Microsoft, every mention
2,386 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 1031David Rosenthal 1029Steve Ballmer 170Ben Thompson 45Brendan Eich 26Jensen Huang 7Emily Chang 7David Senra 6Dara Khosrowshahi 6Mitch Lasky 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 2:28:01 Steve Ballmer You know, Microsoft goes to zero.
- ▶ 2:28:04 Steve Ballmer But even if Microsoft goes to zero, me and my family, we can live, we can give away money.
- ▶ 2:29:55 Steve Ballmer And I will also tell you, unlike Microsoft, it cannot go to zero.
- ▶ 2:30:06 Steve Ballmer It is far more secure than Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:32:22 Steve Ballmer Uh, the business is just like Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:33:12 Steve Ballmer I never did that when I was at Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:33:47 David Rosenthal Microsoft, your domain is always growing.
- ▶ 2:34:24 Steve Ballmer It's not like Microsoft where I felt like I could always find a job that somebody should want.
- ▶ 2:38:07 Steve Ballmer In Microsoft, I, we got rid of the value called teamwork.
- ▶ 2:39:38 Steve Ballmer See, I learned some things that would have been very helpful for me to understand at Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:42:08 Steve Ballmer 35 PowerPoints, 40 PowerPoints, easily.
- ▶ 2:45:48 Steve Ballmer And particularly those that, you know, a number of them, both windows, but also certainly on the backend products, backend, meaning they're not customer visible, but I would say Intuit Dome's probably the product for which I had the…
- ▶ 2:55:44 Steve Ballmer So, you know, just like at Microsoft, patient, long-term, hardcore approach.
- ▶ 2:56:13 Ben Gilbert In fact, when I was at Microsoft, I, you know, I wasn't a podcaster then, but at the time I was such a junior employee, but man, there was a complicated landscape that Steve was navigating between, you know, the product set, between…
- ▶ 2:56:13 Ben Gilbert In fact, when I was at Microsoft, I, you know, I wasn't a podcaster then, but at the time I was such a junior employee, but man, there was a complicated landscape that Steve was navigating between, you know, the product set, between…
- ▶ 2:56:52 David Rosenthal I mean, Microsoft, the Microsoft transition, Steve Satya, this is what was in the water.
- ▶ 2:57:04 Ben Gilbert And it's not clear that Microsoft was gonna be this amazing juggernaut that it turned into.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 2:58:18 Ben Gilbert If you like this episode, go check out our two big episodes on the history of Microsoft.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:39 David Rosenthal Yes, we heard all sorts of stories about companies sniffing around Epic over the years trying to buy the GE, Microsoft, Google, you know, everybody you would imagine wants to buy this company, and it's never gonna happen.
- ▶ 6:21 David Rosenthal Microsoft and Epic, Intel, and all of this.
- ▶ 11:30 Ben Gilbert She is going to build her company in almost the exact same time frame that Apple and Microsoft were built.
- ▶ 41:10 David Rosenthal We talked about this a lot on our Microsoft episodes, but the critical thing about mini computers and especially for duty here and fledgling Epic was like a consumer wouldn't buy these things, but small businesses could and small…
- ▶ 43:44 David Rosenthal I think kind of like how Microsoft never really raised primary capital either.
- ▶ 43:55 David Rosenthal They had kind of a cornered resource as a startup, you know, Microsoft did in Bill Gates and Paul Allen too, but Epic totally did too in Judy.
- ▶ 49:06 David Rosenthal It's the same thing as Microsoft or Google or Meta or what have you.
- ▶ 49:34 Ben Gilbert Microsoft was really on the frontier
- ▶ 49:46 David Rosenthal And Microsoft wasn't even really doing it at this point in time.
- ▶ 49:57 Ben Gilbert So Microsoft really isn't starting to wrap hiring yet.
- ▶ 50:06 David Rosenthal Microsoft is still
- ▶ 50:08 David Rosenthal Its main product is the basic interpreter for Judy and the fledgling human services computing here.
- ▶ 52:40 David Rosenthal Unlike Microsoft, this was a small business from the get-go.
- ▶ 57:47 David Rosenthal And on the back of that in 1992, they launch Epic Care, which I believe is the first graphical user interface like Windows based
- ▶ 58:19 David Rosenthal Now here in the nineties with Epic Care, they've created a Windows application that
- ▶ 58:24 David Rosenthal Any PC user can fire up on their Windows machine and use a graphical interface for their patient interactions and their EMR, and
- ▶ 59:59 Ben Gilbert However, where we were comparing it before was Microsoft.
