Microsoft, every mention
313 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 529Bernadette Kevins 29Toni Cowan-Brown 13
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
AI deployment
- ▶ 2:02 Benedict Evans Step one was give everybody co-pilot, and that didn't work too well, because it's kind of, or Claude or ChatGPT, because it's kind of like being in 1997 and giving everybody a web browser.
- ▶ 11:05 Benedict Evans You've probably never even seen Excel, for God's sake, and you think that the world is just going to change completely in 18 months, and so then you think, 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:32 Benedict Evans Some of them do in some narrow specific places, like will I still do that in SAP or will, because it's too hard to do it in Excel, maybe now I can do it in flawed.
- ▶ 17:13 Benedict Evans Do you work with Microsoft?
- ▶ 18:55 Benedict Evans So, you know, with SAS, you moved from buying the thing one off, doing an installation, doing integration, putting it on prem, putting windows, study to software on everybody's desktop to.
- ▶ 23:07 Benedict Evans Well, so, I mean, I think there's a separate, narrower problem here with Codex, with, with, with, with, with Copilot, which has emerged quite quickly. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:20 Benedict Evans It's a brand name that represents an, that represents every single PM at Microsoft had to add an AI feature as part of their quarterly goals. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:44 Benedict Evans You unbundle Excel, you unbundle email, you unbundle Google and SAP and the Salesforce and Workday, and then you turn, and very often, and you turn them into a new bundle, and you identify tasks or projects or problems that people didn't…
Most people and companies aren't tool-builders
- ▶ 0:27 Benedict Evans And I kind of looked at this a little bit and scratched my head and thought, so is this, you mean the way Microsoft Access destroyed databases?
- ▶ 5:31 Benedict Evans So I think the, well, I think the answer to that, and this kind of comes back to the counter argument to all this, is how many, like, 50 person company departments run on a 10 meg Excel file? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:50 Benedict Evans But like, there's a sort of fuzzy continuum between a Word document and SAP. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:54 Benedict Evans And to go back in our previous generation, I mean, I mentioned in part of the passing access, which I don't think access even exists anymore, but like nobody will need databases anymore because you can just make your own with access. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:08 Benedict Evans It was great, but that didn't replace every other piece of software or neither did Excel. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:47 Benedict Evans It's funny, though, because it is this sort of, it is this sort of recurrent thing every 10 or 15 years, like no code people will make their own stuff, and it's something you see very clearly now around co-pilot and co-work and, um, what's…
Token pricing
- ▶ 10:43 Benedict Evans Sam Altman talked about windows, which is a really bad analogy because windows had network effects. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:51 Benedict Evans Or you can say, well, this is what happened with Windows.
- ▶ 15:08 Benedict Evans And so in the days when of the PC in the 19 nineties, if you were a developer and you wanted to make an app and get customers, you had to make it for windows because that was where all the users were. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:21 Benedict Evans Google search has network effects, so Microsoft can spend, doesn't matter how much money Microsoft spends, so Google search is still better. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:19 Benedict Evans They had to get everybody using Office first, and then everyone had to stay on Office. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:48 Benedict Evans And Microsoft had to get everybody to switch from WordPerfect and Lotus One, Two, Three, and all the other spreadsheets that were floating around to use Office and Excel, to use Word and Excel. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:48 Benedict Evans And Microsoft had to get everybody to switch from WordPerfect and Lotus One, Two, Three, and all the other spreadsheets that were floating around to use Office and Excel, to use Word and Excel.
The spring updates on AI
- ▶ 5:32 Benedict Evans Then you are Microsoft in the, in the, in the 2000, um, or your IBM in the 19 nineties. 5 times in the scene
What jobs are AI jobs?
- ▶ 15:19 Benedict Evans As you go through adding machines and computers and mainframes and PCs and Excel and ERPs and SAS, you get wave after wave of automation and the number of accountants keeps going up.
- ▶ 28:51 Toni Cowan-Brown And to your point, everyone is providing the same software or the same type of PowerPoint decks.
The end of the network effect
- ▶ 1:27 Benedict Evans Consumer computing has been based on network effects, that we had Windows and Intel, and then we had, with the web, we had Google, and then Facebook, and Amazon, and then the things that Facebook bought, and we had the iOS and Android,…
- ▶ 2:44 Benedict Evans And Microsoft has spent God knows how many tens of billions of dollars on Bing, and it can never catch up with Google.
