Steven Sinofsky
94 statements across 25 episodes · 34 bullish · 23 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jan 2, 2019 by Steven Sinofsky · said 4 times in 3 episodes since 2019 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Steven Sinofsky's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Benedict Evans (2), Martin Casado (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
Everything said about Steven Sinofsky, oldest first
Jan 2, 2019
Sinofsky: Managers should use meetings for action, not receiving status reports
“Like, what your role as a manager is in a meeting is no longer to be reported to, because frankly, if you want to know, you should just go visit the place that everybody on the team is already using to keep track of their information. And when you get everybod…”
Jan 2, 2019
Sinofsky: Companies under 1,000 employees do not use printed meeting materials
“If you think about the average large kind of company meeting, even today, the vast majority of meetings are start off with somebody showing up and passing out like a printed version of a work product. You just don't see that in a company of less than, you know…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Bundled features rarely match standalone apps but prevent churn
“And then one day you have, like, someone else's whole vertical integrated into your product, but it's never as good as the separate one. But it might be good enough to keep your customers from jumping and using another product.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Platform killer apps are only recognized in hindsight and take decades
“Going back historically, like things that were killer apps are always like in hindsight. Like, it's not like you knew right away that your PC was going to be good at making greeting cards or balancing your checkbook. It took decades for those things that, that…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Social norms around new technology cannot be predicted in advance
“You can't really project where the whole social norms are going to be. And like when laptops first came out, we had big fights about like whether it was appropriate to bring them to meetings or not, because it was super clear you were focused on whatever was g…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: New device categories succeed by doing new things, not replicating old ones
“The wave of skepticism is really fixated on this, to me, on this notion that the watch needs to do everything the way that your phone did it. And so, like, that, that problem is that is never how a new device category evolves. Like, in fact, it, by definition,…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Sinofsky: New computing platforms scale by attracting non-users of prior platforms
“The interesting thing is for each of those, they didn't sell like the first people to buy minis weren't the people who bought all the mainframes. They were all the people who didn't buy the mainframe. And for the people who bought, like, the PCs, they weren't …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Sinofsky: Shenzhen hardware entrepreneurs execute fixed production runs without venture capital
“Yeah, it's worth actually just highlighting for folks, like, exactly how that works, because in the startup world, that doesn't often make a lot of sense. You're like, wow, you raise capital, you build a company, but what these people are doing is they're tapp…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Hardware differentiation is sustainable for only ten minutes
“You might think you could pick a special part, like, you could pick the best four K camera available, and think that that will be sustainable, but it'll be sustainable for, like, 10 minutes. Because that, that camera will be everywhere, or the capabilities in …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Cloud computing scale and internet data drive modern AI breakthroughs
“That is like, in a sense, the ultimate reason why all of these things are working is basically because of cloud computing, the scale of the architecture of cloud computing, and the internet that brings all that data in.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Pure deep learning systems will emerge for translation and vision
“And that's an important point about just innovation in general, which is there will be massive innovation, and in fact, I fully expect to see pure deep learning approaches to translation, to image recognition, which is, you know, internet already is that, but …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: iPad Pro has 100% replaced my laptop workflow
“Literally, this is the only thing I've carried all week. I have no, I haven't missed my MacBook. I haven't missed my PC laptop. I have made slides. I've worked on spreadsheets. I've written a blog post. I've used apps. I've used the browser. Like, it's a hundr…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: You couldn't invent the iPhone in 1950 due to system complexity
“We now build systems that no one understands, and that classic, if I could get a time machine and go back to, like, 1950, I'd invent whatever your favorite product is now, and then you realize you couldn't come up with an iPhone in 1950.”
Jan 2, 2019
Sinofsky: Successful companies cannot publicly abandon their core legacy businesses
“It's very difficult if you're a big successful organization to stand up and tell the outside world the thing you love, And the thing that's all the business is not the thing we're going to worry about anymore. And you can't do that. Like that's the, that is th…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Sinofsky: Late 2016 Apple and Microsoft PCs used year-old chips
“Well, in fact, all of the new devices that were announced this week are running components at least a year old, and in some cases, two years old. The graphics on, on the surface are the last generation of video, the CPUs on Intel, or the, I mean, on, on the Ma…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Sinofsky: PCs will become super expensive and niche like mainframes
“PCs are going to get super expensive now. Like, and everything about them is, it's just like buying a mainframe. Like, today, you can, if you're a big insurance company running mainframe software, you can hire programmers, you can get new features. It's just 1…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Sinofsky: Power desktop app user counts will plateau as cloud surges
“The number of people that are going to build Excel models isn't going to increase or run Photoshop or AutoCAD. But the number of people communicating with them and coordinating and vendors and things like that, that are going to be cloud-based is going to go u…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Sinofsky: Startups overreact to product announcements from big tech competitors
“I think that that's really important, especially in the startup world, because there's this tendency, you know, if you're a startup and you work in a particular space, and then you just hear an announcement from a big company, that they're working on something…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Sinofsky: Single-vendor smart home platform dominance is extremely unlikely
“So I think that it's a great strategy, and it drives a lot of interesting things, but the odds of this coalescing are very low, and that's why this notion, and the lesson from Sony, or RCA before it, or Whirlpool, they're all there. Like, Nobody ever came to g…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Individual citizens will drive bottom-up enforcement of GDPR compliance
“Ultimately, I think what's going to happen is that when it comes time for there to be complaints or problems, what I think the EU regulators are sort of counting on is that there'll be a bottom-up view, and like, people will sort of police this on behalf of th…”
Jan 2, 2019
Feb 26, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Shared supply cycles cause parallel product trends at CES
“They all are dealing with the next parts of why you go to CES, which is these ingredients that sort of bubble up, and then they take about the same amount of time for a big company to act, and they all show up with it at the same time.”
