Microsoft, every mention
276 scenes (2022), the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
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every year 2022 anyone Ben Gilbert 1015David Rosenthal 995Steve Ballmer 163Ben Thompson 45Brendan Eich 21Jensen Huang 7Emily Chang 7David Senra 6Dara Khosrowshahi 6Mitch Lasky 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 13:17 David Rosenthal A, we need to do a Microsoft series at some point.
- ▶ 13:20 David Rosenthal We've talked a lot about and around Microsoft on the show, but we've never...
- ▶ 13:25 David Rosenthal Covered Microsoft and Apple.
- ▶ 13:27 David Rosenthal We've not done Microsoft.
- ▶ 14:37 David Rosenthal One, you know, for Microsoft, for Apple.
- ▶ 14:59 Ben Gilbert I even have a lot of fear around, like, doing a three-part Microsoft series where, like, are people going to be like, I'm just out for the next three months?
- ▶ 15:28 Ben Gilbert It's like, oh, you're doing a three-part Microsoft thing while I'm out for Q one on acquired.
- ▶ 1:07:10 David Rosenthal And then we get shared within the company, like in a company, slack or teams or just friend networks within, within a company.
- ▶ 1:14:30 Ben Gilbert Which, by the way, I think that's why I'm so drawn to the NVIDIA story, is because that is what they, sort of like, these bet the company big innovations, or like Apple with the Mac and the iPod and the iPhone, or Microsoft with Windows…
- ▶ 1:14:30 Ben Gilbert Which, by the way, I think that's why I'm so drawn to the NVIDIA story, is because that is what they, sort of like, these bet the company big innovations, or like Apple with the Mac and the iPod and the iPhone, or Microsoft with Windows…
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 14:12 Ben Gilbert I think you are still doing it while you're at Microsoft in
- ▶ 16:01 Ben Thompson A very popular choice back then is Microsoft making the Zoom player.
- ▶ 16:06 Ben Thompson Well, why did Microsoft do that?
- ▶ 16:14 Ben Thompson So I think probably Microsoft, either Microsoft or Facebook are probably my two biggest successes as far as an analyst.
- ▶ 16:22 Ben Thompson You know, I think particularly Microsoft, where I think I very clearly articulated what their issues were, and also by understanding those issues, the sort of organization they were, the sort of capabilities they were,
- ▶ 16:35 Ben Thompson And not just the weaknesses that entailed, but also the strengths that entailed where they should go and the sort of strategy they should adopt.
- ▶ 16:43 Ben Thompson And that's basically the strategy they have adopted, and obviously it's tremendously successful.
- ▶ 16:51 David Rosenthal One of the things we thought about a lot was we are not journalists, and we came at this from having worked in the industries that we're talking about, and obviously you did too, having been at Microsoft, Apple, and plenty of other places.
- ▶ 18:21 Ben Thompson I sort of felt like it because I couldn't write about Microsoft because I was some peon there.
- ▶ 18:24 Ben Thompson I think that of my work experience, the Microsoft bit was certainly the most impactful, not just because of what I learned about Microsoft, but just what you learn about big companies, I think in general.
- ▶ 19:15 Ben Thompson But they had to build a team to get apps for Windows eight.
- ▶ 20:09 Ben Thompson So I was at Microsoft and, um,
- ▶ 20:25 Ben Thompson I mean, and yet Microsoft was always a bit of an upset.
- ▶ 26:47 Ben Gilbert So I want to go forward to you're leaving Microsoft.
- ▶ 27:01 Ben Thompson Well, so to go to the back of the Y trip, there was an aspect about going to Microsoft.
- ▶ 27:11 Ben Thompson And can I make changes at Microsoft?
- ▶ 27:15 Ben Thompson Really, I learned a lot from Microsoft as opposed to the other way around.
- ▶ 40:24 Ben Thompson So in the meantime, once I left, I was really looking for a job at Microsoft where I could still blog.
- ▶ 40:29 Ben Gilbert Isn't that all jobs at Microsoft?
- ▶ 40:32 Ben Thompson But I couldn't write about Microsoft.
- ▶ 41:26 Ben Thompson Couple weeks later, I'm at Microsoft, and I get an email from him pointing out that I'd made a grammatical error.
