The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 235 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gilbert: Android destroyed Microsoft's mobile business
“Which would be the very thing that would sort of destroy their mobile business.”
Rosenthal: 1994 Microsoft consent decree banned tying but allowed feature integration
“The next year, in July, 1994, Microsoft just settles with them, rather than going to trial. They're like, alright, look, we just wanna be done, we're gonna settle with you DOJ, we're gonna be done with the US federal government here, and in that settlement, th…”
DOJ Remedy Mandated Gates and Ballmer Work at Separate Breakup Entities
“Steve Ballmer had to work at one company, and Bill Gates had to work at the other. They could not work at the same company. Each of those two, after they picked their companies, had to divest all of their shares From the one that was not their employer, so the…”
Gilbert: Microsoft achieved 75% gross margins selling Windows via OEM channels
“But when they're selling through an OEM channel, their gross margin was 75%, because you just ship the bits to the OS once, and then the PC manufacturer takes it from there.”
Rosenthal: Steve Ballmer called Vista the worst moment of his CEO tenure
“In that conversation that we had with Steve, where he, you know, made the comment about my acquisitions, my mistakes, we just lost money on the bad ones, the genesis of that conversation was about Vista. You know, he was reflecting, he said, that probably was …”
Gilbert: More profits accrued to Microsoft's partner ecosystem than to Microsoft
“There are far more profits who have accrued to Microsoft's independent software vendors, resellers, retail partners, than just to Microsoft itself.”
Gilbert: Cloud computing represents a 30- to 40-year secular growth wave
“It's probably a 3040 year wave that they get to keep riding.”
Gilbert: Microsoft had right ideas but poor execution on Zune and Bing
“And in this era, Microsoft had a lot of the right ideas, with a lot of the wrong timing and execution on everything from the Zune to Bing.”
Rosenthal: Azure represents at least half of Microsoft's $3.5T market cap
“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.”
Gilbert: Companies struggle to enter businesses with lower profit margins
“There's this great general rule that it's really hard for any business to enter a lower margin business than the one they are currently in.”
Rosenthal: Ballmer positioned Nadella in Server & Tools to become CEO
“It was, let's get this guy the right exposure to the right important things that he could be CEO of this company someday in the not very distant future.”
Gilbert: 'Embrace and extend' removes product-market fit risk by adopting proven behaviors
“The embrace and extend thing is actually a brilliant business strategy. There's already a whole bunch of people who love this thing. We want to embrace that new behavior. There's sort of no product market fit risk because we can clearly already see it happenin…”
Rosenthal: Windows XP sold over 500 million copies across its lifetime
“XP was a huge success. Sells over half a billion copies. Gets used over its lifetime on probably a billion PCs.”
Gilbert: Large external ecosystem dependencies make technology resets much harder
“The more externalities you have depending on you, the more difficult it is to reset, and usually a next generation technology requires you to hit a big reset button.”
Gilbert: Free ad-supported search makes 3x to 5x more per user than software
“If I could take seven billion people in the world and sell them Windows, or I can take seven billion people in the world and have them use my search engine for free and then make the money from the advertisers, I'm gonna make three to five X more money from th…”
Gilbert: Microsoft killed new products because of Windows-centric DNA
“You look at Courier, you look at Kin in mobile, you look at all these things that they would let them get so far, and then they'd be like, ah, you guys don't get it. Windows is the center of everything, and if it doesn't make Windows look great or it competes …”
Gilbert: Windows Phone Lost When Verizon Backed Motorola Droid Over Microsoft
“I think the biggest moment when the door really shut is when Verizon freaked out after the Apple and AT&T deal and said, we need an answer, and they decided that answer was Droid, and they put like a gajillion dollars behind the Droid advertising campaign.”
Gilbert: Microsoft P/E multiple compressed from 75x to 14x under Ballmer
“The P.E. Multiple went from 75 X to 14 X. The market cap when he was announced went from six hundred billion to when he left at three hundred and thirty billion.”
Gilbert: Microsoft used its browser for defense, while Google used Chrome for offense
“Microsoft built a browser, had a bunch of share, and then kind of looked around and said, we don't really know what to do with it. I guess we'll use it for defense? And Google built a browser and said, we know exactly what to do with this, and they used it for…”
Software makers must target platform shifts rather than fight entrenched incumbents
“You kind of have to counter position. If one, two, three is the best spreadsheet out there for the current technology generation, you just can't compete with them. You need to wait for the next big leap forward in order to find a new competitive vector.”
Microsoft retained full non-exclusive licensing rights to DOS from IBM
“Microsoft retained the rights To own DOS and to own their languages and license it and them to anyone else they wanted at any price on any terms.”
Lotus generated more revenue than Microsoft in the late 1980s
“There are a couple of years in the late eighties where Lotus has more revenue than Microsoft. And is valued higher.”
Microsoft surpassed IBM in market capitalization in January 1993
“January, 93, the crowning moment, it happens, Microsoft passes IBM in market cap”
Microsoft became the first software company to pass $1 billion in revenue
“In fiscal, 1990, the year that Windows three point O shipped, Microsoft does 1.2 billion dollars in revenue, making them the first software company ever to pass a billion dollars in revenue.”
