Microsoft
includes Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Bing, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Bob, Microsoft HoloLens and 26 more
116 statements across 87 episodes · 34 bullish · 35 bearish · 55 people on the record · first statement Jul 15, 2017 by Benedict Evans · said 1,583 times in 332 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Steven Sinofsky (305), Benedict Evans (279), Marc Andreessen (73), Chris Dixon (67), Alex Rampell (60), Michael Copeland (42), Ben Horowitz (36), Martin Casado (35)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 142 mentions in 31 episodes 5 per episode
- The Economics of AI Usage and What's Next For SaaS | Benedict Evans on a16z
- Software in the Age of Agents | The a16z Show
- How Cursor Built One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies
- Garry Tan: New Rules for Founders
- How AI Changes the Economics of Innovation
- Why AI Demand Is Outrunning Compute Supply
- Atlassian CEO on the SaaS Apocalypse, AI Agents & What Comes Next
- Box CEO on the AI Adoption Gap | The a16z Show
- 23 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 340 mentions in 58 episodes 6 per episode
- Former Microsoft Executive on Apple’s Hidden China Problem
- Keith Rabois: Israel, OpenAI, Opendoor, and DOGE
- Steven Sinofsky & Balaji Srinivasan on the Future of M&A, AI & Tech
- Why AI Moats Still Matter (And How They've Changed)
- Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a $100 Billion Business
- AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on the Next Platform Shift
- Software Finally Eats Services - Aaron Levie
- Aaron Levie and Steven Sinofsky on the AI-Worker Future
- 50 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 72 mentions in 23 episodes 3 per episode
- Marc Andreessen on Inventing The Internet Browser (How We all Access the Internet)
- Politics & the Future of Tech
- Future of Crypto, Blockchain & Web3 w/ Chris Dixon
- Build Your Startup With AI
- Marty Chavez (Sixth Street): Finding a Single Source of AI Truth
- AI, Robotics & the Future of Manufacturing
- Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities
- Building a $20B+ Open Source Business with MongoDB and Viam's Eliot Horowitz
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 55 mentions in 17 episodes 3 per episode
- AI Copilots and the Future of Knowledge Work with Microsoft's Kevin Scott
- Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
- AI Will Save The World with Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado
- Unlocking Creativity with Prompt Engineering
- The Rise of the Exponential Organization with Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail
- The 1000x Developer with Amjad Masad
- 2024 Big Ideas: AI-First Games That Never End with Jonathan Lai
- AI Food Fights in the Enterprise with Databricks' Ali Ghodsi
- 9 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 17 mentions in 3 episodes 6 per episode
2019 859 mentions in 168 episodes 5 per episode
- Clippy: The Unauthorized Biography
- a16z Podcast | So Where Are We on the 'S-curve' for PC Devices?
- a16z Podcast | Finally a Tablet that Replaces Your Laptop
- a16z Podcast | The $200 PC in the Enterprise
- a16z Podcast | Engineering a Revolution at Work
- a16z Podcast | Nobody Discusses Work Software Outside of Work -- and Then There’s Slack
- a16z Podcast | The Year Mobile Began to Truly Dominate Tech
- a16z Podcast | A Copernican Update ... In Tech, the Smartphone is the Center
- 160 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 38 mentions in 9 episodes 4 per episode
- 10 Years Too Early: On a Tech Career, Business, and Investing
- Crypto and Decentralization: Building Blocks
- Going to Market When No Market Exists
- An Intro to Crypto: Decentralization, the Big Picture
- The Oral History of TrialPay -- Obstacles and Opportunities in Payments
- When Software Eats the Real (Estate) World
- Distribution, Channel & Partnerships
- The World Through an API
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 50 mentions in 17 episodes 3 per episode
Everything said about Microsoft, oldest first
Jul 15, 2017 bearish
Evans: Microsoft's share of connected computing devices fell below 25%
“The other company that's been affected here, of course, is Microsoft, which has gone from selling the vast majority of connected computing devices to under a quarter, simply because there are so many more phones out there than there are PCs.”
