Microsoft, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 35:47 Ben Gilbert One was effectively Microsoft Paint for two-D animation, where you could look at all the lines on a computer, you could select a color, you could bring over your little paint tool, and dump your bucket of color into an enclosed area.
- ▶ 36:00 Ben Gilbert It sounds like I'm describing something that you're like, yes, we've all used MS Paint, but this was
- ▶ 1:17:36 David Rosenthal Uh, they acquire Starwave, Paul Allen's company, uh, after Microsoft.
The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:56:27 Ben Gilbert And to me, it really symbolizes that animators are the crown of Disney in this era, in the way that at Google, it's engineers, and at Apple, it's designers, and at Microsoft, it's PMs.
Vanguard: The communist capitalist who saved investors a trillion dollars (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:43:21 Ben Gilbert They got me when I started my first job at Microsoft
- ▶ 2:46:04 Ben Gilbert This is like Vanguard is Microsoft and Fidelity is Google, and they could launch Gmail and say that thing, that's your primary business.
- ▶ 3:22:01 Ben Gilbert Apple, Microsoft, Google, it's all 20% plus these big, uh, Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock, State Street, et cetera.
- ▶ 3:36:00 David Rosenthal Oh, uh, Microsoft.
- ▶ 3:36:02 Ben Gilbert Microsoft.
Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 54:42 David Rosenthal Chat SDK, which lets you build agents across Slack, Teams, Google Chat, Discord, and more, all from a single code base.
- ▶ 3:57:18 Ben Gilbert Folks at Microsoft, uh, here in Seattle, who then would have a second career actually working for Ferrari.
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 50:40 David Rosenthal I think it was our Microsoft series when we talked to Steve, to Bomber.
- ▶ 51:09 David Rosenthal Well, what's funny with Microsoft, so we had some access, Ben used to work at Microsoft, uh, before.
- ▶ 51:24 David Rosenthal Because we had started in Seattle, and you still live in Seattle, and you had worked at Microsoft, when we started our Microsoft journey, we knew some people.
- ▶ 1:02:35 Michael Lewis If what's on the page interests me enough to put it in, uh, in, uh, in a Word document,
- ▶ 1:07:36 Ben Gilbert I mean, amazing productivity apps on the web, but they lacked enterprise features for years, leaving the door open for Microsoft to catch up and respond with Office.
- ▶ 1:07:36 Ben Gilbert I mean, amazing productivity apps on the web, but they lacked enterprise features for years, leaving the door open for Microsoft to catch up and respond with Office.
- ▶ 1:50:47 Ben Gilbert Come over to the office and I'll sit you down and give you the entire whiteboard and PowerPoint on how the Costco business model works.
- ▶ 2:02:13 Michael Lewis But Tesla and NVIDIA and, and, and Microsoft and Google and they, people don't really get them explained to them.
Coca-Cola: The Complete History & Strategy (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 50:41 David Rosenthal It's kind of like Microsoft and Intel in the PC era, except even more closely tied.
- ▶ 50:47 David Rosenthal It'd be like if Microsoft had contracts with Intel where they got to stipulate what the processes were going to look like and what the machines were going to look like.
- ▶ 2:26:55 Ben Gilbert Like, do you remember when Microsoft did bang it on?
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:11 David Rosenthal Mustafa now, in addition to in the past, having been a founder of DeepMind, runs AI at Microsoft.
- ▶ 53:36 Ben Gilbert That includes Microsoft.
- ▶ 55:29 Ben Gilbert At some point, Microsoft drops out.
- ▶ 2:08:57 David Rosenthal Reid, just a year or so earlier, had sold LinkedIn to Microsoft, and Reid is now on the board of Microsoft.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 2:09:27 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.
- ▶ 2:09:40 David Rosenthal And in return, Microsoft will get access to OpenAI's technology, get an exclusive license to OpenAI's technology for use in Microsoft's products.
- ▶ 2:10:02 David Rosenthal And Microsoft will invest into the captive for-profit entity
- ▶ 2:10:37 David Rosenthal Microsoft, they're back.
- ▶ 2:10:39 David Rosenthal Microsoft is Google's mortal enemy.
- ▶ 2:10:43 David Rosenthal That in our first episode on the founding of Google and search, and then in the second episode on alphabet and all the products that they made, the whole strategy at Google was always about Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:11:28 David Rosenthal And this is the right time to talk about why, from OpenAI's perspective, Microsoft is the absolute perfect partner.