- ▶ 43:37 Ben Thompson The next day I get reached out by the head of strategy at Microsoft or a week later.
- ▶ 44:08 Ben Thompson But fortunately I turned him down, but all this is a circuitous way to say, I did feel I needed to leave Microsoft.
- ▶ 44:16 Ben Thompson Number one, I couldn't write about Microsoft and it was stuff that people at the highest levels cared about.
- ▶ 1:01:05 Ben Thompson So I had the lowest hanging fruit in the world to sort of pick, right?
- ▶ 1:15:38 Ben Thompson You know, I think that's the other company I've mostly been pretty right about over the years, along with Microsoft or probably my two
- ▶ 1:23:17 Ben Thompson Well, then Microsoft was the other thing.
- ▶ 1:23:40 Ben Thompson This is what Microsoft should do.
- ▶ 1:23:43 Ben Thompson They're not doomed to irrelevance.
- ▶ 1:28:35 Ben Thompson Like I remember I was in, um, there's some meeting at Microsoft
- ▶ 1:42:42 Ben Thompson Number two, you know, Microsoft sort of bread and butter has been, look, you've been working us for a long time.
- ▶ 1:42:49 Ben Thompson We're going to package it at like, suddenly you're not just paying for on-premise windows.
- ▶ 1:42:52 Ben Thompson It also includes Azure credits and
- ▶ 1:42:52 Ben Thompson It also includes Azure credits and
- ▶ 1:42:54 Ben Thompson We're going to be able to attribute that to our numbers.
- ▶ 1:42:56 Ben Thompson And now you can sort of move pieces over and we'll help you do it, which I think is exactly what they should do.
- ▶ 1:43:14 Ben Thompson And, and Microsoft is just really cleaned up in that market.
- ▶ 1:43:18 Ben Thompson We're the known entity.
- ▶ 1:43:19 Ben Thompson We can help you move over.
- ▶ 1:43:30 Ben Thompson AWS is the Microsoft word of cloud providers in that they have an absolute absurd number of features and the interface is pretty terrible, but every single customer is completely dependent on one of those features.
- ▶ 1:45:02 Ben Thompson it's the Microsoft strategy.
- ▶ 1:45:03 Ben Thompson Amazon has a lot of old Microsoft people in it.
- ▶ 1:45:13 Ben Thompson Like Microsoft was the originator.
- ▶ 1:45:15 Ben Thompson Microsoft's always been the best platform administrator.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 1:46:10 Ben Thompson Geography is what saved Microsoft because when Microsoft was in the dumps, if they were in Silicon Valley, all their best talent would have left and gone to work for other companies.
- ▶ 1:46:24 Ben Thompson And so they stayed at Microsoft and they were miserable and they bitched and they wrote snarky blog posts about the company.
- ▶ 1:46:29 Ben Thompson But then when Nadella came in and sort of refocused the company, they had this foundation of talent that the HP's of the world, the Yahoo's of the world had long since lost.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 1:03:36 David Rosenthal and then I and Ron will recognize as revenue today my projected cash flows based on this Excel spreadsheet for the next 20 years.
- ▶ 2:12:43 Ben Gilbert If you think about what's a company like Microsoft have, 70,000 employees, and you think about how much money they need every two weeks to pay all those people.
- ▶ 2:13:16 Ben Gilbert And like, if Microsoft asks me, can you loan me some money for the next 24 hours, I promise I'll give it back to you with this tiny amount of interest, and
Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired
- ▶ 1:42:15 Miles Grimshaw Amazon, Microsoft, Shopify, Adobe, Square, like they're all crossover.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 1:22:20 Jason Calacanis It's like making Microsoft Word, one point
- ▶ 1:27:04 Jason Calacanis Outlook support.
- ▶ 1:57:35 David Rosenthal It was the Forethought PowerPoint.
- ▶ 1:57:41 David Rosenthal Then it was Microsoft Silicon Valley.
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 16:34 David Rosenthal And Forethought were the makers of a little Mac application that then became a Windows application called PowerPoint.
- ▶ 16:34 David Rosenthal And Forethought were the makers of a little Mac application that then became a Windows application called PowerPoint.
