Microsoft Azure, every mention
80 scenes · ← back to Microsoft Azure
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 38Ben Gilbert 31Steve Ballmer 9Ben Thompson 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft Azure comes up
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:09:27 David Rosenthal And while they're there, they hash out a deal for Microsoft to invest one billion dollars into OpenAI in a combination of both cash and Azure cloud credits.
- ▶ 2:11:48 David Rosenthal Azure.
- ▶ 2:26:27 Ben Gilbert To try to get more investment, to get more Azure credits or get advances on their Azure credits in order to handle the incredible load in November of 2022 that's coming in of people wanting to use this thing.
- ▶ 3:24:13 Ben Gilbert Even Microsoft pivoted Azure to this reasonably quickly.
- ▶ 3:26:25 David Rosenthal So we can offer this tool a kind of counterposition against AWS and Azure.
- ▶ 3:26:38 Ben Gilbert So this kind of becomes one of the pillars of their strategy is you want multi-cloud?
- ▶ 3:32:03 David Rosenthal Maybe there will be TPUs in AWS or Azure someday, but I don't think they would have been able to start there.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:55:21 David Rosenthal It is the Google version of Azure from our Microsoft series.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 51:58 Steve Ballmer I mean, people say that they might mean Azure, AWS, or in the old days, Windows, or Windows Server, or Unix, uh, then Linux.
- ▶ 1:04:31 Steve Ballmer They use that mostly now in Azure data centers.
- ▶ 1:07:00 Steve Ballmer Well, some, some with Azure, some certain, even more than Azure, even more than Azure to get started.
- ▶ 1:07:08 Steve Ballmer The office three, what's now M three, 65, the office backend, because that got critical mass as a cloud infrastructure before Azure did.
- ▶ 1:17:42 Ben Gilbert There's another one with Azure.
- ▶ 1:17:45 Ben Gilbert Can you tell us the story of how Azure really got started?
- ▶ 1:23:28 Steve Ballmer And then we're learning more things about the cloud from both exchange in the cloud and Azure in the cloud.
- ▶ 1:24:29 Steve Ballmer Uh, and, uh, you know, by the time I leave, we have some, some, some momentum with Azure, but some momentum.
- ▶ 1:24:58 David Rosenthal Azure was that.
- ▶ 1:26:54 Ben Gilbert Going back to the core initial start of Azure, I find it very interesting that Microsoft had a business called Server and Tools Business, and that is not where Azure started.
- ▶ 1:27:05 Ben Gilbert Azure started as a incubation by Ray Ozzy with a completely separate team than your existing, like, actual product group selling server and tools.
- ▶ 1:28:52 Steve Ballmer We'd been working on Azure for eight years.
- ▶ 1:32:26 Steve Ballmer Three 65 and Azure.
- ▶ 1:58:32 David Rosenthal What about Azure?
- ▶ 1:58:34 Steve Ballmer Bill was fine with Azure.
- ▶ 2:07:35 David Rosenthal That's why Azure was turbocharging.
- ▶ 2:57:08 Ben Gilbert I mean, obviously Steve had planted some seeds in enterprise and what would become the juggernaut of Azure, but
- ▶ 2:57:24 David Rosenthal Steve knew how great Azure was going to be, but the rest of the world didn't yet.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:56:18 Ben Gilbert Some are on-prem at hospitals, some are in our cloud, some are on AWS, some are on Azure, but either way, there's all this interesting structured patient data that
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:01:29 David Rosenthal Their efforts launching Bing making that into ultimately a successful business, but even more importantly for Azure that comes out of it.
- ▶ 5:27:29 Ben Gilbert You know, you think AWS, Azure, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:13:53 David Rosenthal We'll come back to this with Azure.
- ▶ 2:14:46 Ben Gilbert Led to Azure, which we'll talk about later.
- ▶ 2:36:17 David Rosenthal Okay, Ben, I'm too excited for Azure.
- ▶ 2:36:29 Ben Gilbert There's a cohesive story that leads to Azure here.
- ▶ 2:50:48 Ben Gilbert And then they plucked him out of Bing to go run Azure, right?
- ▶ 3:34:48 David Rosenthal It's Azure.
- ▶ 3:35:04 David Rosenthal And the Azure story is
- ▶ 3:35:18 Ben Gilbert Satya Nadella came in and launched Azure, and Azure has been great.
- ▶ 3:39:47 David Rosenthal Of course, Azure should have come from within there.
- ▶ 3:39:58 Ben Gilbert And that group is not the group that produced Azure, the cloud service that runs, at the time, Windows Server.
- ▶ 3:42:37 David Rosenthal And the two of them recruit a team, and they build Azure.
- ▶ 3:42:42 David Rosenthal Cutler builds a new hypervisor that Azure runs on from scratch without using open source like himself.
- ▶ 3:44:17 Ben Gilbert Two, in its initial incarnation, Azure did not threaten
- ▶ 3:44:27 Ben Gilbert If you remember, when Azure launched, it was Windows Azure, and it ran Windows Server, and it was Platform as a Service, and Microsoft in no way changed its tune on open source.
- ▶ 3:45:10 Ben Gilbert They never at all wanted to be a part of anything that open source developers were doing until a couple of years into Azure.