- ▶ 2:44 Benedict Evans And Microsoft has spent God knows how many tens of billions of dollars on Bing, and it can never catch up with Google.
- ▶ 5:23 Benedict Evans And then the thousands of stuff that are built on top of it and run on top of it, the way you've got thousands of stuff built on top of and running on AWS or Azure or Google Cloud.
- ▶ 5:42 Benedict Evans And you look at the stuff that OpenAI have published, and they say, well, yes, this is going to work like Windows. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:41 Benedict Evans You're competing with Google and Amazon and Microsoft, a whole bunch of people who want to build clouds. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:30 Benedict Evans So it doesn't matter how much money Microsoft spends on Bing and how many people they hire, Bing can never be as good as Google. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:21 Benedict Evans Um, so it came down to brand and distribution, which is why Microsoft was able to crowbar their way in. 2 times in the scene
AI and SaaS
- ▶ 1:44 Benedict Evans Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:32 Benedict Evans And then you've got the middle case of Excel and Google sheets and email, where like we don't, haven't got a dedicated tool to do that thing. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:29 Benedict Evans I say this as somebody who hasn't written code except for Excel in 20 years.
- ▶ 30:50 Benedict Evans Are you buying the PowerPoint deck?
How does OpenAI compete?
- ▶ 5:41 Benedict Evans Um, and, or you can say, well, we're going to be the best infralayer for that, which takes you back to, okay, why, how are you going to be the best infralayer than this, as opposed to AWS or GCP or indeed Microsoft, or perhaps Oracle, if… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:15 Benedict Evans Are you going to end up with 30 buttons underneath and it'll look like Microsoft Office and you'll need Clippy to tell you which ChatGPT feature you're supposed to use?
- ▶ 19:25 Benedict Evans So obviously owning the web browser would give Microsoft control of the internet. 3 times in the scene
The AI presentation
- ▶ 2:28 Benedict Evans They've had one from Microsoft and Google, they've had the one from their ad agency, they've had the one from Bain or BCG or McKinsey, they maybe had one from OpenAI, they've had stuff from Accenture, and they probably deployed a bunch of… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:14 Benedict Evans Should we go with Microsoft or hire Accenture to build a custom solution?
- ▶ 19:14 Benedict Evans And then, 10 minutes later, they showed us this diagram of how they're going to build, like, a classic 19 nineties Microsoft-style ecosystem stack, where they've got enabling technology, and there's other enabling technology, and there's… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:21 Benedict Evans He said that half of his jobs were telling people who used Excel to use the database, and the other half were telling people who used the database to use Excel. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:55 Benedict Evans Let's talk about how much money these companies are spending on infrastructure, and let's contrast the fact that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI
A double episode: AI differentiation, and Apple does F1
- ▶ 2:29 Benedict Evans They're all black and white line drawings, except for Google and Microsoft, which are, and Meta are colorful switches.
- ▶ 10:53 Benedict Evans One of them is what you get when you open these apps, is the same thing that you get if you do file new in Excel or PowerPoint, which is a bunch of suggestions.
- ▶ 10:53 Benedict Evans One of them is what you get when you open these apps, is the same thing that you get if you do file new in Excel or PowerPoint, which is a bunch of suggestions.
- ▶ 15:32 Benedict Evans And Windows and Mac today are kind of doing the same things.
- ▶ 15:43 Benedict Evans I mean, that's a flawed analogy because, you know, Microsoft's business model is still completely different to Apple's.
- ▶ 19:44 Benedict Evans Um, this is, I was looking at Claude this morning, and it, Claude have a, um, the Anthropics have an announcement of Claude for Claude for Financial Services, and one of the bits of marketing copy is, like, it scores 83% on a benchmark for… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:00 Benedict Evans From Apple or from, from Microsoft mostly. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:43 Benedict Evans Which is what you see then with distribution that Microsoft stuck Internet Explorer onto every Windows PC and Google puts Gemini and AI mode and AI overviews into every Google search.