- ▶ 2:11:48 David Rosenthal Azure.
- ▶ 2:12:20 David Rosenthal And hey, one of them in Microsoft is really interested.
- ▶ 2:12:59 Ben Gilbert Anyway, Microsoft's open AI, they end up tying up.
- ▶ 2:15:51 David Rosenthal So after the first Microsoft partnership, the first billion dollar investment, in 2019, OpenAI releases GPT-II, which is still early, but very promising, that can do a lot of things.
- ▶ 2:17:58 David Rosenthal Microsoft releases GitHub Copilot using GPT-III.
- ▶ 2:18:04 David Rosenthal This is the first, not just Microsoft product that comes out with GPT baked into it, but first.
- ▶ 2:18:35 David Rosenthal So after that, Microsoft invests another two billion dollars in OpenAI, which seemed like a lot of money at the time.
- ▶ 2:19:38 Ben Gilbert Are they like the Microsoft of the 2000 where they haven't had a breakthrough product in a while?
- ▶ 2:26:21 Ben Gilbert They're working with Microsoft to try to get more compute.
- ▶ 2:26:24 Ben Gilbert They're cutting deals with Microsoft in real time.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 2:31:37 Ben Gilbert And if you remember back a few years before, Microsoft released Tay, which was this crazy racist chat bot.
- ▶ 2:31:44 David Rosenthal Yeah, they launched it as a Twitter bot, right?
- ▶ 2:32:39 Ben Gilbert And to underscore this, so if you didn't know it in November of 22, you sure knew it by February of 23, because good ol' Microsoft, our biggest, scariest enemy.
- ▶ 2:33:23 Ben Gilbert That now Microsoft can actually challenge Google on their own turf, intent on the internet, with a legitimately different, better differentiated product vector.
- ▶ 2:33:38 Ben Gilbert This is the full leapfrog, and they have the technology partnership to do it.
- ▶ 2:33:51 David Rosenthal I want people to know that we made Google dance.
- ▶ 2:37:39 David Rosenthal Well, even before that, January 23, when OpenAI hits a hundred million registered users for ChatGPT, Microsoft announces they are investing another ten billion dollars in OpenAI.
- ▶ 2:37:54 David Rosenthal And says that they now own 49% of the for-profit entity.
- ▶ 2:38:00 David Rosenthal Incredible in and of itself, but then now think about this from the Google lens of Microsoft, our enemy.
- ▶ 2:38:05 David Rosenthal They now arguably own, obviously in retrospect here, they don't own OpenAI, but it seems at the time like,
- ▶ 2:38:14 David Rosenthal oh my God, Microsoft might now own OpenAI, which is our first true existential threat in our history as a company.
- ▶ 2:42:37 David Rosenthal Which, fast forward now into twenty-twenty-four after the absolute insanity that goes down at OpenAI in Thanksgiving twenty-twenty-three when Sam Altman gets fired over the weekend during Thanksgiving and then brought back by Monday when…
- ▶ 2:43:02 David Rosenthal After all that, which certainly strains the Microsoft relationship,
- ▶ 2:43:06 David Rosenthal Remember again, Reed is on the board of Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:43:09 David Rosenthal Microsoft does one of these hackquisition type deals with inflection AI and brings Mustafa in as the head of AI for Microsoft.
- ▶ 3:17:02 David Rosenthal Plenty of other folks have made the sort of glib comment, but there's merit to it of, hey, as flat-footed as Google was when ChatGPT happened, if the outcome of this is they avoid a Microsoft-level distraction and damage to their business…
- ▶ 3:18:48 Ben Gilbert They're the fourth most valuable company in the world behind Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple.
- ▶ 3:19:27 Ben Gilbert So they're very much playing offense in the way that Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are in deploying that capex.
- ▶ 3:24:13 Ben Gilbert Even Microsoft pivoted Azure to this reasonably quickly.
- ▶ 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?
- ▶ 3:30:07 Ben Gilbert Microsoft?
- ▶ 3:30:10 Ben Gilbert They make some models, but.
- ▶ 3:30:11 David Rosenthal I mean, they've got applications, but yeah, cloud.