Jul 15, 2017 bearish
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Microsoft adopted Chris Ré's Hogwild algorithm for its Project Atom
“A while ago, last year, Microsoft released their Project Atom, and they had a great demo where they were showing they were releasing, you know, recognizing Shih Tzus with Windows phones. Using deep learning. And the reason I will love Microsoft forever is the …”
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 16, 2017 negative
Horowitz: Microsoft beat Google in cloud productivity due to enterprise culture
“Google, like had, they built Google Apps, like what, like five years before Microsoft really got going with Office three 65, and Microsoft ran right by them. Why? Because there was no enterprise culture in Google, none.”
Jul 16, 2017 positive
Jul 28, 2017 negative
Dec 5, 2017 neutral
Evans: Dominant Tech Giants Always Look Invulnerable Right Before They Fall
“The winners always look invulnerable until they don't. So, IBM looked invulnerable, then Microsoft, Intel, Nokia did, then the internet giants of the last bubble, now Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon look invulnerable, but all the previous ones fell, and it was…”
Jul 15, 2018 negative
Oct 26, 2018 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Levie: Building custom data centers loses value versus buying cloud compute
“You're probably better off letting Amazon, Microsoft, Google all compete for your dollars than you going and building them out yourself, and then by the time you deploy them, Moore's Law cycle, another Moore's Law cycle has already occurred, and you've lost, y…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Sinofsky: Non-tech firms cannot compete with tech giants on security
“It also allows IT to focus much less on the deployment and management and scale and reliability and security, which of course, the idea of competing with, you know, the Googles and the Amazons and the Microsofts on security, if you're, you know, an appliance m…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Google is the new Microsoft in its universal computing platform ambition
“I think there's a macro point here that Google is the new Microsoft, and this is the thing that came out really strongly last year, and indeed this year, is the sort of self-confidence and the ambition to do absolutely everything to become the global computing…”
Jan 2, 2019
Reichert: Governments Cannot Abandon Tech Laggards Like Private Corporations Do
“And unlike a corporation, you can't fire those as customers, right? You know, the people are still on Windows XP. You know, they want to upgrade, and Microsoft eventually says, you know what? You can't upgrade anymore. You got to move on. You can't do that if …”
Jan 2, 2019
Thiel: Easy success or early failure teaches founders the wrong lessons
“Most of the time people are either in companies that fail, and then the lesson you learn is that it's impossible to build a great company, and so the next time around you try for something that's less ambitious, and so And then you certainly will not build a g…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Thiel: Legacy tech giants like Microsoft and Oracle bet against innovation
“There's a whole set of companies in the Nasdaq 100 that are actually bets against technological innovation. So Microsoft is a bet that there will never be anything like Linux. It's a bet that there will be that the operating system won't shift to mobile platfo…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Stamos: Backward compatibility neutralized Microsoft's $1 billion security investment
“It's the reason why Microsoft has spent probably a billion dollars on security in the last decade, and they still haven't gone anywhere. It's because they're not willing to do a tax service minimization due to the way they do backwards compatibility.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Dixon: A16z viewed Microsoft as Oculus's top competitor during investment diligence
“Cause when we invested in Oculus, whatever it was a year and a half ago, we did, you know, we were sort of analyzing the competitors and had heard a bunch of rumors about that, but had heard it was a gaming and heard it was very good by the way. Like the best …”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Apple outsold Microsoft-Nokia's total handset volume in Q4 2014
“Apple sold more phones than Nokia. I mean, the Nokia, you know, this is still Microsoft, because Nokia did, Nokia Microsoft did ten million numis and forty million feature phones. Right. Apple did seventy-five million smartphones.”
