Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
82 published records
01 / belief
“Ben, you covered this in your intro, but I think everybody knows the narrative about what happened to Microsoft between (call it) 1995 and 2014 when Satya took over.”
02 / recommendation
“Think about how I watch Netflix. I will watch Netflix tonight after we record on my Apple TV upstairs.”
03 / recommendation
“I used AirPods for years and years and they’re great, but if you sleep on your side or do anything you know you got the AirPod jamming into your ears.”
04 / belief
“To be honest, I think Steve took one for the team in taking over as CEO in that moment.”
05 / belief
“Yup, you’re right. I think yours is better than mine. Now that’s my new land the plane.”
06 / belief
“We’re done, it is a new day, and that needed to happen. The office for iPad discussion we had a minute ago, I think was emblematic.”
07 / belief
“I think he was even a contractor working on, maybe the project was Landman, but he was actively contributing to other Microsoft products.”
08 / uncertainty
“How it went down, we don’t know exactly, but the fact pattern is Steve announced that he was leaving.”
09 / belief
“Then the Intelligent Cloud segment, and that’s Azure. I think LinkedIn is part of the Office segment, if I have that right.”
10 / uncertainty
“You can twitch your hands and I don’t know, we haven’t actually seen a product yet, so we’ll have to see what that looks like.”
11 / uncertainty
“As we said a minute ago, the market cap was, I don’t know, call it $300 billion, slightly below.”
12 / belief
“Then Dave went on to co-found August Capital where he is a partner emeritus these days. I think Dave was the longest-serving Microsoft Board member besides Bill Gates.”
13 / belief
“The Azure story is absolutely incredible. I think nobody knows how it really happened.”
14 / observation
“Therefore my value, the only way to grow value accruing to me is to win at the expense of someone else at this company.”
15 / uncertainty
“Even just setting up, we preserved the talent asset and that we had continuity in our businesses for another 15 years on what is already a 30-year-old business. I don’t know.”
16 / commitment
“Yup. Now I will say the company stayed the Windows-centric company for too long.”
17 / belief
“We have shifted from a devices and services company to a cloud-first, mobile-first company. I believe that was the message.”
18 / belief
“There’s a big one I’ve been thinking on, which is how to go about placing your bets for the future as a company. I think in the 2000s, Microsoft was viciously trying to fight against the tide.”
19 / belief
“I think that is both, especially in the early days when Microsoft and Satya was hyping up how much cloud revenue the company was doing, being able to report the legacy server business as part of that revenue helped a lot.”
20 / belief
“David, I think you’re making the same point about the cloud today that I was about Microsoft in the PC era.”
21 / uncertainty
“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.”
22 / belief
“I think Bill Gurley had a blog post about Android back in the day about the less than free business model and why you can’t compete with it.”
23 / belief
“The cloud era even more. I think there are crazy returns to scale on cloud economics.”
24 / belief
“Office got to this point where, and I think Steven Sinofsky even writes about this in Hardcore Software in his book and on his Substack, that at some point they were trying to ship features that the PMs thought were great and users would love.”
25 / belief
“I think a lot of the consumer stuff can be answered by Steve Ballmer wasn’t really a consumer-oriented technologist.”
26 / uncertainty
“The way you phrase that, I’m thinking like, oh, did Microsoft try and buy Google? I don’t know about it, but the number of course you’re talking about Yahoo.”
27 / belief
“One stat and then one point I want to make to highlight all this, by 2007 analysts estimated that 40%, of all of Microsoft’s revenue, which I think was about $51 billion that year, 40% of $51 billion came from multi-year enterprise agreements.”
28 / commitment
“With the enterprise agreement you can customize all of this and we will give you exactly what you want.”
29 / belief
“There’s a meaningful moment in history, I think about 15–16 months, where the official ruling is Microsoft should be going through the preparations to do their breakup.”
30 / belief
“Crazy. It is worth not to pour cold water at all because I think the high level point stands.”
31 / commitment
“Certain Microsoft fans have probably been listening to this episode and gripping their phones with all their strength, like when are you going to talk about Xbox ? We are going to talk about Xbox briefly right now.”
32 / belief
“I think that’s a galvanizing factor to pull the parties into the room and say, hey, this has gone on too long and we need to put this behind us.”
33 / belief
“I think with one exception. I think you were totally right. Nobody is writing Vista apps, but the only people left who are writing Windows apps period are enterprise developers writing custom software for enterprises.”