- ▶ 1:00:07 David Rosenthal So only a couple of years after Microsoft.
- ▶ 1:00:09 Ben Gilbert Four years after Microsoft.
- ▶ 1:00:15 Ben Gilbert In 1995, Microsoft
- ▶ 1:00:25 Ben Gilbert You know, the primary reason here is one is a small vertical focused healthcare company and one is creating the horizontal platform of the future, but it's worth contextualizing businesses going well by making sure that we stop making the…
- ▶ 1:00:43 David Rosenthal Well, I think I want to come back to it later in the episode and in analysis because yes, Epic is and always will be constrained by being a vertical software provider instead of a horizontal software provider like Microsoft or Google or…
- ▶ 1:25:05 David Rosenthal We need to model out in Excel exactly what Kaiser's transaction flow is gonna be throughout the day in the system and how our system will process it and prove to them that we have far in excess bandwidth capability to handle their system…
- ▶ 1:33:54 David Rosenthal First is Judy's son, by this point in time, is actually working at Microsoft in Redmond as a developer.
- ▶ 1:34:03 David Rosenthal And Judy and Carl had always been inspired by Microsoft's way of doing things, and so one time when Judy's visiting her son, she's like, hey, can you go give me a tour of the campus in Redmond?
- ▶ 1:34:48 David Rosenthal So Judy comes back and basically copies the campus strategy of Microsoft almost exactly.
- ▶ 1:35:23 David Rosenthal Or I guess maybe Redmond was bucolic before Microsoft, but he got it built up, but.
- ▶ 1:35:28 David Rosenthal Just like Microsoft kind of owns Redmond, Epic owns Verona, spiritually.
- ▶ 1:35:36 Ben Gilbert And what is very different about it than Microsoft is it is not utilitarian, the way that the Microsoft buildings were.
- ▶ 1:37:16 David Rosenthal And then they also hired the firm that built a lot of the Redmond campus for Microsoft.
- ▶ 1:49:11 David Rosenthal I know we keep making the comparison, and it's a direct one with the campus here, too, but the company that this reminds me the most of is those early days of Microsoft.
- ▶ 1:49:20 David Rosenthal This is exactly what being at Microsoft in the eighties and nineties was like when we talked to people doing that research.
- ▶ 1:50:20 David Rosenthal So, we mentioned that Judy's son was a programmer at Microsoft, and that's how she went to visit him, part of the inspiration for the campus.
- ▶ 1:50:29 David Rosenthal His involvement in the company actually predates him becoming a programmer at Microsoft or even an adult.
- ▶ 1:59:22 Ben Gilbert It's this kind of amazing bundling strategy that certainly reminds me of the Microsoft episode.
- ▶ 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
- ▶ 3:07:57 David Rosenthal Another thought exercise to kind of come at this question is if in some alternate universe, Microsoft or Google or Amazon, or I don't know, maybe even Berkshire Hathaway, maybe Apple, if they could acquire this company,
- ▶ 3:08:22 Ben Gilbert That's four percent of Apple or Microsoft.
- ▶ 3:08:59 David Rosenthal You think Google or Microsoft or whomever wouldn't pay a lot of money to own that?
- ▶ 3:33:56 David Rosenthal Well, and should that happen, they still have the Microsoft playbook, which they absolutely run.
- ▶ 3:39:03 David Rosenthal So one is Microsoft and Nuance.
- ▶ 3:39:06 David Rosenthal Microsoft bought a company called Nuance a few years ago.
- ▶ 3:45:16 Ben Gilbert Microsoft Office.
- ▶ 3:45:18 David Rosenthal Microsoft Office.
- ▶ 3:45:20 Ben Gilbert Or Windows, actually.
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:12:58 Ben Gilbert And on top of that, someone was tracking some one-off rebates in a separate Excel file.
- ▶ 3:48:34 Ben Gilbert For listeners out there, I'd spend a good amount of time with Soma Soma Segar, who is the former Microsoft exec now at Madrona, who is a co-owner with Satya Nadella of the Seattle Major League cricket team.
- ▶ 4:25:54 Ben Gilbert He is, of course, a partner at Madrona Venture Group here in Seattle, and a former Microsoft exec who helped us on those episodes, too.