Jan 2, 2019
Zetter: Microsoft uses civil lawsuits to dismantle botnets and malicious IP infrastructure
“We've seen this a couple of times with Microsoft, where they've gone to, ah, they filed a civil action court in order to get certain IP addresses or hosting companies taken down in order to control botnets and other malicious activities that's sort of, ah, con…”
Jan 2, 2019
Chris Dixon: Tech strategy shifted from Microsoft's horizontal model to Apple's vertical
“I think there used to be the more, I think in the business theory world, A stronger belief in kind of core competency. And that people, you know, it was sort of the, it was the Microsoft model as opposed to the Apple model, right? It was like, let me do one th…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Boneh: Big tech security teams possess the authority to delay product launches
“In big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google security teams in fact are involved in the process from the design phase, which is really important. And then if a product is about to ship out and a security, the security team discovers a big vulnerability, they…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Tanium uncovered hundreds of unused SQL Server licenses during a pilot
“We could also show them that they had hundreds of copies of SQL Server that were installed that they weren't using, that they were paying for. Hundreds of copies of SQL Server is hundreds of thousands of dollars a year of spend. And they started really delving…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
The Mobile Device Management market is broken due to OS vendors
“The answer for you is that MDM, at least in my estimation, is a pretty broken market today, and the reason it's broken is the vendors of the platforms that provide, you know, Google, Microsoft, Apple, really Apple is kind of the real, real offender here. They …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Apple undershot its enterprise market potential by 100x
“If you look at Apple's products and their product position, and you look at their success in the enterprise versus say Microsoft which is selling competing products, you would, I would argue Apple's undershot their potential with the products they have by prob…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Unicode Voting Power Concentrated Among US Tech Giants, SAP, and Oman
“No, so of those 12, so of those 12, nine are U.S. Multinational tech companies. Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Symantec. Then of the other three full voting members, one is the German software company SAP, another is the Chinese te…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Rampell: EU regulatory hostility toward US tech giants is driven by jealousy
“I think the EU is very jealous that Google's not a European company. I think they're jealous that Apple's not a European, like, Google is bad in Europe. In my personal opinion, I don't think they're nearly the monopolist that Microsoft was like in the late nin…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Schuler: Aside from tech giants, major corporations lack an AI strategy
“Pretty much everyone has missed the boat on an AI strat, like everybody. There's a handful of companies, Google, Microsoft, Facebook that are doing it, but Everybody, I mean, I talk to companies with 15, twenty billion in revenue, they go, we don't have an AI …”
Jan 2, 2019
Microsoft search logs revealed unreported side effects of combining common drugs
“In a collaboration with Microsoft, we looked at what people who were on, well, we don't know if they were on these drugs. We just looked at search logs and said, how often do people type in these two drugs and words that might be associated with the symptoms o…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jensen Harris: Startups beat Google and Microsoft on tailored security policies
“A huge advantage that a startup has that some big company trying to do the same thing doesn't have, which is we can tailor our security policies, tailor the way that we handle the data, the way that we sanitize the data, and the way that we use the data in a v…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Harris: Negotiating mobile privacy standards with tech platforms avoided regulation
“Over the course of six months, we worked out, I think, an all too rare example of government and industry coming together to solve a problem. Short of regulation or litigation or legislation. And what we did is we came up with an understanding that would, that…”
Jan 2, 2019
Ehrsam: Only two top 50 websites were created by pre-internet companies
“One thing I think is really interesting to look at is the top 50 sites on the internet today. Guess how many of them were made by companies that existed before the internet was popularized? It's two. MSN.com and Microsoft.com, both by Microsoft. Every other si…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Forsgren: Only one-third of well-designed Microsoft features deliver customer value
“Even companies like Microsoft, where they are very good at understanding what their customer base looks like. They have a very mature product line. Ronnie Kahavi has done studies there, and only about one third of the well-designed features deliver value.”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: PC makers commoditized while Microsoft and Intel captured industry profits
“Apple did not win PCs. So you can all talk about whether Apple disrupted IBM, but Apple didn't actually get the benefit from that. Not in, and in fact, PC companies didn't really get the benefit from that. PC companies became low margin commodity companies, an…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Apr 27, 2019
Apr 27, 2019
Apr 27, 2019
Apr 27, 2019 positive
Apr 27, 2019 neutral
Microsoft used costume actors and Flash animations to publicly retire Clippy
“Lisa Gurry on the office marketing team, like, had this, like, let's really go crazy. Yeah. And, like, actually, Like, have a retirement party, and so we went, we flew down to San Francisco, we met with the press to tell them this, and then at one point we jus…”
Apr 27, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Clippy had only ~30 animations due to floppy disk space constraints
“Plus we could only have like, you know, 30 different little animations, like types of things like here's waving or smiling or looking, thinking or whatever. And each one can only have a few frames. Right. Because we had to fit on the floppies.”
