Speaker unverified: prediction

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…ture of a corporation, whether it's a pharma company, a payments company, or a software company. That I think is the work that we all are doing and will do. And I think that to me that is sovereignty. I'm still thinking about this discussion we're having about the IDE for people who aren't software engineers. And again, I feel like there could be a product in the next 10 years for finance people, where in hindsight it is obviously the correct UI, but just the spreadsheet, it kind of came out of nowhere as a UI. It may feel like it came out of nowhere at that time. I'm really struck by that. Speaking of the spreadsheet, it's like a rite of passage for certain software companies to try to take on Excel and it seems to be doing pretty well 40 years in, or what have you. Why is it so durable? Yeah, it's unbelievable, right? I mean, at some level the idea that a tabular form… I mean I think it's the power of lists and tables. It's just a perfect—and the malleability of software that was, I think, the combination. That's why a blinking canvas, it's always going to be there. We may add lots of bells and whistles to it. And the same thing with spreadsheets. The other thing about the spreadsheet is it's Turing complete. We don't give it enough credit. It's like I can make it— I think it is the world's most approachable programming environment. One hundred percent. I mean it's like… And you get into it without even thinking you're programming. And that is the other beauty, which is AI still, we’ve mystified it. You and I talked about, oh my God, we need change management. When the next spreadsheets came, nobody talked about change management. They were just using it. And that to me is the other thing, which is—somebody was describing to me, I was meeting the CEO of Generali. He joined Generali during the fax machine era, and he was managing all their insurance agents. And he said to me, “Look, I still remember the day when emails showed up, Excels showed up, and the entire workflow of how things happen completely were upended and it evolved and changed ground up.” So to me, I think that's to your point, what are those things of this era that we'll discover that'll allow the ground-up relitigation of the work, the work artifact and the workflow. It's such an interesting time to be in software. I mean compared to, you must feel this, it's just a much more interesting time now than five or 10 years ago. ork, the work artifact and the workflow. It's such an interesting time to be in software. I mean compared to, you must feel this, it's just a much more interesting time now than five or 10 years ago. It is interesting, we were like “Cloud, cloud, cloud.” And if you had to ask me what is the hottest thing in 2019, we had built this fantastic multi-region or region-less database that was multi-format. Cosmos DB, which was like we had basically a JSONdatabase. We had a SQL in there. It was the everything database. And we were thinking, it was region less and blah, blah, blah. And then the pandemic happened, and then the cloud went into another hyper drive. I mean, Teams, thank God, just became the thing. So that was the exciting thing, and lo and behold, you come out of it and you sort of say, “Oh, I thought after the pandemic we're going to get to some stable state.” In fact, I remember a forecast of the cloud. We were saying, what do we do? We overbuilt during the pandemic and there was a good eight months where we were like, “Oh, and then this thing now has come too.” To, there's a lot of charts of the shape at Stripe. I don't know if it was this way at Microsoft where obviously March 2020, you saw this discontinuity, right? Much more e-commerce activity happening, and we saw the rate of online business creation. You had businesses that were offline only saying, “Oh, we’ve got to switch to selling online.” And it just stayed at that elevated level forever, obviously since it's gone up from there. But there was no matching decline as people went back into physical offices and things like that. It was just a step change and then it stayed at the elevated level forever. I'm sure you saw similar things in Azure. One hundred percent, yeah. It never came down. We're talking about commerce, so we might as well talk about what we’re working on together. We are very excited about it. I think the idea that has always been there, which is what's the best way for a merchant-friendly set of rails and what is a customer-friendly set of rails? Is there a perfect matching? A conversational sort of commerce is a thing that people have talked about. And now I think with the work you all have done and others have done, we kind of can really bring the merchant and the end user and have this agentic sort of experience. So it's early days, it has to be tastefully done. It has to be done in a way that you earn the user's trust. And so I'm very excited about it. Yeah, we see two differences here because there have been previous attempts at buying on Twitter, buying on Instagram and these kinds of things. But what's different here is one, you have AI. So all the integrations for the merchant are much easier. It's much less of a lift than previous times when things like this have been tried. But then secondly, I just think the experience is so compelling as an end user. We're already seeing this in the early data from the super early customers that we have. We launched a few weeks back in ChatGPT as well, that it has to work. And again, the data is already bearing that out because it's so much easier as an end customer. uper early customers that we have. We launched a few weeks back in ChatGPT as well, that it has to work. And again, the data is already bearing that out because it's so much easier as an end customer. Yeah, I've been talking about it. I'm a bit of a cricket nut, so I am always searching for something. And the problem is whether it's Amazon or Walmart or what have you, the search experience sometimes is hard on the site. So interestingly enough, these chat experiences first are fantastic. And the fact that they point back to the catalog, I mean the catalog is still king, but now if I can marry the checkout and the catalog, and that to me is where I think the seamlessness— Do you have any experiences, I've found versions of this. I'm curious if you've had experiences where for product research using an AI app is so much better than keyword-based search. It's amazing that up to last year we thought keyword-based search was an acceptable way to hunt for anything. Yeah. And the seller, the bottom line is, it's kind of like it is creating a custom catalog for you. I mean, the response is not like a SERP. We were buying furniture in our house and we were just saying, “Oh yeah, we have this much space available in this spot. What do you think is a good piece that would look good in that spot that meets these dimensions and things like that.” But it's crazy that we weren't doing that previously. You know what I mean? And so all this customization, being able to give vibes, general aesthetics, I'm looking for something slightly higher-end, but not super fancy. It's crazy that you weren't able to— By the way, that's just the other crazy, crazy thing. My wife's an architect, and so she sort of has this Copilot notebook in which she has all these architectural pictures and so on. And you can ask it quite high-level reasoning questions on what I should put in there. So it's able to take an architectural sketch, a drawing, and then take a public catalog of furniture and put those things together and reason about it. And that type of stuff is pretty magical.…

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