"I would say Sachin from yesterday and Virat today," Nadella told Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, here on Tuesday when asked about his favourite cricketer.
"I would prefer coding for cricket. I met Anil Kumble yesterday. He has a startup where cricket bats are equipped with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. Coding is one thing that I would say is a malleable, changeable resource for a great future," Nadella told the gathering at Microsoft's 'Young Innovators' Summit' in the capital.
"The thing really inspires me is that how coding needs to become such a core skill, irrespective of whether you are in computer science or you're in medicine or even history because there's AI in literature," he said.
"I always think of coding is like poetry, it's just compact expression. So I think coding can inspire you, in both liberal arts as well as in the sciences, to really make a difference," Nadella added.
Earlier, Nadella highlighted two key trends that will define the compute fabric needed in the future. There will be 50 billion connected devices by 2030, which will be the endpoints. On the other hand, by 2025 data generation will quadruple to 175 ZB.
"You put those things together and you think about the computing fabric you need, and that's what Azure is motivated by. We're building out this distributed computing fabric as the world's computer. We're building out Azure as the world's computer," Nadella said in Bengaluru on Tuesday.