Apr 27, 2019
Apr 27, 2019
Jan 16, 2020 positive
Jan 16, 2020 positive
Jan 16, 2020 positive
Shum: Microsoft AI surpassed human transcribers with 5.1% error rate
“In speech, ah, there's this very standard dataset called the switchboard dataset that is really recording of two, ah, from two sides and, ah, phone conversations. Ah, two years ago, we accomplished the 5.1% of the error rate. Ah, that is really, really, ah, am…”
Feb 20, 2020
Jul 27, 2023 positive
Sep 25, 2023 positive
Sep 25, 2023 bullish
Sep 25, 2023
Dec 16, 2023
Feb 28, 2024 negative
Mar 5, 2024
Mar 11, 2024 negative
Mar 18, 2024 positive
Apr 2, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Big Tech's startup cloud deals involve illegal roundtripping accounting
“The big tech companies have done this thing which we thought was illegal because we observed it occur at AOL and people went to jail, but what they've done is they invest in startups, you know, huge amounts of money. Microsoft and Amazon and Google are all doi…”
Apr 2, 2024 negative
Apr 30, 2024 negative
Holding LLM creators liable is like holding Microsoft liable for Windows misuse
“Let's make the LLM creators liable for every bad thing that happens with an LLM. To me, that is the exact equivalent of saying, let's make Microsoft Liable for every bad thing that someone does on a Windows computer, right? They're fully general, and so these …”
May 9, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Google and Microsoft use safety rhetoric to lobby against open-source AI
“And they do it like the really kind of nasty thing is they claim, oh, it's for safety. You know, we've created an alien that we can't control, but we're not going to stop working on it. We're going to keep building it as fast as we can. And we're going to buy …”
May 9, 2024 positive
Andreessen: Microsoft's Phi model competes with larger LLMs using curated data
“Microsoft released their five small language model yesterday, and apparently, apparently it's like, it's competitive. It's a very small model competitive with much larger models. And the big thing they say that they did was they basically optimized the trainin…”
Jun 28, 2024
Horowitz: Delayed browser creation would have enabled proprietary network monopolies
“If you had not had the idea when you had it, The internet as we know it probably doesn't happen in that the kind of Microsoft alternative, the Oracle alternative would have had an opportunity to gain a network effect. And so the chance of all this getting buil…”
Jun 28, 2024 neutral
Andreessen: Original Internet Explorer was relabeled Spyglass Mosaic code
“Microsoft had the press conference where they originally announced Internet Explorer, their browser, which was Spyglass Mosaic, again, our code relabeled and there's a famous, famous moment where the Microsoft guys are on stage and they're, and then they do th…”
Jun 28, 2024 neutral
Andreessen: Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic for a $1 million flat fee
“Spyglass gets this call from Microsoft and so the Microsoft guys call Spyglass, and they're like, yeah, we want to license Spyglass Mosaic so we can build it into Windows, and the Spyglass guys say, you know, yeah, that sounds great, you know, basically how mu…”
Dec 9, 2024 bullish
Feb 6, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 bullish
Jun 18, 2025 positive
Jun 18, 2025 negative
Jul 16, 2025 neutral
Aug 5, 2025 negative
Andreessen: Seattle tech executives elected a candidate wanting to nationalize Amazon
“Seattle, to give you a sense how crazy things are, the district in Seattle, the city council district where the most Microsoft and Amazon executives lived, live, elected a city council woman who's, who ran a platform of nationalizing Microsoft and Amazon.”
