Steven Sinofsky

“And the most interesting thing about it is the group that's most excited are mostly the mathematicians. And they're the ones, and so that actually confuses everybody, because if you're of the school of the people who are like, it's gonna put people out of work…”

“Three years ago, I tried to get Cornell to use AI in, in freshman writing. When the first, and they just stopped talking to me.”

“Like first you have this, you have a agent, which is far as I can tell right now is also a new word for program that takes a very long time to run and might not finish.”

“And in fact, many, many of the newly announced, you know, headless agent APIs are just look up. And they're just, you basically have a new interface to the old way to look something up.”

“The most sticky thing you could do is actually collect money from a customer. And if you're collecting money, it turns out it's really, really hard for them to stop sending you money.”

“The software that runs all state is older than me. And it's not going anywhere.”

“If you take SAP out of a large automobile manufacturer, there's no automobile manufacturer left. Or Walmart. Like the company just evaporates. Because the company is defined, not just by purchasing the software, not even by just using it, but by how they codif…”

“Startups look at enterprise software and they think about it in terms of startup scale... And that's fine until you have a 100,000 people in 20 countries with different national laws and policies about business expense and all of those, and then you overlay co…”

“In enterprise software, the two most frequently used features exist in no enterprise software natively. It's export to Excel and export as CSV and or PDF you pick.”

“This notion of exception handling is just the root of the challenge with agents, which is almost everything interesting in an enterprise is an exception.”

“When we get through sort of the One point O version of this. We're going to get to a new version where people are like comfortable letting AI do or decide things because they realize it's adding a level of predictability and repeatability to their enterprise.”

“Except I can assure you contracts will get longer. And more sophisticated, and encompass way more sets of scenarios than a person ever could.”

“And I think that, that AI is the first thing to come along that really taps into that unstructured information in a company.”

“This middleware layer, it's always, always very unstable. It looks great in a network hierarchy diagram of the OSI levels of networking, but it's just never that stable.”

“The universal truth for enterprise software is the most difficult thing to do that happens to be the dumbest is to attempt to just compete head on with an existing category. And by head on, I mean, not just the same category, but doing it the same way. The big…”

“The one thing that established players won't do is disturb their existing product line and go to market. So they absolutely will just be bolting AI on top of their existing product. They won't be getting rid of it. They won't stop working on it. They won't do …”

“Well, certainly network effects outside of a company are extremely difficult for a bunch of clients and security reasons. But the biggest network effect in enterprise software is inside of a company.”

“And this, the thing that's not different about AI, and that agents don't fix, that nothing fix, is that any enterprise of a thousand people or more, or that's older than 10 years, is just a mass of stuff that's sitting there waiting to be integrated. And you c…”

“AI might be the first time that inside a company search can actually provide immediate value.”

“So, I actually think it, that whole discussion about headless, for me, made the Sasspocalypse seem even dumber Than it was already, and it was already dumb.”

“Now, someone might come up with a very clever pricing scheme, and that agents, you know, somehow cost less, because maybe for the first five years they're read only, or they, they're always tied to a person or something, but it is another seat. There is no way…”

“And I, last I checked, there are way more lawyers today than there were 30 years ago, and they all are, every human lawyer you talk to is a computerized lawyer.”

“It's just absurd to think you're going to vibe code your way to like SAP.”

“The biggest problem right now is everybody is trying to figure out the economics of all of this when they're off by at least an order of magnitude on how big the opportunity is.”

“Where we are with agents is just at this step where you think you need 50 and the abstraction layer is such that we're dividing up in these really small pieces with one super smart person coordinating them all and pretty soon that, that whole thing is just gon…”

“Until the whole, like, non-reproducible, non-random element of this AI stuff goes away, the doing stuff is gonna get very costly.”

“Right now, you have to be an absolute, you have to be a rocket scientist and the growth marketing person to create 42 agents and spin them all up and do all of this stuff. But the rocket science part of it just Is going to evaporate in very short order.”

“Humans have been a bottleneck In tapping the past 25 years of software capabilities.”

“Their fear is, like, unleashing, not just the agents themselves, but humans to do integration. Because you put, People creating new integrations. And you just say, please break my system of record.”

“Where they always think that, like, you'll be able to get, like, a fraction of a penny, but in the end, especially in the enterprise, like, people are just going to consume things, it's just cheaper and easier to buy, like, a bulk license for a bunch of stuff.”

“Also don't, I keep thinking, do not discount the local compute engine as being a release valve for all of this.”