Microsoft did not pass IBM in annual revenue until 2015
“Microsoft would not eclipse IBM in revenue, you mentioned market cap, David, but in revenue until the year 2015.”
Microsoft was the first software firm to reach $10 billion in revenue
“Fiscal 95. So this is the 12 months ending in June before Windows 95 comes out. Microsoft did 5.9 billion dollars in revenue. Fiscal 96, they did 8.7. Fiscal 97, when Windows 95 is really going, they do twelve billion dollars in revenue. First software company…”
Microsoft dropped 'running Microsoft software' from its vision due to DOJ scrutiny
“And then the part that got left off later when the DOJ started sniffing around was running Microsoft software, but that is the vision here.”
Technology Venture Investors provided Microsoft's only external equity dilution
“Spoiler alert, this is the only dilution that they would ever take.”
Microsoft bought full rights to QDOS for $75,000
“Later on, before this all gets announced and the PC ships, Microsoft would pay Seattle computer products another 50,000 dollars for full rights to own 86 QDOS, sell and license it to anybody else indefinitely. So I believe the total amount of dollars that chan…”
IBM paid Microsoft a $430,000 fixed fee for DOS with no royalties
“IBM paid Microsoft 75,000 dollars for testing and consultation. 45,000 dollars for DOS. 45. And 310,000 dollars for an array of sixteen-bit language interpreters and compilers. So all told, bundled together, that is 430,000 dollars fixed that IBM paid Microsof…”
Microsoft had no enterprise software sales experience until the mid-1990s
“The Microsoft you know today, as late as the mid-nineties, really had no idea how to sell or build software for businesses.”
Windows 95 sold 7 million copies in its first month
“Windows 95 comes out, sells a million copies in the first week, seven million copies in the first month.”
Bill Gates personally absorbed 3.5% equity dilution to hire Steve Ballmer
“In fact, it created some tension with Paul Allen, where Bill asked Paul if they could go to five percent. Paul said sure, and then Bill actually offered him eight and a half percent, and Paul got upset, and Bill said, I'll eat the three and a half percent. It …”
Microsoft Excel was the world's first graphical spreadsheet program
“Excel is the world's first graphical spreadsheet program, and that's why it wins, and that's why it's so important.”
Nvidia functions fundamentally as a platform company akin to Microsoft
“They do make semiconductors, and they do make data center gear, but really they are a platform company. The right analogy for NVIDIA also is Microsoft. They make the operating system. They make the programming environment. They make many of the applications.”
Generative AI and cloud compute convergence is Nvidia's greatest growth tailwind
“And the combination of those three things turns out to be basically the single greatest moment that could ever happen for NVIDIA.”
Lasky: Cloud game streaming is now viable due to bandwidth and scale
“So with the new xCloud platform, and I was a pioneering investor in this with Gaikai back in the day, and it wasn't really economically viable, but now with scale and, Moore's law and all these other things we, and bandwidth improvements, we can now really do …”
Gilbert: D. E. Shaw recognized the internet's potential years before Microsoft
“DE Shaw, I think, was actually before Microsoft in realizing, okay, the Internet's gonna be huge by a handful of years.”
Rosenthal: AWS market share exceeds Google Cloud and Azure combined
“AWS is growing at 37% annually on a seventy five billion dollar base. Google and Microsoft are growing at 45%, but their market share combined is still significantly less than Amazon.”
Nvidia Signed $500M/Year Xbox GPU Deal with Microsoft
“Five hundred million dollar a year deal for Nvidia to supply the graphics for the Xbox with a two hundred million dollar advance.”
Mauboussin: 2001's Top 10 Companies Excluding Microsoft Lost $460B Over 20 Years
“So if you took Microsoft out, so you bought the other nine turns out their market capitalizations are down It's about four hundred and sixty billion dollars in the 20 year period.”
Microsoft Invested an Additional $2B in OpenAI in 2021
“So after that, Microsoft invests another two billion dollars in OpenAI, which seemed like a lot of money at the time.”
Microsoft Announced $10B OpenAI Investment in January 2023
“January 23, when OpenAI hits a hundred million registered users for ChatGPT, Microsoft announces they are investing another ten billion dollars in OpenAI. And says that they now own 49% of the for-profit entity.”
Microsoft Originally Created the XMLHttpRequest API for Internet Explorer
“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.”
Writely Founder Sam Schillace Is Now the Deputy CTO of Microsoft
“He would go on to manage all of Docs and Sheets, and I think he actually managed Maps at some point, too. He is now the deputy CTO of Microsoft.”
Gmail Launched When Hotmail Offered Just Two Megabytes of Storage
“At the time, Hotmail, which as you said, Microsoft owns,
Had two megabytes of free storage, and Yahoo Mail had four megabytes.”
Ballmer: I directly managed engineers to ship Windows 1.0
“I actually managed the engineers. Because the guy who was doing it wasn't being successful and we had to ship the thing.”
Ballmer: Microsoft's upgrade model threatened to cut company revenue in half
“We were selling upgrades and new licenses. And upgrades were, I can't, less than half the price of new licenses. So what does that mean? The company was headed to a world where its revenue was half of its existing revenue.”