Apr 27, 2019
Apr 27, 2019 positive
Apr 27, 2019 neutral
Apr 27, 2019
Apr 27, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Publicly retiring Clippy contributed to its cult status
“I honestly believe in hindsight that the, sort of, the boldness of out front retiring him, as opposed to, like, just secretly cutting him and pretending like he never existed. Or it never existed. I keep saying he, but there's no gender. I think that contribut…”
Feb 6, 2025 negative
Sinofsky: $1T market selloff over DeepSeek was a complete overreaction
“Like on a Friday, the whole weekend was like everybody whipping themselves into a frenzy so they could wake up Monday morning and trade away a trillion dollars of market cap, which seems to be a, Complete overreaction and craziness, but that's not what we're h…”
Feb 6, 2025 bullish
Sinofsky: Endpoint devices will eventually surpass centralized data center compute capacity
“Well, at some point you're going to end up breaking the problem up to the seven billion endpoints of the world, which will have vastly more compute than you can ever squeeze into one giant nuclear power data center.”
Feb 6, 2025 positive
Sinofsky: DeepSeek's efficiency leap is AI's JavaScript moment
“And it's, to me, this is all the equivalent of the browser getting JavaScript. Because once the browser got JavaScript, then all of a sudden you could do anything you needed without going to some standards body or building your own browser.”
Jun 18, 2025 negative
Sinofsky: US manufacturing does not need to replicate China's migrant labor model
“I think that the mistake is either thinking that China is about cheap labor, or the mistake is thinking that for things to be made in the U.S., it has to recreate three hundred million migrant workers on buses working temporarily and going back home.”
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 27, 2025 positive
Sinofsky: Best-selling novels will be AI-generated within a few years
“Absolutely. A hundred percent. A hundred, and I think, I don't think Stephen King is going to do that, and, but I think there'll be some new writer who will probably write it under a pseudonym, and a year after the novel is written and has been made into a mov…”
Jun 27, 2025 positive
Jun 27, 2025 neutral
Jun 27, 2025 neutral
Jun 27, 2025 bearish
Sinofsky: Claims that AI will replace all programmers are extreme overpromises
“The arc of programming has been one of basically over promise and under deliver. You know, when I was in college, like, the theory was the market was gonna need so many programmers that the whole employment force would be, the whole workforce would just be sof…”
Jun 27, 2025 bullish
Sinofsky: The near-term adoption of AI vibe writing is underestimated
“But I really think that the most interesting thing for me, what's being underestimated in the near term is sort of vibe writing. And I mean, it seems weird to say anything with AI is underestimated because Lord knows that's not where we are. But the thing is, …”
Jun 27, 2025 bullish
Sinofsky: AI writing represents an order-of-magnitude shift unlike past programming tools
“And that, and whether it was, you know, that or all the database programming languages like Delphi or PowerBuilder, you know, these are all in algorithmic sense, they were all constant improvement. Like just, they added a constant factor, like plus seven onto …”
Aug 8, 2025
Sinofsky: Acquiring second-tier competitors instead of market leaders always fails
“About two thirds of the time, the big company says, wow, the leader is really expensive, but we have our magic distribution beans. So we're gonna pick the number two or number three. That's like way, way cheaper and get it in a fire sale. And of course that ne…”
Aug 8, 2025 positive
Aug 8, 2025
Sinofsky: Tooling is never a big business, driving irrational platform investment
“Tooling itself is never a really huge business because you have to have it. And so it's sort of this, well, if you have to have it, then there's going to be, there are going to be many alternatives and there are going to be some low priced ones, some high pric…”
Aug 8, 2025 negative
Sinofsky: Regulatory M&A intervention acts as rent control on investing
“They really can't come out on the, we predict that this one will be successful because that, that just, it's statistically not a supportable public policy approach to the action and the markets are much, much better. Otherwise they're just basically institutin…”
Aug 25, 2025 bullish
Aug 25, 2025 positive
Aug 25, 2025 negative
Aug 25, 2025 bullish
Aug 25, 2025 positive
Aug 25, 2025 negative
Aug 25, 2025
Apr 8, 2026 bearish
Apr 8, 2026 bearish
Apr 8, 2026 negative
Apr 8, 2026 bullish
Apr 8, 2026 bullish
Apr 8, 2026 bearish
Sinofsky: AI token prices will face steep deflation like IBM mainframes
“People were on MIPS and then one day the reality was IBM was selling more MIPS for fewer dollars every year. And didn't even realize it. And they were still pricing their mainframes by MIPS until it got pointed out to them that they were on a decreasing curve …”
Apr 8, 2026 negative
Apr 8, 2026 negative
Sinofsky: Enterprise AI software will rely on bulk licenses, not micropayments
“Where they always think that, like, you'll be able to get, like, a fraction of a penny, but in the end, especially in the enterprise, like, people are just going to consume things, it's just cheaper and easier to buy, like, a bulk license for a bunch of stuff.”
