David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…To put it another way—and let's exclude Xbox for a moment—you're basically just recognizing that Microsoft had an unbelievable position in the market and did an amazing capital allocation job exploiting it. Basically saying, hey, you know what? You know what we don't need to do? All that crap that NVIDIA, ATI, and all those guys are doing. You know how we can still retain our market position and continue printing money the way that we do? This thing. And they did that. They didn't get into the commodity business and they were brilliant. We don't need to be in this brutally competitive industry where if we don't ship six months ahead of our competitors every cycle, we're toast. I think you know, in this grading question, the longer we do this show, the more I realize, this is like a mega theme of Acquired that Microsoft in the 90s or early 2000s was such a power. The DOJ case really, really crippled it probably for good for the ecosystem. This kind of foreshadows the next episode. Because NVIDIA had to learn these hard lessons and had to develop, like was forced to develop these really crazy competencies, like eventually developing CUDA that would power this whole machine learning and scientific computing revolution, was it bad for Microsoft to not have to grow that DNA in the same way that it was bad for Microsoft to not have to grow the mobile DNA and Apple beat them at that game?…

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