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 45 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
Benioff calls Microsoft Copilot 'really a terrible product'
“And I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product co-pilot that I'm have to position against and market against.”
Pfeffer: Bill Gates stole the original code that built Microsoft
“People forget that Bill Gates stole the code on which Microsoft has built.”
Ugarte: Microsoft and early rivals lost AI coding lead due to culture
“AI coding has always been competitive from when cursor first, first kind of came to be. And at the time the competitors were Microsoft and others and a handful of maybe 10 or 20 companies. And I think it's notable that none of those competitors are at the fore…”
HubSpot saw 100% attrition on hires from Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce
“Like we hired so many people from Salesforce and Google, Microsoft, like a hundred percent, you know, attrition rate on all those folks.”
Sharma: Continuous reward-model tuning is every AI company's true IP
“The whole KPI is what is the metabolism of a product team to be able to ingest data and then digest the rewards model and then create some sort of outcome? Because these models are so effective at this point, you want to start to tune them to certain types of …”
Founder DNA actively prevents tech giants from succeeding in misaligned product categories
“I have this premise that certain companies can never succeed at certain type of products, right? Like Microsoft with mobile or Google with social or Facebook with enterprise, right? It's just the DNA of the founder actively acts against you succeeding there.”
Chennapragada: Microsoft built the first deep research AI agent for work
“We like, we just built this world's first agent for deep research agent made for work, right? Post train for work.”
Chennapragada: Prompt sets are replacing PRDs in the AI era
“In this day and age, if you're not prototyping and building to see what you want to build, I think you're doing it wrong. I call it the prompt steps of the new PRDs, right? Like, I really insist on folks saying, if you're building new projects, new features, o…”
Houston: Big tech competitor launches showed no visible impact on Dropbox's numbers
“The products launched, but you would never be able to look at our numbers and see when that happened.”
Schwartz: Apple Refused Microsoft’s Offer to Replace Google with Bing for Free
“One is that Bing tried to give itself to Apple for free, and Apple said there was absolutely no price that they would take to use Bing search within Apple.”
Shah: Most Microsoft employees were 'wildly unproductive' post-Yammer acquisition
“Lo and behold, I was at the world's largest productivity company at Microsoft. And most people there, in my opinion, were wildly unproductive and I wasn't shipping a lot.”
Verna: Nobody in tech has work-life balance, even at Google or Microsoft
“I don't think anybody has work-life balance, regardless of what company that they work at, even at Google or like Microsoft or any of the others, I think everybody's freaking out and running as fast as they can.”
Sharma: Enterprise AI platform success depends on data residency and reliability
“It's not all the features for the platform that matters. It's the data residency. So the hospital in Germany that's fine tuning a model can do so in confidence and the data isn't going to leave the region. It's the availability. It's the reliability. It's, you…”
Sharma: 600,000 expert annotations boosted Microsoft Dragon AI acceptance to 83%
“We've got an AI product called Dragon that's for physicians. And we saw a massive difference from when we used, you know, synthetic fine tuning to when we annotated 600,000 patient physician interactions by experts and actually fed that into the model and cont…”
Sharma: Traditional strategy docs will fade into interactive applications and artifacts
“I think docs themselves, like for every idea, for every, you know, need will just start to kind of fade into, you know, applications and different artifacts. In the productivity suite, which you know, is just a different way of working.”
Placek: Microsoft initially called the name 'Azure' a dumb idea
“The reaction wasn't good. You know, one of the clients said, that's just a dumb idea.”
Truell: Most of the original GitHub Copilot team has left Microsoft
“The group of people that worked on the first version of Copilot have, by and large, gone on to do other things at other places.”
Houston: Incumbent platform bundling acts like a gradual boa constrictor
“There's a big time lag where between when these products launch and when they actually have an impact, because often it's not so much the existence of the product or its availability, it's the sort of Constant bundling or the constant iteration or, you know it…”
Martin: Operating system market share should be measured by smart screen minutes
“The right measure of share, in my view, in that industry is your share of minutes spent staring at a smart screen. Like that, that, that's what the share of operating systems that you should care about.”
Schillace: Giving multi-agent AI systems shared whiteboard memory makes them smarter
“We were trying to get multiple versions of them working together, like multi-agents working together, and we gave them whiteboard Working memory, like as a shared working memory thing to fix this problem, and that turns out to make them much smarter.”
Schillace: Google Docs won market share, but Microsoft kept the money
“In retrospect, they did fine. Like, we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically. So, you know, we being Google, like, you know, so, like, they survived it. Like, you know, they survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. …”
Microsoft's overall experiment failure rate is 66%, reaching 85% at Bing
“So overall at Microsoft, About 66%, two-thirds of ideas fail, right? And don't think the 66 is accurate. Like, you know, it's about two-thirds. At Bing, which is a much more optimized domain after we've been optimizing it for a while, the failure rate was arou…”
Sharma: Microsoft Azure customers have already deployed millions of AI agents
“15,000 customers who have produced agents. I think the number of agents is actually, like, millions.”