Aug 8, 2025 negative
Srinivasan: Tech platforms face market constraints, but Washington DC is a monopoly
“See the thing is these platforms are at least competing with other platforms, and if Apple or Microsoft or Google makes too bad decision, Then the people on those platforms have exit, they have choice, they can move between platforms, so there's ultimately a m…”
Aug 18, 2025 bearish
Patel: Microsoft's custom AI silicon lags behind Amazon, Google, and Meta
“Microsoft, their custom silicon kind of sucks but the other three, they're really upping their orders massively over the last year. You know, Amazon is making millions of Tranium. Google's making millions of TPUs. TPUs clearly are like a hundred percent utiliz…”
Aug 22, 2025 positive
Casado: Early AI coding tools reached $400M to $600M in ARR
“The first kind of monetized AI app was code, right? It was Copilot, and so Microsoft had invested a ton of money and matured the market with Copilot, with VS Code, and so everybody knew it. It's just, like, the models weren't quite ready then, and so you had, …”
Sep 24, 2025
Oct 15, 2025
Horowitz: Big company partnerships fail without massive financial commitments
“Look, you got to get them to put enough, they're such a big company that they're going to lose interest many times. So if you don't have them write you such a big check that somebody in there is going to get fired if it doesn't go well, you're, it doesn't matt…”
Oct 16, 2025 bearish
Oct 16, 2025 neutral
Oct 20, 2025
Hoffman: Microsoft's long-term AI agent experiments get trapped in polite loops
“So Microsoft has had running for years now, agents talking to each other long form, like, just like, let's go for a year and do that and see what happens. And so often they get into like, oh, thank you. No, thank you. No, thank you. One month later. Thank you.…”
Oct 30, 2025 bullish
Nov 10, 2025 bearish
Nov 24, 2025
Epoch AI: Microsoft's Mount Pleasant data center will consume half NYC's power
“The one we found that's actually seriously underway and has permits and is, you know, setting up the electrical infrastructure for is one by Microsoft, which is going to be used by OpenAI, at least in part in Mount Pleasant. They're calling it Microsoft Fairwa…”
Jan 26, 2026 positive
May 29, 2026 bullish
Jun 8, 2026
Jun 8, 2026
Jul 3, 2026 negative
Horowitz: Microsoft created cyber theft opportunities by deploying Windows online prematurely
“When it went from vandalism to theft, the vandalism company, Microsoft, is one who created all the theft opportunities By putting windows on the internet when it wasn't ready to be on the internet because it wasn't built for that kind of idea.”
Aug 11, 2026 bearish
Garry Tan: AI startups will not replace incumbent giants like Microsoft
“There are real motes to these things. Like, there are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere. And then, I guess, This is sort of a little antithetical to what most, you know, most people in Silicon Valley would say, like, I want to start up to…”
Aug 11, 2026 negative
Tan: Turning down early Palantir offer was a $2B to $4B mistake
“Peter said, I'm so sure this is the right thing for you. Like, here's a check for 70 grand. That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time. And I said, thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year. Which I did, but I think …”
Aug 11, 2026 bullish
Tan: Startups use AI to compress six-month product releases into days
“Like you could release something in a day or two that would have taken like six months. And if you could like multiply that out across, like the thing is like probably an org like Microsoft can't. But, like, a startup can. And every startup must.”
Aug 25, 2026 bullish
Casado: AI gives startups competitive footing with incumbents by solving distribution
“And like, what's crazy is AI, A, solves the distribution problem. It just solves the demand problem. And B, these companies are able to raise so much money that they're actually on competitive footing with like the Microsofts and the medicine and the Microsoft…”
Aug 25, 2026 neutral
Aug 27, 2026 bullish
Casado: Cursor navigated Microsoft/Anthropic competition and M&A in two years
“I mean, imagine like starting competing with Microsoft, ending, ending up competing with say, Anthropic, you know, both of these kind of, you know, mega companies with tremendous amount of capital and power and distribution. In the meantime, you evolve like fu…”
Aug 31, 2026 negative
Microsoft Failed to Build Competitive In-House Frontier AI Models
“They clearly tried to make a frontier model. They failed. You know, Satya said, we're gonna have our own models that are very competitive. Like, I think he said that 18 months ago. They don't have their own models that are competitive.”