Rolex (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:55:06 Ben Gilbert So the price value curve that it would follow actually looked a lot more like the early PC from the Microsoft episode we did.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 3:18 Ben Gilbert If you're excited at all about Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, or even any of the chips that Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple are making,
- ▶ 41:45 Ben Gilbert The sort of family of IBM with Intel processors and eventually running Microsoft operating systems.
- ▶ 1:06:03 David Rosenthal So that's like, I don't know, Excel or like Figma for chip designers.
- ▶ 1:43:44 David Rosenthal And today they're not only trusted by startups, but also by more mature enterprises like Bloomberg and Microsoft and Electronic Arts.
- ▶ 2:10:29 David Rosenthal It's, I don't know, some company that's not a tech company somewhere in the world running their Outlook server on Office
- ▶ 2:10:29 David Rosenthal It's, I don't know, some company that's not a tech company somewhere in the world running their Outlook server on Office
- ▶ 2:12:35 David Rosenthal Microsoft CEO.
- ▶ 2:14:48 Ben Gilbert Up here in Seattle, there's a lot of people spinning out of Microsoft, starting companies.
- ▶ 2:14:51 Ben Gilbert Classically, people coming out of Microsoft would always want to build platforms, because Microsoft was the platform company, and they would always
- ▶ 2:19:22 Ben Gilbert I probably wouldn't say it is above Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, in terms of pure value creation in the world.
- ▶ 2:20:13 David Rosenthal Compare it to all the FANG companies and Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:20:16 David Rosenthal Those are very, very strong moats, but we've seen all of those, you know, they've changed their new companies, they've emerged, they've, you know, Microsoft fell and then now it came back with new strategy and Facebook's not that old and…
- ▶ 2:22:54 Ben Gilbert I'd say it's probably just competing with Microsoft there.
IKEA (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:22:24 Ben Gilbert They power companies like OpenAI, Atlassian, Microsoft, Figma, and they process over a trillion events per day, and they've got a great engineering blog on how they do this.
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 22:03 Ben Gilbert Yeah, and I think Microsoft was one of them, too.
- ▶ 38:25 Ben Gilbert If you go back two, three, four years, you're gonna have to go to Oracle, you're gonna have to go to Microsoft, you're gonna have to buy, like, enterprise grade, super proprietary systems to do this.
- ▶ 1:04:09 Ben Gilbert Tying this back to our Microsoft episode, this would have been, what, early 2004?
- ▶ 1:04:21 Ben Gilbert He was still the chief architect and still chairman of the board, but it's sort of this, like, post-DOJ time for Microsoft where Bill is just technically focused and can do things like go speak at Harvard.
- ▶ 1:04:33 David Rosenthal It is amazing how much influence Microsoft had on Facebook and on Mark.
- ▶ 1:45:21 Ben Gilbert Very Microsoftian.
- ▶ 1:45:23 David Rosenthal Very Microsoftian.
- ▶ 2:00:46 David Rosenthal So in August of 2006, they do the first partnership with Microsoft.
- ▶ 2:00:53 David Rosenthal It's funny that, you know, the Microsoft Facebook relationship in some ways is sort of a precursor to the Microsoft OpenAI relationship today and how that gets built.
- ▶ 2:01:04 David Rosenthal Microsoft says, we're gonna take over selling all of the display ad inventory domestically within the U.S. for Facebook, and we will give you a guaranteed CPM that we can sell, and then we are gonna use this to help bootstrap our online…
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 2:01:37 David Rosenthal Microsoft knows they need some scale to bootstrap up and get started with both the ad business, but also just like the online services division period.
- ▶ 2:01:51 Ben Gilbert Suddenly Microsoft's problem is not how do we find enough inventory to sell?
- ▶ 2:02:00 David Rosenthal Yes, and Microsoft have been trying to do this.
- ▶ 2:02:46 David Rosenthal In 2006, with this Microsoft partnership, that jumps to forty eight million dollars in revenue.
- ▶ 2:02:57 David Rosenthal And then the next year in 2007, again, I think almost all of this is Microsoft, that goes to a hundred and fifty three million dollars in revenue.
- ▶ 2:03:30 David Rosenthal Oh, and by the way, in the second iteration of this Microsoft partnership, which we will talk about in just a minute, it included an investment from Microsoft at a 15 billion dollar