Enterprise isn’t sexy. But enterprise is hard. Always felt Microsoft knows enterprises best. I think about how they destroyed Slack’s growth when creating Teams. I remember the day Slack got cocky, took out a full page NYT ad, and the Startup world laughed. 10 years later Slack, now owned by Salesforce, is an enterprise afterthought. Microsoft has made some big moves to keep relevant and I admire the choices. I remember the day they moved Office to the cloud, made everything multi-platform (not Windows!), and took a bet on Azure. These were Satya Nadella’s decisions.
When I hear Satya Nadella, I take out a pen and paper to write down how he says everything because the manner in which he speaks and creates an argument, ties it back into his role as Microsoft CEO, and makes a case for it, puts me at awe. He speaks very differently than a startup founder. I admire how he takes a hard question, goes far away with an anecdote, raises a relatable point, and draws that point back to the question.
Casey Newton: “But so much has been happening at Microsoft with AI since then. So just catch us up. For people who may not have tuned in a little while, what have you guys been up to in AI?”
Satya Nadella: “Yeah, I mean, look, the fundamental thing that I feel we’re about to move from is not talking about AI as one thing, to sort of having even a mental picture of what is an ecosystem that is sort of driven by AI, right? So today, if you think about it, even since when you first used Sydney to now, it has been about frontier model. You sort of talked about Fable, what have you.
But if we are ever going to transition to an economy that is driven by AI, it can’t be about one model, it can’t be about three firms, it has to be something that’s broadly felt, where the economy is at the frontier, not a firm or a model is at the frontier. So Microsoft is a platform company, to me that’s what we are up to. So to me, we had our developer conference last week.
It was all about, hey, can we build a platform and the tools where every enterprise in every country can operate at the frontier. To me, that’s the question. To be saying, hey, my model does this, but the economy is growing at 2 percent, means this is not going to end well, unless we really get to a place where the economy is inflecting in terms of its economic growth and its broad spread because the frontier benefits are.”
He was the latest guest on the Hard Fork podcast by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton. And this week’s topic was talking about Microsoft’s vision for AI.
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