It concluded that “companies taking advantage of their data have the potential to raise an additional $1.6 trillion in revenue over companies that don’t,” and Nadella was determined to make landfall on the far shores of this rich new space. Microsoft would reap the advantages of its own data, and it would specialize in “empowering” its clients to do the same. Nadella composed a blog to signal the new direction, writing, “The opportunity we have in this new world is to find a way of catalyzing this data exhaust from ubiquitous computing and converting it into fuel for ambient intelligence.” As a video outlining the new “data vision” explains, “Data that was once untapped is now an asset.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 506