Placek: Microsoft originally requested an Azure name starting or ending in 'cloud'
“They came to us to develop a name that started or ended with cloud. Made sense to them because it was a cloud service. And our reaction was, if you do that, ah, you're gonna be in an ocean of other cloud this, cloud that.”
Chennapragada uses AI to simulate how Satya Nadella will react to pitches
“By the way, that is actually one of my common use cases, which is the WWXD. I call it, what would X do? Like, I used to say, hey what would Satya think about, like, this particular set of conversations or ideas that we are pitching and so on.”
Levine: Microsoft invested in Waze due to lacking proprietary navigation maps
“Microsoft decided that, wait a minute, we don't have our own maps, so let's invest in Waze. So we ended up getting investment from someone that we did not expect.”
Rachitsky: Major tech companies hire product managers, not product owners
“Google has no product owners as far as they know. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, like no company you, you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner. They have, or they're all product managers. They're all product managers.”
Levine: Waze took 4 years and Netflix took 10 to reach PMF
“For Waze, it was four years. For Microsoft, it was five years. For Netflix, it was 10 years.”
Shah: Satya Nadella acted as Krishna during the OpenAI crisis
“For example, let's say Satya during the open AI crisis played Krishna and got things out, but he'll switch back to being Rama and continue to keep scaling it up.”
Moore: Microsoft Copilot is a low-risk Main Street adoption product
“If you go to Chat to Microsoft Copilot. You're on Main Street. You're not taking any risk. You're experimenting with a new thing. It's kind of cool. Makes you more productive. God bless. You know, it's just kind of like just an add-on to Teams or to your whole…”
Udezue: Broad, high-frequency workflows are most profitable but hardest to enter
“Everyone Frequent workflows intuitively are the most profitable to work on, but also the hardest to get into because they're dominated by Microsoft and Google and very, very large companies.”
Roughly 8% of Microsoft's online experiments had sample ratio mismatches
“And where we share that at Microsoft, even though we'd be running experiments for a while is around eight percent of experiments that suffered from the sample ratio of dispatch.”
Bing wasted 100 person-years integrating social feeds before shutting it down
“We hooked into the Twitter Firehose feed, and we hooked into Facebook, and we spent a hundred person years on this idea, and it failed. You don't see it anymore. It existed for about a year and a half, and all the experiments were just negative to flat.”
Miller: Web browsers are high-margin, cash-printing products with low marginal costs
“Browsers print cash. There is a reason why they're owned primarily by Google, Apple, Microsoft. They're incredibly high margin. They're incredibly lucrative, low marginal costs. The cost of revenue is incredibly low, et cetera.”
Schaffer: Microsoft and Netflix experimentation shows 80% to 90% of hypotheses fail
“Companies like Netflix and Microsoft, there's over and over again. 80 plus percent. Some companies say 90% of things fail.”
Chennapragada: Microsoft created simulated companies to test autonomous AI agents
“What we've done is like, we've actually set up in like a comp external, like a fake company and said, Hey, if you are somebody who wants to come play with some of the cutting edge science projects and deep research agents and, you know, agents at work, Come, c…”
Wiz's four co-founders have worked together for over 22 years
“Before, Wiz is actually their second company together. So before Wiz, they founded Adalom, which sold to Microsoft. That's how they all ended up in Microsoft in the first place. And even before that, they all worked together in the Israeli army. So they've kno…”
LinkedIn Shared Early AI R&D and Prompt Engineering Learnings With OpenAI and Microsoft
“In fact, a lot of things we've learned so much ahead of the market and even shared with OpenAI and shared with Microsoft”
Rachitsky: Leading US tech and enterprise CEOs were born in India
“Today the CEOs of Microsoft, Alphabet, Adobe, which is a two hundred fifty billion dollar company, turns out, IBM, which is a hundred seventy billion dollar company, Palo Alto Networks, which is a hundred billion dollar company, even Starbucks, also a hundred …”
Carr: Amazon Borrowed Bar Raiser Hiring Process from Microsoft
“So they created this bar raiser process, which by the way, they borrowed from Microsoft, which had a process called as appropriate.”
The Xamarin team acted as patient zero for Figma's adoption across Microsoft
“It was Xamarin. They were the ones who were using Sigma first, and we saw that. And, you know, then, so they were that kind of patient zero at Microsoft.”
By 2019, Microsoft launched roughly 100 new experimental treatments daily
“At Microsoft, just to let you know, when I left in 2019, we were on a rate of about 20 to 25,000 experiments every year. So every working day, we were starting something like a hundred new treatments.”
Bing's search relevance team targets 2% annual compounding improvement
“One is at Bing, the relevance team. Hundreds of people all working to improve Bing relevance. They have a metric. We'll talk about, oh, we see the overall evaluation criterion, but they have a metric that their goal is to improve it by two percent every year. …”