a flagship experience that launched alongside the Surface. Imagine walking into a Best Buy and seeing the Surface demonstration revolve around an iconic crossword puzzle—this instantly highlighted the potential of a Windows 8 app. It showed how we could innovate together in ways that went beyond the old, transactional relationships. In parallel, we discovered groundbreaking ways to use machine learning to help publishers deliver the right content to the right user at the right time. My first foray into ML, Multi-World Testing, became one of Microsoft’s earliest ML products and was pilot-tested with these very partners.

The results? We blew our revenue and strategic partnership targets out of the water. Far more importantly, we proved to the biggest names in news that Windows 8, despite being an unproven platform, held real promise and genuine opportunity—enough to justify building dedicated apps. Within a year, every major publisher was on Windows 8. It was a total transformation of our relationship: from a loose collection of vendor contracts to a genuine strategic alliance. And while Windows 8 has become a chapter in Microsoft’s evolving story, the lessons from that experience—unifying under One Microsoft, focusing on true partnership, and innovating fearlessly—remain the guiding principles of how we continue to build, grow, and collaborate today.