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 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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 …”
Keith Rabois says Vinod Khosla intervened to stop Sam Altman joining Microsoft
“Or like, yeah, for like, 24 hours until Vinod and some other friends intervened a fair amount.”
Casado: Microsoft's initial Copilot product was actually created by OpenAI
“I learned recently it was created by OpenAI, so that kind of explains it.”
Wilson: Cloud market will split to Amazon 60%, Google 30%, Microsoft 10%
“But I think it could be like Amazon has 60% of the market, Google has 30% of the market, and Microsoft has 10% of the market. I think it's gonna be a three player game in that business, and that's good.”
Alex Rampell: Microsoft never restricted Windows software like Apple restricts iOS
“Microsoft, in my opinion, never really They never did the same amount of control. Like, they never said, hey, this software product cannot be downloaded onto your Windows PC.”
Evans: There are even odds Windows Phone disappears within a year
“It's, that, that, I would be, I think there's even odds that that product won't exist in a year.”
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.”
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…”
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, …”
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.”
Price-Wright: Microsoft contracted over a third of Georgia's electricians last year
“When Microsoft was building their new data center in Georgia last year, at one point, they had on staff at Microsoft, or on contract, more than a third of the electricians in the state of Georgia.”
Sinofsky: Microsoft shut down Hotmail in China over server access demands
“Like, we had to shut down Hotmail for forever because, like, we wouldn't let them see the data center servers, which weren't even in China, and all sorts of complexities.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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”
Matthews: Minecraft Education reaches millions of monthly players across 119 countries
“Minecraft education is now in a 119 countries, and we've got Millions of players every month”
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.”
Ehrensvärd: Mozilla and Microsoft are adding native hardware security key support
“Google was the first. Mozilla is coming on board. Microsoft is coming on board.”
Spisak: Microsoft has shifted its strategy from mobile-first to AI-first
“And Microsoft has switched from a mobile first over to an AI first now as well.”
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…”
Primack: Top five companies by market cap are all tech companies
“If you look at the top five Stocks, I think, or top five companies in terms of market cap now are tech companies, whereas just five years ago, I think only Microsoft was in that group.”
Hobson: Microsoft's valuation multiple once dropped to 10x earnings
“Microsoft was in that from an earnings, from a P ratio, absolutely, I think got down to 10 times.”
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…”
Chen: Microsoft DeepCoder builds software by remixing code samples
“Microsoft has a system called deep coder that creates software in much the same way that human developers do, which is they go find some sample code and they sort of remix it for their purposes.”
Evans: Tech giants occupy the top five spots by market valuation
“Today, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and yes, Microsoft are all the five, are the five biggest companies on the stock exchange.”
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 …”
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…”