Looking for AI strategies
- ▶ 2:13 Benedict Evans To solve some problem inside big companies to unbundle something out of Excel, Salesforce, email, Oracle, um, whatever, um, solve some point solution.
- ▶ 7:03 Benedict Evans Whereas Microsoft and Amazon have a kind of a different strategy because they've got a bunch of, they were trying to make it a feature as well, and they don't want it to be generic.
- ▶ 10:11 Benedict Evans Um, Amazon, sorry, Microsoft and Google are in a slightly different position in that they have a cloud business that wants to be selling different, that sells models, but they would rather, they weren't, were not cheap than commodities.
- ▶ 10:23 Benedict Evans And they also have kind of product businesses in, um, um, everything that Google does and in, in, in office and everything else where this enables new features.
- ▶ 12:31 Benedict Evans Um, so there's a lot, and that gets back to my point about all these SaaS companies, you know, hundreds and hundreds of SaaS companies, most of them using API calls to, um, either the various third party cloud providers that are running…
Ai eats the world
- ▶ 7:18 Benedict Evans Are you building a thing that's going to get absorbed into windows like the web browser or TCP IP?
- ▶ 10:39 Benedict Evans Microsoft is supply constrained. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:03 Benedict Evans You couldn't put Excel in a browser in 95. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:22 Benedict Evans Some of it will be people will work out a way that they can do something, unbundle some task out of Salesforce and turn it into a new company, or unbundle some process out of Oracle, or out of Excel, or out of email and make it a new…
- ▶ 28:07 Benedict Evans I always feel like go watch the office and imagine saying, I'm just going to give co-pilot to Dwight and Fat Keith and David Brent.
- ▶ 32:56 Benedict Evans And this was better than browsing through a folder structure and then opening word.
- ▶ 33:40 Benedict Evans Thinking about, to make Windows, to make stuff that was like your desktop app that worked on a web browser.
- ▶ 35:13 Benedict Evans Should we work with Microsoft or Google? 2 times in the scene
Google's Antitrust case
- ▶ 5:45 Benedict Evans And just as a point of process, there will be appeals, and, but the court hasn't announced the remedies yet, and those will be appealed, and those will go on for more years, just as the Microsoft thing, 20 years, well, it went on for years.
- ▶ 9:02 Benedict Evans Um, but we've got these quotes from Eddie Cue, who said, quote, there is no price Microsoft could offer to make the switch. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:09 Benedict Evans Microsoft, obviously, but they've got nowhere.
- ▶ 29:21 Benedict Evans So, obviously the Microsoft case, which has been referenced a lot in the last two weeks, was partly about Microsoft contracts that made it harder for, that said, I mean, 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:37 Benedict Evans There's a lot of history to this, but some of this is about Microsoft telling OEMs what the, the default Windows install has to be, and the default Windows install has to include Internet Explorer, and the customer thinks they're buying… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:45 Benedict Evans This is kind of bizarre assertions that somehow the DHA Microsoft case resulted in the rise of Google or resulted in the iPod and the iPhone, which is just ignorant nonsense.
The AI summer
- ▶ 3:54 Benedict Evans You know, is Microsoft going to get back into the game? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:04 Benedict Evans And so you'd write your, you'd write your document in Word or Write or WordPerfect or whatever.
Looking for AI use-cases
- ▶ 3:20 Toni Cowan-Brown In Excel, go back to my first point.
- ▶ 17:48 Benedict Evans So yes, you do have four or 500 different software applications, and the reason I mention this is that all of those are basically doing stuff you could do with X, some Excel, email, Salesforce, or Oracle, or PowerPoint. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:48 Benedict Evans So yes, you do have four or 500 different software applications, and the reason I mention this is that all of those are basically doing stuff you could do with X, some Excel, email, Salesforce, or Oracle, or PowerPoint.
- ▶ 18:03 Benedict Evans They're all basically unbundling Oracle and Microsoft Office, to put it kind of crudely.
- ▶ 18:37 Benedict Evans Anybody from Microsoft would look at that and say, no, please don't do that.
