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 33 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
The Microsoft antitrust case did not create Google or the iPhone
“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.”
Evans: 1990s antitrust intervention against Microsoft had no effect
“And actually none of the antitrust intervention had any effect, but that's again a separate conversation”
Evans: Microsoft Copilot is an umbrella brand of disconnected features like IBM Watson
“Copilot is rather like Watson. 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. And so every, every third button at Microsoft And every Microsoft product is purple and…”
Evans: OpenAI and Anthropic lack distribution and cannot out-innovate startup ecosystem
“You don't have the existing feature set that Google and Meta and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and everybody else have where they can add it and Salesforce and, you know, Workday and, you know, Figma and everyone else, some of them, some of which will survive…”
Evans: Most Big Tech sub-threshold acquisitions were under $10M and 10 employees
“And the vast majority of them were less than 10 people, and less than ten million dollars.”
Evans: Apple views user privacy violations as analogous to malware
“I think Apple sees privacy as sort of analogous to malware. It thinks that this is an architectural problem on the computer. It controls the computer. They make the operating system. It's their job to fix it in the same way that it was sort of Microsoft's job …”
Kevins: Google is the new Microsoft and Salesforce is the new Oracle
“Google has become the new Microsoft. I think that's pretty obvious to everyone. Google is the new Microsoft. And Salesforce is the new Oracle.”
Evans: Google Search Network Effects Will Defeat Microsoft's Spending
“Google search has network effects, so Microsoft can spend, doesn't matter how much money Microsoft spends, so Google search is still better.”
Owning the default browser yielded no long-term strategic advantage for Microsoft
“Owning the browser didn't get Microsoft anything.”
Microsoft invested $100 billion in Bing over 20 years for 5-10% share
“Bing has invested about a hundred billion dollars over the last 20 years, and they've got 10%, five to 10% share of US search.”
Evans: HoloLens and Magic Leap demos misrepresented narrow field of view
“The big Bullshit thing that you get in these demos, particularly for AR, like that you got with particularly with HoloLens, but also to some extent with Magic Leap, is that they would show you somebody in a slightly three-dimensional world with stuff all aroun…”
Evans: Generative AI does not work for general web search
“I mean, it also doesn't work for general web search, which is what we can come back to, but it seems kind of hilarious, relevant to relative to all the other excitement and attention that's going on.”
Evans: Incumbents treat AI as a feature, but disruption requires new products
“The incumbent's always trying to make the new thing a feature. And so that's very obviously what's happening with Microsoft and Google, including this in PowerPoint and office and of course in search and everything else. But what actually happens is, is then p…”
Evans: Microsoft's Activision acquisition is a straightforward, non-speculative antitrust case
“This is actually a much more straightforward, obvious kind of antitrust case because you're not trying to guess the future.”
Evans: FTC Meta-Within case is very aggressive; Activision case is much less aggressive
“I think within is kind of a test case to try and push the you know, really kind of move the flag post, move the goal much further over. You know, it's a very aggressive case. I think the Activision case is actually much less aggressive.”
Evans: Azure beat Google Cloud due to superior enterprise sales
“AWS is mostly lower level building blocks. Azure is mostly high level building blocks. Totally beat Google Cloud, mainly because of like knowing how to sell to enterprise and knowing how to build what enterprises have.”
Evans: Microsoft buying Figma would make more strategic sense than Adobe
“It would have been actually strategically much more interesting for Microsoft to buy this, whereas for Adobe it's just really fucking obvious.
Of course they should buy it, and they should have bought it five years ago.”
Evans: a16z Never Passed on Deals Fearing Big Tech Competition
“When I worked at Andreessen Horowitz, we saw three or 4000 companies a year. You know, I don't think we ever said, you know, what if Google does this? Or, you know, you can't invest in that because Microsoft might do that or because Amazon might do that.”
Evans: Microsoft's calls to regulate Google are self-serving
“One of them is of course that when Microsoft says that you should regulate Google, they're being tremendously self-serving. When Microsoft says, ah, regulation had a big effect on us and you should do it to Google now. You can't just take that at face value as…”
Evans: Tech monopolies fall when industry paradigm shifts bypass them
“Controlling Windows doesn't give them dominance of the tech industry, and so what happens is, like, and it's the analogy that I use here, you've built your castle, and it's absolutely impregnable, and sometimes people capture your castle like they Tunnel under…”
Evans: US antitrust punishes lawbreaking while Europe engineers market competition
“US regulation tends to proceed in criminal cases. They tend to look, they tend to say, did you break the Sherman Antitrust Act of 16, 21, or whenever the hell they passed it? And yes or no, and if yes, then we will do this thing. And 20 years ago, they tried t…”
Samsung and Microsoft release folding phones as public product experiments
“Whereas what you've also seen in the last few months is another wave of folding phones. Microsoft has this duo, which is two screens. Samsung has, and a couple of, and Motorola have been selling like 1500 dollar phones that fold in half, and the screen folds i…”
Evans: Big Four tech capex will jump from $400B to $650B
“The big four companies, platform companies, spent four hundred billion dollars on capex last year. This year, they've said they'll spend 650, more or less. Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled…”
Evans: Big companies run 10 to 20 AI pilots without systemic clarity
“Every big company now has had, like, 10 AI presentations. 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, a…”
Evans: Big Tech funds AI capex out of cash flow, unlike OpenAI
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI has to do these innovative funding structures because it has no cash flow, and Oracle is basically going to borrow a hundred percent of revenue to…”
Evans: Google, AWS, and Microsoft Cloud Capex Will Near $100B in 2023
“Google AWS, Microsoft probably spent, will probably spend a hundred billion dollars on cloud capex this year.”
Evans: Most Excel spreadsheets do not contain formulas
“Actually most Excel spreadsheets don't have formulas. Most Excel spreadsheets are actually tables or they're schedules or they're lists. They're not actually spreadsheets.”
Cowan-Brown: Bing has nothing to lose against Google in search
“Microsoft and Bing had absolutely nothing to lose, but Google is on that back foot of we do have something to lose here”
Evans: Satya Nadella previously called Xbox non-core and non-strategic
“And there was a moment like five or six years ago when Satya Nadella was saying that Xbox was sort of non-core and non-strategic.”
Evans: Google acquired Android over ten years ago to block Microsoft dominance
“This is why Google created Android, because they were afraid of Microsoft doing this. You know, they bought Android and created Android, and this was over 10 years ago.”
Paradigm Shifts Disrupt Incumbents by Doing Something Entirely Different
“Each of those generations tended to change what companies mattered. So IBM dominates mainframes, and in fact, at the time, people used to talk about IBM and the Seven Dwarfs, because there were seven much smaller companies, like kind of Honeywell and Control D…”