“First, like the startups are going to burn through available capital pretending like it's not a problem. And they are going to do that.”

“And a lot of big companies are going to be so terrified. They're just going to freeze and not do anything. And then people are going to actually start buying it on their own.”

“The thing is, is this is all going to go away. There's absolutely no doubt that this just goes away.”

“And, like, we are gonna have a transistor moment with all of this. It might just be more supply the way we think of it, But it also might be an actual algorithmic fundamental change. It could be a change in the hardware. There's a lot of stuff that can happen.…”

“People were on MIPS and then one day the reality was IBM was selling more MIPS for fewer dollars every year. And didn't even realize it. And they were still pricing their mainframes by MIPS until it got pointed out to them that they were on a decreasing curve …”

“And it's like the worst Most assistant in the world, and agentification is just hiring a lot of these really bad interns.”

“Well, Unix is going to prove to be right, which is like, you're going to ha, you're going to want to break things up into much smaller granularity and tools.”

“We're on an exponential curve. So no one's predictive powers work. And it's just gonna keep happening. It's not gonna plateau. It's not gonna, you know, all of a sudden we're done.”

“You can say in the future when we all have our personal AI with all this other stuff, and then that's great, but then you say it's gonna happen in twenty-twenty-nine. Yes. You're an idiot.”

“Well, I think that, like, if you actually stick with the medical example, we're just going to wake up and there's going to be way more people with way more specialties. Right. And AI will have created more jobs.”

“I mean, you would have asked me, 15 years ago, would CDN be companies? I never would have, I'm like, how does it make any sense? Like, how could you have a company that's a cache?”

“The shadow, having been the shadow cast by large companies over, we're gonna put you out of business and stomp you, it's ridiculous. And it has never in any technology way lived up to the fear that people have.”

“About two thirds of the time, the big company says, wow, the leader is really expensive, but we have our magic distribution beans. So we're gonna pick the number two or number three. That's like way, way cheaper and get it in a fire sale. And of course that ne…”

“The most exciting things that are going to be going on in the near term are in the tooling to enable the platform.”

“Tooling itself is never a really huge business because you have to have it. And so it's sort of this, well, if you have to have it, then there's going to be, there are going to be many alternatives and there are going to be some low priced ones, some high pric…”

“They really can't come out on the, we predict that this one will be successful because that, that just, it's statistically not a supportable public policy approach to the action and the markets are much, much better. Otherwise they're just basically institutin…”

“But I really think that the most interesting thing for me, what's being underestimated in the near term is sort of vibe writing. And I mean, it seems weird to say anything with AI is underestimated because Lord knows that's not where we are. But the thing is, …”

“You dig in, and you find out like, wow, you're prompting, Although it's English-like, it turns out you're just programming. And you're just programming in prompts.”

“The arc of programming has been one of basically over promise and under deliver. You know, when I was in college, like, the theory was the market was gonna need so many programmers that the whole employment force would be, the whole workforce would just be sof…”

“And that, and whether it was, you know, that or all the database programming languages like Delphi or PowerBuilder, you know, these are all in algorithmic sense, they were all constant improvement. Like just, they added a constant factor, like plus seven onto …”

“So what we're going to see is a whole different set of errors in business writing or academic writing in schools that just replace other errors that have always creeped in.”

“Absolutely. A hundred percent. A hundred, and I think, I don't think Stephen King is going to do that, and, but I think there'll be some new writer who will probably write it under a pseudonym, and a year after the novel is written and has been made into a mov…”

“Well, of course, I think the demise of Google is an absurd proposition. The demise of a giant company is, is a crazy thing to say.”

“They show you every step in the line. And then they, but you know, they show you the one you're allowed to see.”

“I think that the mistake is either thinking that China is about cheap labor, or the mistake is thinking that for things to be made in the U.S., it has to recreate three hundred million migrant workers on buses working temporarily and going back home.”

“Like on a Friday, the whole weekend was like everybody whipping themselves into a frenzy so they could wake up Monday morning and trade away a trillion dollars of market cap, which seems to be a, Complete overreaction and craziness, but that's not what we're h…”

“Well, at some point you're going to end up breaking the problem up to the seven billion endpoints of the world, which will have vastly more compute than you can ever squeeze into one giant nuclear power data center.”

“And it's, to me, this is all the equivalent of the browser getting JavaScript. Because once the browser got JavaScript, then all of a sudden you could do anything you needed without going to some standards body or building your own browser.”

“Three years in advance a date is set and then 6000 people ship on that date no matter what.”