The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 116 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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…”
Hicks: DoD R&D budget exceeds Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft combined
“It's more than what Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft combined spent on R&D last year.”
Scott: OpenAI is by far Microsoft's most important AI partner
“I think if you think about AI, like, by far, in a way, the most important partner we have is is OpenAI.”
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…”
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.”
Sinofsky: Microsoft could not formally prove to Boeing that Excel actually worked
“I couldn't go to people at Boeing or people at the Navy or wherever in Wall Street and prove that Excel worked.”
Sinofsky: Bing's biggest barrier to fighting Google was crawling the internet fast
“It turns out that was what the barrier to entering the search market, even for Microsoft and Bing, Was like, sucking in the entire internet fast enough.”
Chokshi: Microsoft has more GitHub commits than any other company
“The most interesting thing I saw this past week is this stat that Microsoft now has more commits to GitHub than any other company. And can you just think about that for a moment? Like Microsoft on GitHub.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
Davies: DOJ antitrust prosecution derailed Microsoft for years
“Arguably, I think it derailed them for years, possibly derailed them until now, to some extent.”
Markoff: 25% of Microsoft's Xiaoice chatbot users told it "I love you"
“25% of the Zhao Ice users have said, I love you, to the program.”
IBM killed a 1982 OS deal to protect its Microsoft relationship
“They killed the deal because of IBM didn't want to mess up the relationship with this new guy, Bill Gates or his company, Microsoft.”
Evans: Microsoft and Intel No Longer Set Tech Industry Agenda
“And again, that doesn't mean that Microsoft or Intel have gone away, it just means that they're not setting the agenda anymore at all.”
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.”
Dixon: Tech power concentration is at its highest since peak Microsoft
“We live in a time where I think we have probably the greatest concentration of power in, on the internet that, that I mean, you know, or in the technology world since probably Microsoft at its peak in the nineties.”
Mars: AI assistant infrastructures are monopolized by major tech companies
“These kinds of infrastructures are monopolized essentially by companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and so forth.”
Evans: Microsoft's share of connected device sales plummeted from 90% to 20%
“Microsoft's share of connected devices has gone down from 80 or 90% to perhaps 50 to 20% of the devices being sold.”
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.”
Sinofsky: Microsoft worries far more about Amazon and Google than startups
“The only incumbents are only interested in what the other incumbents are doing. Microsoft is worried way more about what Amazon and Google are doing than anyone in a startup space.”
Evans: Big Tech produces more profits than the entire telecoms industry
“You have a pretty safe bet that Google, Meta, Amazon Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.”
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.…”
Sinofsky: Microsoft spent $30B to $40B developing Bing
“People forget that Microsoft poured, I don't know, 30, forty billion dollars into Bing.”
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…”
Ulevitch: Microsoft formed dedicated nuclear energy procurement teams
“And then companies like Microsoft have spun up nuclear teams, nuclear energy teams to figure out how do they procure energy that comes from a nuclear power plant.”
Mulchandani: Universities lack compute power to compete with tech giants
“When you go talk to universities right now, one point they make is they don't have the compute power to be able to rival Microsoft and OpenAI and these companies”
Horowitz: VCs refused to fund PC applications in the mid-1990s
“If you go back to like the mid nineties, you could not get an application funded on a PC by a VC because, you know, they knew that Microsoft would just put you out of business.”
Lai: Mobile gaming was won by new startups, not legacy publishers
“The winners in mobile games were largely new companies Supercell, King, Zynga, and not the PC console and companies, right? It wasn't Electronic Arts or Activision or Microsoft.”
GitHub Copilot's primary benefit is keeping developers in a flow state
“The thing that it really does in our observation with developers more than anything else is it helps keep them in flow state. Longer than they otherwise would.”
Casado: JPMorgan spends $600M and Microsoft spends over $1B on cybersecurity
“So for example, JPMorgan Chase alone will estimate about six hundred million dollars in cybersecurity. And Microsoft will spend over a billion dollars in security.”
Sinofsky: Office 95's Answer Wizard was Microsoft's first shipped AI feature
“And so Answer Wizard was this breakthrough AI. It was the first time we shipped any kind of AI thing.”
Sinofsky: Early usability tests for Microsoft's Office Assistant prototype were overwhelmingly positive
“So we actually had like many people go and use Pogo to try to figure out if it worked, and like the response was crazy positive.”
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…”
Arthur: Early Contracts Allowed Microsoft to Lock In 1980s PC Software
“Microsoft got ahead with certain contracts very early in the game. They locked in a lot of the personal software in the 19 eighties.”
Microsoft hires Fields Medalists over traditional coders for topological quantum computing
“So if you look at Microsoft, this topological Cubit, you know, the program that they're doing, they've got Fields Medal winners taken away from the blackboards. Not people who code.”
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…”
Markoff: Microsoft's Chinese AI chatbot Xiaoice reached 10 million intense daily users
“They've gotten twenty million users. Ten million of them are intense users who have multiple conversations within a day”
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…”
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 …”
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 …”
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…”
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…”