- ▶ 3:31:04 David Rosenthal The only way that external companies, users, developers, model researchers could use TPUs would be if Google had a cloud to deliver them, because there's no way in hell that Amazon or Microsoft are going to put TPUs from Google in their…
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 3:32:19 David Rosenthal Would Amazon or Microsoft be like, eh, you know, all right, Google, we'll take some of your TPUs, even though no developer out there uses them.
- ▶ 4:05:37 Ben Gilbert If you liked this episode, go check out our episode on the early history of Google and the 20 tens with our Alphabet episode, and of course, our series on Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 7:46 Ben Gilbert The universe at the time is Microsoft sells sort of enterprise grade mail for a lot of money, or there's all these free web-based services popping up like Hotmail that Microsoft would end up buying and Yahoo Mail and AOL.
- ▶ 8:02 David Rosenthal At the time, Hotmail, which as you said, Microsoft owns,
- ▶ 13:57 David Rosenthal The problem was it was kind of this casualty of the browser wars with Microsoft and Internet Explorer and everything that killed Netscape, and so up until this time, kind of, 2001, JavaScript existed, but, like, it wasn't super popular.
- ▶ 15:53 Ben Gilbert The origin of the XML HTTP request is a part of Internet Explorer, first implemented by Microsoft, and used in this part of Outlook called Outlook Web Access.
- ▶ 15:53 Ben Gilbert The origin of the XML HTTP request is a part of Internet Explorer, first implemented by Microsoft, and used in this part of Outlook called Outlook Web Access.
- ▶ 16:07 Ben Gilbert When I worked for my high school, I could log in on any computer into my Outlook through their Web Access, and that thing used Ajax, and I think it only worked in Internet Explorer.
- ▶ 16:26 David Rosenthal It's so deeply ironic that this originated for a Microsoft mail client.
- ▶ 18:11 David Rosenthal But there's also another reason, and that's Microsoft, because Google was doing great printing money, AdWords search, greatest product, greatest business of all time, but they've got a big risk, which is that everything about Google,…
- ▶ 18:34 Ben Gilbert Yeah, Google's entire money printing machine was built on top of Microsoft's and at two layers.
- ▶ 18:40 Ben Gilbert So to this point, over 90% of Google search queries were done on Windows PCs, and 90% were done in Internet Explorer running on those PCs.
- ▶ 18:52 Ben Gilbert So Google's got the killer app for the web in search, and the thing under them is a browser owned by Microsoft, and the thing under that is an operating system owned by Microsoft.
- ▶ 19:02 Ben Gilbert They exist at the pleasure of Microsoft at this point in history.
- ▶ 19:06 David Rosenthal And Microsoft has a different business model.
- ▶ 19:30 Ben Gilbert And web usage isn't bad for Microsoft, but if the platform of the next generation becomes the web, and people are writing web applications instead of Windows applications, that makes Microsoft's platform a lot less valuable versus other…
- ▶ 19:30 Ben Gilbert And web usage isn't bad for Microsoft, but if the platform of the next generation becomes the web, and people are writing web applications instead of Windows applications, that makes Microsoft's platform a lot less valuable versus other…
- ▶ 19:54 David Rosenthal At a minimum, Microsoft doesn't
- ▶ 20:00 David Rosenthal Microsoft makes money by OEMs selling PCs that have Windows on them, and then Microsoft sells software that goes on those PCs.
- ▶ 20:00 David Rosenthal Microsoft makes money by OEMs selling PCs that have Windows on them, and then Microsoft sells software that goes on those PCs.
- ▶ 20:09 David Rosenthal So at a minimum, they don't care, and at a maximum, like you're saying, web apps are at an existential risk to Microsoft.
- ▶ 20:28 David Rosenthal And most of Microsoft hasn't realized this yet.
- ▶ 20:31 David Rosenthal Microsoft's distracted with the albatross that was Longhorn that would become Windows Vista.
- ▶ 20:38 David Rosenthal A few people in Microsoft realize this, but Google for sure realizes this, though.
- ▶ 20:50 David Rosenthal Microsoft.
- ▶ 20:51 David Rosenthal And Microsoft crushed them.
- ▶ 20:53 David Rosenthal So, why Google's so jazzed about Gmail, they need to build up leverage with consumers, with users, that they're gonna demand rich web applications, so that if Microsoft ever tries to disadvantage Google or disadvantage web apps and things…
- ▶ 22:13 David Rosenthal It builds this strategic mode against Microsoft, but it will cost money.
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