Apr 8, 2026 negative
Apr 8, 2026
Apr 8, 2026 bullish
Sinofsky: AI compute will soon experience a breakthrough transistor moment
“And, like, we are gonna have a transistor moment with all of this. It might just be more supply the way we think of it, But it also might be an actual algorithmic fundamental change. It could be a change in the hardware. There's a lot of stuff that can happen.…”
Apr 8, 2026 bullish
Sinofsky: Technical barriers to orchestrating AI agents will quickly evaporate
“Right now, you have to be an absolute, you have to be a rocket scientist and the growth marketing person to create 42 agents and spin them all up and do all of this stuff. But the rocket science part of it just Is going to evaporate in very short order.”
Apr 8, 2026 positive
Apr 8, 2026 positive
Sinofsky: Multi-agent networks will soon consolidate into broader domain agents
“Where we are with agents is just at this step where you think you need 50 and the abstraction layer is such that we're dividing up in these really small pieces with one super smart person coordinating them all and pretty soon that, that whole thing is just gon…”
Apr 28, 2026 bullish
Apr 28, 2026 negative
Sinofsky: AI agents do not solve enterprise legacy system integration
“And this, the thing that's not different about AI, and that agents don't fix, that nothing fix, is that any enterprise of a thousand people or more, or that's older than 10 years, is just a mass of stuff that's sitting there waiting to be integrated. And you c…”
Apr 28, 2026 positive
Apr 28, 2026 bullish
Sinofsky: Enterprise AI agents must hold distinct SaaS licenses, not human credentials
“Now, someone might come up with a very clever pricing scheme, and that agents, you know, somehow cost less, because maybe for the first five years they're read only, or they, they're always tied to a person or something, but it is another seat. There is no way…”
Apr 28, 2026 neutral
Jul 7, 2026 bullish
Sinofsky: Enterprises will trust AI to make autonomous decisions
“When we get through sort of the One point O version of this. We're going to get to a new version where people are like comfortable letting AI do or decide things because they realize it's adding a level of predictability and repeatability to their enterprise.”
Jul 7, 2026 bullish
Jul 7, 2026 positive
Jul 7, 2026
Jul 7, 2026 bearish
Sinofsky: Incumbent software vendors will only bolt AI onto existing products
“The one thing that established players won't do is disturb their existing product line and go to market. So they absolutely will just be bolting AI on top of their existing product. They won't be getting rid of it. They won't stop working on it. They won't do …”
Jul 7, 2026
Jul 7, 2026 bullish
Jul 7, 2026 positive
Sinofsky: Software startups should position between established players, not head-on
“The universal truth for enterprise software is the most difficult thing to do that happens to be the dumbest is to attempt to just compete head on with an existing category. And by head on, I mean, not just the same category, but doing it the same way. The big…”
Jul 7, 2026 negative
Sinofsky: Removing SAP would cause auto manufacturers and Walmart to evaporate
“If you take SAP out of a large automobile manufacturer, there's no automobile manufacturer left. Or Walmart. Like the company just evaporates. Because the company is defined, not just by purchasing the software, not even by just using it, but by how they codif…”
Jul 7, 2026 negative
Jul 7, 2026 neutral
Jul 7, 2026
Sinofsky: Startups fail in enterprise software by designing for startup scale
“Startups look at enterprise software and they think about it in terms of startup scale... And that's fine until you have a 100,000 people in 20 countries with different national laws and policies about business expense and all of those, and then you overlay co…”
Jul 7, 2026 negative
Jul 7, 2026
Jul 7, 2026
Aug 25, 2026 positive
Sinofsky: Mathematicians Are the Group Most Excited About Math-Solving AI
“And the most interesting thing about it is the group that's most excited are mostly the mathematicians. And they're the ones, and so that actually confuses everybody, because if you're of the school of the people who are like, it's gonna put people out of work…”