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Nadella: Dominant organizing layers always emerge in open ecosystems

Satya Nadella · Satya Nadella describes how lessons from Microsoft’s history apply to today’s boom · Nov 18, 2025 · at 26:21

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explains to Stripe co-founder John Collison how open technology shifts inevitably produce centralized aggregation layers like search engines and chatbots.

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“And so, the thing that maybe the meta thing for me is organizing layers will always emerge, even in an open ecosystem. And a lot of the category power moves to that organizing layer, and it's always unclear, like the last paradigm of, oh, this last time it was search engines. Today, it's chatbots.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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