Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q That alphabet's eliminated. Meta has started to eliminate in their organization four years ago. You had the same number of employees you have at Microsoft now, but you put a ninety billion dollars onto the top line of the revenue in that time, and you doubled your income during that time. So how did that happen? Is that automation of those jobs? Is it you were a little bit overstaffed?
A I think it's, it's actually, you're pulling on a very interesting thread, which is, at some level, what's the big structural change that needs to happen? In fact, I would say this is probably the biggest change in knowledge work since PCs. I mean, I always, you know, think about, like, how did work happen pre-PCs, right? I mean, think about a multinational company like ours trying to do a forecast, uh, right? Faxes went around, interoffice memos got sent, And then you kind of created a, you know, a forecast. Then suddenly, you know, PCs became standard issue. You put an Excel spreadsheet, put some numbers, sent it in email, everybody entered numbers, and you had a forecast. So the work, the work artifact, and the workflow all changed. That's what's happening. So for example, I'll give you, at LinkedIn, we used to have product managers, we had designers, we had front-end engineers, and then we had back-end engineers and so on. So what we did is we sort of took those first four roles and combined them. In fact, increased scope and said, let's, they're all full stack builders. So I like that because that's a structural change that allows for us to increase the change, both the work and the workflow between these functions.
AI assessment note: “took those first four roles and combined them. In fact, increased scope”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 3.85
Q have Claude came out with co-work this week. Incredibly powerful. People are kind of losing their minds over it. I've been playing with it for the last 40 hours. Truly impressive. What's your vision for Microsoft and how knowledge workers will actually put this to use? Cause there seems to be a gap between You know, playing around with chat GPT and getting some interesting results and getting business results.
A Yeah, so I think it, one of the most, uh, perhaps illustrative examples, um, of trying to understand these various form factors is looking at coding, which is obviously a form of knowledge work, or, uh, probably the best example of knowledge work, and if you think about the journey coding has been, it started with, uh, essentially, uh, uh, the next edit suggests, right? That was the first time, in fact, my own belief in this entire Uh, generation of tech really sort of got formulated, but I started seeing, I think this, you know, there's a codex model back in the day, it was pre-GPT-III-V. Uh, that's when NextEdit suggestions started working with some real accuracy. Then we went to chat, then we went to actions, and now to full autonomous agents, and then the autonomous agents can be both, uh, foreground, background, in the cloud, or local. Right? So that's all the form factors that exist today when you're coding. And interestingly enough, if you look at it, you use all of them. Right? It's not like there's only one form factor. So that's, I think, probably one of the other lessons. So for example, when I'm in a CLI, I can go a foreground agent, background agent, and then just literally go edit in VS code right there, all happening in parallel. Right? So that sort of shows how these form factors even compose. So then you bring that to knowledge work, to your point. We started w…
AI assessment note: “So then you bring that to knowledge work, to your point. We started with chat.”
