Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…We’ll talk about this a little more in conclusion. We have one more chapter in Nokia in the end of Steve’s tenure to talk about here. But it turned out actually that the cloud market was so big that nothing else really mattered. All the missteps, all the losses, it makes sense. Cloud powers everything. Cloud powers tech. cloud powers all the consumer services. They all run on the cloud. Every consumer service that is not owned by Microsoft or Meta or Google or Amazon runs on one of their clouds, and some portion of that revenue accrues to Microsoft. And increasingly the offline economy is becoming some sort of cloud-dependent service. It’s crazy to just see cars rely on the cloud and restaurants rely on the cloud. Anything that you interface with in the physical world, you expect to have some digital component. At the very least, take credit cards, point of sale systems. All of these things are routed through the cloud at some point. David, I think you’re making the same point about the cloud today that I was about Microsoft in the PC era. Microsoft was lucky to own 90% market share, and in cloud they own meaningfully less than that. But it’s still basically a tracker on the growth of an insane secular tailwind that is just an inevitability in the world. It’s probably a 30–40 year wave that they get to keep riding. And again, this is outside the scope of this episode, but it’s sure looking like to the extent AI is the next computing wave that is also happening in the cloud in the data center. That’s just going to turbocharge everything.…

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