- ▶ 3:45:24 David Rosenthal They didn't go full infrastructure as a service and embrace open source and let people use Azure to run Linux into LAMP stack on top of it.
- ▶ 3:45:59 Ben Gilbert But Azure came in with an aggressive point of view.
- ▶ 3:46:31 David Rosenthal So, in 2010, Ray Ozzie actually leaves the company, but as he's doing, he and Steve roll Red Dog, by this point in time renamed Azure, back into the server and tools business, and the two of them go to the University of Washington, and…
- ▶ 3:46:52 David Rosenthal We are all in, and we are betting the company on cloud and on Azure.
- ▶ 3:47:58 Ben Gilbert And from what I can tell, it's just as motivated by Azure is the future
- ▶ 3:48:46 David Rosenthal The more personal computing segment, that's Windows and Surface and their hardware efforts, and then the intelligent cloud segment, and that's Azure.
- ▶ 3:50:13 David Rosenthal Less so today, but in the earlier days of the Azure transition.
- ▶ 3:53:09 Ben Gilbert I mean, there was some conflict business model-wise with Windows Server, since Azure would be an orthogonal business model, but the technical chops were there.
- ▶ 3:54:06 Ben Gilbert There was seven years before Steve Ballmer handed the reins to Satya where Azure development was happening under him.
- ▶ 3:54:35 Ben Gilbert I could see if you were an Azure doubter, and you were sitting there at the top of Microsoft enjoying the Windows monopoly, the tremendous business that is Windows and Office, and thinking, why would I do anything to jeopardize this?
- ▶ 3:56:22 Ben Gilbert I mean, Azure was being built, so it was successful enough that it sort of erases everything else, but a lot of listeners know this, but I worked at Microsoft from 20 11 to 20 14.
- ▶ 4:07:54 David Rosenthal And at the same time, everybody knew, hey, there is a huge win that we are sitting on right here, like a huge, huge, huge win in Azure.
- ▶ 4:08:47 David Rosenthal Probably, like, I don't know, I haven't done a sum of the parts analysis, but I think you can say probably at least half is Azure, propping up that market cap.
- ▶ 4:14:58 David Rosenthal If you cannot tell your story right and in a compelling fashion, this is what's gonna happen to your stock price, even if you triple revenues and profits and build Azure and all these things.
- ▶ 4:20:16 David Rosenthal Actually, I would say they had some of it in the development of Azure, because they could say to Fortune 500, we will do hybrid cloud with you, and we can be your trusted partner in a way that AWS couldn't.
- ▶ 4:40:16 David Rosenthal And what they have done with Azure and in cloud and now with AI is, I mean, hell, they're the most valuable company in the world.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:12:35 David Rosenthal The punchline here is that NT becomes the seeds of Windows Server, the business line, which become the seeds of Azure today.
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023) (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 25:19 David Rosenthal It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure.
- ▶ 1:12:17 David Rosenthal This is Azure.
- ▶ 1:22:19 Ben Gilbert I think Azure and AWS were where I looked.
- ▶ 1:24:27 David Rosenthal Via other clouds, so Azure and Oracle and Google.
- ▶ 1:26:02 David Rosenthal And even more for Nvidia, more important longer term, for enterprises that buy this, Nvidia now has a direct sales relationship with those companies, not necessarily intermediated by sales through Azure or Google or AWS, even though
- ▶ 2:10:40 David Rosenthal But obviously Google is not going to be in AWS and Azure and Oracle and all the new cloud providers.
Costco (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:39:44 Ben Gilbert Crusoe is a cloud infrastructure provider, just like AWS and Azure, that is 100% purpose-built for AI training and inference.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:07:40 David Rosenthal So just like AWS and Azure,
- ▶ 1:07:46 David Rosenthal So just like Phil Knight had the crazy idea of taking on Adidas with Blue Ribbon, Crusoe and its founders, Chase and Cully, had the crazy idea a few years ago that they could take on AWS and Azure.
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:42:52 Ben Thompson It also includes Azure credits and
- ▶ 1:45:31 Ben Thompson And Amazon doesn't WS obviously Microsoft is doing that with Azure and the Silicon Valley companies are just very, very bad at that.
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 1:37:17 Ben Gilbert And now that Azure has actually been a extremely viable competitor and made a big, big comeback.
- ▶ 1:38:27 Ben Gilbert But they did eventually realize that they had to make a big bet on Azure and totally separate from Windows Server.
- ▶ 1:38:49 Ben Gilbert They realize, okay, Azure needs to be a thing that's kept separate and has CEO sponsorship and can sort of escape the Windows Server thing.
- ▶ 1:39:20 Ben Gilbert We have primitives in a data center that you can lift and shift to, much like how Azure works today.
- ▶ 1:58:08 David Rosenthal Azure, 21%.
- ▶ 2:18:32 Ben Gilbert And in fact, I even think iCloud's backend is Azure, or at least for a long time was Azure.
Arena Show Part I: Idea Dinner + YC Continuity · Acquired
- ▶ 30:38 David Rosenthal Azure and Google Cloud are growing faster, and Amazon, despite being the early leader in cloud, might actually end up losing this market.
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:47:46 David Rosenthal Like, you can get NVIDIA GPUs in AWS and Azure and Google Cloud, and that is part of the growth story for NVIDIA, too.