- ▶ 23:26 Benedict Evans My staff, what he was saying, and I realized what he was saying was that his staff are basically the people in the background in the TV show The Office, whether it's the American version or the British version, so that his staff, his staff… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:57 Benedict Evans And so you're in, we mentioned Codepilot a couple of times, you know, you're in Microsoft Office and now there's this kind of
- ▶ 28:03 Benedict Evans Purple thing with some stars on it, and you click on that, and something happens, or you're in LinkedIn, or you're in Excel, or whatever it is, and so this stuff just kind of appears anyway, and now at least that's not,
Tiktok, Apple and Temu
- ▶ 4:46 Benedict Evans Yeah, and there's a lot of shouting about that, and kind of the core of this is, A, Apple actually doesn't want your phone to work like Windows, and that would be actually pretty bad for users and developers, and B, the EU has kind of come…
Apple's Vision Pro
- ▶ 2:24 Benedict Evans You know, it's preposterous, but you can open Excel and open a spreadsheet and it looks as good or better as it will look on your 3000 dollar five K screen on your desk. 2 times in the scene
What's your AI strategy?
- ▶ 6:31 Benedict Evans He said, my, my, my first exposure to chat GPT, my first practical CIO job thing from buttons pressing with relation to chat GPT or LLMs is turning off the Microsoft co-pilot that Microsoft sprayed all over Office three six five, because…
- ▶ 6:31 Benedict Evans He said, my, my, my first exposure to chat GPT, my first practical CIO job thing from buttons pressing with relation to chat GPT or LLMs is turning off the Microsoft co-pilot that Microsoft sprayed all over Office three six five, because…
- ▶ 6:31 Benedict Evans He said, my, my, my first exposure to chat GPT, my first practical CIO job thing from buttons pressing with relation to chat GPT or LLMs is turning off the Microsoft co-pilot that Microsoft sprayed all over Office three six five, because…
- ▶ 12:22 Benedict Evans I mean, I was listening to a, um, podcast with Steven Sinofsky from, I mentioned sometimes who I used to work with, who used to run Office, and he's got stories of going, literally going to investment banks with PCs, showing them Excel,…
- ▶ 12:22 Benedict Evans I mean, I was listening to a, um, podcast with Steven Sinofsky from, I mentioned sometimes who I used to work with, who used to run Office, and he's got stories of going, literally going to investment banks with PCs, showing them Excel,…
- ▶ 16:40 Toni Cowan-Brown Thinking and working in consultancies where you would be like, oh, I have to wait for the design team to be open or have a free slot so that they can help me design a PowerPoint or a presentation for a client and bring my idea to life.
AI and Everything Else
- ▶ 5:25 Benedict Evans AWS, Microsoft probably spent, will probably spend a hundred billion dollars on cloud capex this year.
- ▶ 8:53 Benedict Evans So, like, you can't just use Excel. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:09 Benedict Evans You know, today, like all startups run on, you know, GCP, Azure, or AWS, or a lot of them do, but like AWS doesn't decide what, you know, you, a legal software company can do.
- ▶ 32:07 Benedict Evans It also won't be Nokia or Microsoft. 2 times in the scene
LLMs, links, and the death of links
- ▶ 18:17 Benedict Evans Well, so, so, um, I mean, I used to work with, um, Steven Sinolsky, who ran Office, and he always had this model of, um, filers versus pilers.
Bundling/Unbundling AI
- ▶ 4:44 Benedict Evans And I thought that is exactly like what happens if you do file new in Word or Excel or Keynote or, I don't know, InDesign or Logic or Final Cut or any of those kind of applications. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:44 Benedict Evans And I thought that is exactly like what happens if you do file new in Word or Excel or Keynote or, I don't know, InDesign or Logic or Final Cut or any of those kind of applications. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:30 Benedict Evans Um, and so if you go back to, um, to Excel, 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:00 Benedict Evans Well, this is also like the unbundling unbundling point, but this is, um, I mean, this is what happens with what happens with Microsoft Office is you end up with 500 buttons 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:40 Benedict Evans So the way I always used to describe this years ago was that, you know, every big company, there's, there's people who download every week, you download a CSV out of SAP, and you put it in Excel, and you analyze it and sort it, and you… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:40 Benedict Evans So the way I always used to describe this years ago was that, you know, every big company, there's, there's people who download every week, you download a CSV out of SAP, and you put it in Excel, and you analyze it and sort it, and you… 3 times in the scene
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