, Bell discussed why he left Amazon, how he met Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and whether he'll ever work on Azure. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.Wind the clock back to January of 2021, Jeff came to us and said,"Hey, I'm going to retire." That was quite a surprise. Andy was pretty surprised. I was surprised. Nobody thought Jeff would do it. He was the company. So I had a moment.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought,"Well, Microsoft might be the place to do it." And the funny part was my wife knew Satya. I said,"Well I don't know if I could do that. Are they a competitor? I don't know. Not in security, certainly." And so my wife said,"You should talk to Satya. Just talk to him and if nothing comes of it, that's OK.
The biggest problem in security is that everything is sort of piecemeal, and that creates opportunities for attackers because they go after each piece one at a time and they find the seams between things and they move around. We call it end-to-end, but you really want everything knit together as one solution. So that's where I spent some time.
One of the things I loved is when I met Satya and then a little later I met Scott Guthrie, who runs Azure — Scott's awesome, by the way. Great. I love the engineers over here — so Scott's an engineer, just like I am, and we start talking … and they were already doing a lot of the same things . One of the things that's interesting, when you have the same kind of problem that you're facing, you're going to come up with the same kinds of mechanisms to deal with it.