Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Three times the average or something like that?
A Something like that. Why? It's about basketball. Get out and get back into your seat. Don't miss the action. We, we started out with a lot more concession stands, and then we said, no, no, let's just do this completely frictionless. So if you register your face, you just walk in, grab what you want, and leave. If not, you can just tap your phone on the way in, grab your stuff and leave. Uh, there's no checkout. We don't serve eclectic food, little everything, same thing everywhere. Why? We don't want you walking around having to look for your favorite food. No, you're going to get the same great stuff everywhere. Turns out, 85% of what gets bought is in five items anyway. It's a hamburger, it's a hot dog, it's, uh, nachos, uh, chicken tenders, and I don't know. I'm not remembering off the top of my head.
AI assessment note: “Something like that. Why? It's about basketball. Get out and get back into your seat.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q It is reasonable to call you the founder of Microsoft's enterprise business. That is not a narrative that is often discussed. And we wanted to ask you, how do you feel about the fact that it basically defines the business today?
A Yeah. Uh, interesting. Uh, very kind fathering something. I feel good about that. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. Of course, there are many fathers to the enterprise business at Microsoft, and I feel both good and bad about it because the truth is Microsoft started out as a consumer company and we built a very important consumer business. That success translated into the opening to go build an enterprise business. And one of my regrets is we lost the consumer muscle along the way, because I think the ability to be ultra ultra, I mean, we're a great company, Microsoft's great company, but to have both of those muscles totally firing, if I'd been able to sustain that consumer muscle and, and I had some ideas about why, why that didn't happen, but the enterprise muscle. Very big and very strong. And, uh, so I'm very proud of that. And the fact that, you know, it's also funny when you say consumer and enterprise. What does it mean really to say enterprise? Sometimes it can sound just like backend stuff. And the truth of the matter is Microsoft office slash M three 65, whatever exactly it's called today is super important. It was the foundation for having permission to be in the enterprise. And yet it's a product that sits right there in front of users. So the question is, do you think about users or consumer, and do you think about enterprise, or do you think about IT? …
AI assessment note: “I feel both good and bad about it because the truth is Microsoft started out”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 4.15
Q Why did you move him to Server and Tools?
A I thought it would be great to, we had Chi. So we, we could probably move him. I thought it would be important to give him other experiences to try to get him right to, you know, be able to be CEO. Cause he was on a list of three or four internals at that time who said he'd been on a list of guys we had been talking about. Cause we did an annual succession plan thing. Uh, you know, succession plan has two candidates. It's what happens if you get hit by a bus and what happens if you get served to term, whatever term feels like. And they're different people, right? If you get, Satya gets by bus, if Satya serves another five years, it's probably a different person. Um, no, I think that's true in most, most companies, you got to think about it differently anyway. Uh, so I said, hey, get them another experience. You know, he hasn't worked in apps, hasn't worked in server and tools, and it was kind of a good time to sort of switch things around. You know, Bob wound up obviously being super successful because Bob was running, uh, uh, server and tools at the time, and, uh, I love Bob. Bob's one of my favorite guys I've ever worked with.
AI assessment note: “important to give him other experiences to try to get him right to... be CEO”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 4.15
Q And are the Clippers and the Intuit Dome fully paid off at this point?
A Uh, the Clippers are fully paid off. I paid them off the day I bought them. Uh, that's not true. Uh, I didn't want to sell stocks at the time, so I borrowed some money, which is long paid off. Intuit Dome, we borrowed some money against Intuit Dome, so I don't owe any money on it. Oh, that's not true. I owe some, I had some margin debt, uh, that I used to, but again, it's just a timing thing. I didn't want to sell stock, so took some margin debt, which as dividends come in, I'm reducing the margin debt. Uh, but the building itself has debt on it. Why? Because to sell the building, let's say something was to happen to me and Connie, uh, my wife had to sell, sell it. It obviously has a lower value. The buyer would have to come up with less cash because it has debt on it. So call it worth X billion. Right.
AI assessment note: “the Clippers are fully paid off... but the building itself has debt on it.”
Partly raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 3.70
Q Yeah, in the old world, IBM would have accrued that sort of platform benefit. Did they see these?
A They were selling a lot of computers and making profit also. They would have been making more profit than we were at the time, just the way pricing worked. There was a little twisty in here though. I should throw at you if you're curious, these things had something called the BIOS basic input output system, which was the lowest, lowest layer of firmware sort of first level software built into the hardware and IBM had its own BIOS and some applications became BIOS dependent. And so then the question is who was going to do an IBM compatible BIOS? We weren't going to get into that game. We didn't want to have that Intellectual property, other arguments, but there were people then, that was important.
AI assessment note: “They were selling a lot of computers and making profit also.”
Partly raw tape
D 3 · C 3 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.00
Q Yeah, I was gonna ask. Do you think mobile would have played out differently if you'd taken this approach with mobile?
A We did break it out, but we constrained it with Windows. We broke Windows NT out and constrained it with Windows. It worked fine because Windows belong. So, you know, how you do Those incubations. And in this case, I just said, look, it'll, it'll get probably subsumed. I don't know. Partly Ray wanted, you know, Ray was Ray wanted some operating control over the thing and putting it under Muglia would have made it harder for Ray. And, you know, obviously it was less palatable and I'm not sure Cutler would have gone to If it was all, you know, all in server and tools, but, um, it was the right, it was the right thing to do, even though it was, quote, part of the future of servers, you know, it was the future of server and tools, essentially.
AI assessment note: “We did break it out, but we constrained it with Windows.”