- ▶ 16:45 David Rosenthal Forethought, of course, got acquired by Microsoft, absorbed into the office juggernaut, and that their campus there in the Quadris office complex became Microsoft's original Silicon Valley
- ▶ 16:45 David Rosenthal Forethought, of course, got acquired by Microsoft, absorbed into the office juggernaut, and that their campus there in the Quadris office complex became Microsoft's original Silicon Valley
- ▶ 17:21 David Rosenthal Who wouldn't want to be right in the thick of Microsoft Silicon Valley Business Unit Outpost
- ▶ 17:28 David Rosenthal But TVI, technology venture investors, they had the unique honor and what made them single-handedly really part of the then top tier of venture capital firms is they were the only venture capital investor in Microsoft.
- ▶ 17:48 Ben Gilbert One million dollars to own five percent of the company.
- ▶ 17:52 Ben Gilbert I don't believe they raised another dollar until the IPO.
- ▶ 17:55 Ben Gilbert Imagine owning five percent of Microsoft at IPO.
- ▶ 18:39 David Rosenthal And so both of these firms, the founders and the senior partners of these firms, TVI made all this money on Microsoft.
- ▶ 18:50 Ben Gilbert , it was Dave Marquardt, right, who made that investment in Microsoft and was sort of the leader of TVI?
- ▶ 24:56 David Rosenthal This is right as the Microsoft deal is going down.
- ▶ 27:54 David Rosenthal They did Microsoft.
- ▶ 28:29 Ben Gilbert I think Microsoft had gone public.
- ▶ 29:07 Ben Gilbert Before we actually get into the formation of Benchmark here, it is worth lingering on Dave and TVI and the Microsoft investment for one more moment.
- ▶ 29:15 Ben Gilbert When I was looking up what the terms of the deal were for the Microsoft investment, there's some interesting color shared by Dave about his style of investing, and you can see that the seeds of Benchmark really were present in TVI's…
- ▶ 32:35 David Rosenthal And Bruce is like, well, Bob, I'm honored, but I don't have the Microsoft money here.
- ▶ 1:12:03 David Rosenthal And the company ends up getting sold to Microsoft in a good outcome.
- ▶ 1:50:23 Ben Gilbert Rich famously started Expedia by spinning that out of Microsoft and then started Zillow where Benchmark was an investor and Rich for a long time was a venture partner with
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 37:24 Ben Gilbert Which was a Microsoft thing before.
- ▶ 38:10 David Rosenthal Let's take this technical assistant idea from Microsoft.
- ▶ 39:58 Ben Gilbert And at Microsoft, when they encountered this problem a decade or two earlier, they invented the program management role.
- ▶ 40:54 David Rosenthal Was the Microsoft PM program, and it was program management, not product management, but was that the origin of the modern Silicon Valley product manager?
- ▶ 41:06 Ben Gilbert Microsoft considers product management a marketing function.
- ▶ 41:11 Ben Gilbert So it's owned in the marketing org and is much more go to market oriented, whereas Microsoft's program manager is in the engineering org.
- ▶ 41:35 David Rosenthal So that's what most companies would do, even incredibly successful, brilliant, smart companies and founders like Microsoft, Bill Gates, et cetera.
- ▶ 49:43 Ben Gilbert So of course they start all these meetings with the six pagers and the PR FAQs where we're not doing PowerPoint slides.
- ▶ 1:18:13 David Rosenthal So when S three launched, probably at the same time that you were playing around with it, a truly world-class, fantastic engineer at Microsoft at the time, by the name of James Hamilton, who's now an S team member and SVP distinguished…
- ▶ 1:20:13 David Rosenthal Could you imagine back in 2006, let alone even probably today, Oracle or Microsoft or IBM or HP or you name it.
- ▶ 1:24:51 Ben Gilbert A hundred and twenty billion dollars a year of revenue has already moved to the cloud of at least Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.
- ▶ 1:30:17 Ben Gilbert That platform is not Windows of the past, or the App Store of the current day, where it was just sort of coming.
- ▶ 1:30:37 Ben Gilbert And the unfortunate thing for Microsoft and for Google, who really started at this platform as a service layer, was you basically didn't get the startups because you didn't have a mature platform yet that people were excited to build on…
- ▶ 1:31:49 Ben Gilbert They had this big partnership with Microsoft.
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