David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…With Steve’s buy-in and the air cover from Steve to make it happen organizationally. You look at where all the talent came from. Bing taught them how to do distributed systems. Xbox Live was a always-on cloud service, realtime, zero latency with 40 million subscribers. MSN was a super high traffic web property with 750 million registered users. Hotmail was a web application that hundreds of millions relied on. They had SharePoint and Exchange. There was knowledge of how to do server-based application software for the enterprise. There was some conflict business model-wise with Windows Server since Azure would be an orthogonal business model, but the technical chops were there. These are hardcore server OS people. Of course that group is going to be capable of doing things like hypervisors. I just think the ingredients were remarkably there from all these other things that Microsoft had been doing over the years. They were kind of the only one who could pull this off at this scale with this set of enterprise relationships to migrate all these people to the cloud as they built out the product suite. Really like we got, I don’t know, halfway-ish through our research for this, and this just hit me of holy crap, this era for Microsoft that everybody thinks of is like the loser era. This is the era where they won or they built the foundation to win. There was seven years before Steve Balmer handed the reins to Satya where Azure development was happening under him. That is nowhere near the public narrative.…

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