Speaker unverified: observation

Transcript context

…It’s reasonable to call you the founder of Microsoft’s enterprise business. That is not a narrative that is often discussed. We wanted to ask you, how do you feel about the fact that it basically defines the business today? Interesting. Very kind. Fathering something, I feel good about that. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Of course, there are many fathers to the enterprise business at Microsoft, and I feel both good and bad about it. The truth is, Microsoft started out as a consumer company. We built a very important consumer business. That success translated into the opening to go build an enterprise business. One of my regrets is we lost the consumer muscle along the way. I think the ability to be ultra, ultra. We’re a great company. Microsoft’s a great company. But to have both of those muscles totally firing, if I’d been able to sustain that consumer muscle, and I had some ideas about why that didn’t happen, but the enterprise muscle, muy macho. It got very big and very strong. So I’m very proud of that. It’s also funny when you say consumer and enterprise. What does it mean really to say enterprise? Sometimes it can sound just like backend stuff. The truth of the matter is, Microsoft Office/M365, whatever exactly it’s called today, is super important. It was the foundation for having permission to be in the enterprise, and yet it’s a product that sits right there in front of users. The question is, do you think about users or consumer, and do you think about enterprise or do you think about IT? And then there are developers that span both. That’s my mental model. You have products that appeal to consumers that IT can handle, and a platform that lets developers build around those and based around those, whether they’re building for users, users and IT, or in some instances just for IT people, because there are a lot of tools that are just for IT people. Well, to contextualize all this, we want to go back almost all the way to the beginning, right around the time you joined Microsoft, and talk about Microsoft’s relationship with IBM. Before the IBM PC and before DOS, can you catch listeners up who weren’t around at that time, what was IBM in that era?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.