34 / belief
“I think Bill Gates was a big fan of this vision because it was really technically ambitious where they had an object-oriented file system where the file system could specify data types.”
35 / belief
“I think that was one that was felt by a lot of employees and managers who suddenly can do less with the same amount of resources that they have.”
36 / belief
“Separate operating system company and a separate applications company, just like the Standard Oil breakup order, however many years it was before 90, I think.”
37 / belief
“Then he (I think) ran BizTalk server, which was another one of these enterprise server products.”
38 / belief
“Somebody we talked to characterize this period as a mental breakdown for the whole company. I think that’s the best way to characterize it.”
39 / belief
“Steve Ballmer realized pretty early, I think because of the Google Android thing, mobile was going to shake out differently.”
40 / uncertainty
“You’d have to ask them. I don’t know. It’s 20 hours of this. Well somehow—I actually don’t really know how this happened—after the deposition is recorded on October 9th, the judge then issued a reversal saying that videotaped depositions are indeed allowed to be used in court.”
41 / belief
“I think that’s a lost to history moment is the acquisition that almost happened here for $47 billion.”
42 / belief
“Microsoft is trying to ask for, whatever it is, some single digit number of dollars for a licensing fee of the OS. I think I’m undershooting, but let’s even say it’s $5.”
43 / belief
“The future is tablets. We think that’s going to be a dominant computing paradigm.”
44 / belief
“Bill Gates shows up on the satellite feed, and of course this moment is legendary. But studying it from this lens, I realized there’s this whole other aspect to it that I didn’t know before.”
45 / commitment
“We are going to get out ahead of Apple, we’re going to try to out-Apple Apple here, and we’re not going to let what happened in phone happen to us in our core market of PCs.”
46 / belief
“While Yahoo gets 88% of the revenue in the deal for the first five years, arguably the value from this basically all accrued to Microsoft because they ended up building out not only a proper advertising business, which now is used on a number of different sites—I think even in partnership with Netflix—for their ad supported tier, but also being, once it had all the Yahoo traffic, needed to be a scaled web service.”
47 / belief
“I can’t figure out if I’m a super nerd for wanting that, and most people wouldn’t actually want that. But I travel with an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook, and I think I could just do two.”
48 / belief
“Here’s how to pull it apart. Yahoo had about 15% market share of search, which I think was number two.”
49 / commitment
“We will. No dice. Instead they work out an investment and a commercial deal. The terms of the deal are in October 2007, Microsoft invests $240 million for 1.”
50 / belief
“I think at first it was, you can have it open source, but you don’t get any of our services.”
51 / commitment
“In this era, Microsoft had a lot of the right ideas with a lot of the wrong timing and execution on everything from the Zoom to Bing. But despite that, from 1995 where we start our story, to 2014 where we will end this episode, Microsoft grew their annual revenue from $6 billion to $80 billion.”
52 / belief
“Like he (I think) worked in Dynamics, their Salesforce competitor, their CRM for a while.”
53 / belief
“I think the biggest moment when the door really shut is when Verizon freaked out after the Apple and AT&T deal, and said we need an answer.”
54 / uncertainty
“You’re already getting this picture of Microsoft’s business strategy, which is until we know exactly what the future looks like, start placing bets that approximate, so that we’re in the mix even though we don’t know exactly what the future is.”
55 / belief
“I think at that point it was a two horse race. Microsoft probably could have figured out a way to get in before that, but it is all related to Google finding that orthogonal business model.”
56 / belief
“One of the greatest tailwinds you could ride in business history, PC shipments, I believe the stat, David, was that they grew 98% per year over the 11 years between the founding and 1975 and the IPO in 1986.”
57 / belief
“I think the vision for this was like, hey, we’re going to take DirectX, bake it into the operating system, and allow the operating system to use GPU hardware acceleration.”
58 / commitment
“Any modifications you make enterprise or software you use and rely on, we won’t break no matter what.”
59 / belief
“” You have Palm who was already saying things like, I believe the CEO even before the announcement said “The PC guys are not just going to figure this out.”
60 / commitment
“Of course, Microsoft, the strategy here is we will develop a browser application that used the building block that others could also use to render HTML.”
61 / belief
“Marc had (I think) by this point already put the image tag into HTML, so they can now send images that render in browsers.”
62 / belief
“I think that’s right. I think a set of technologies were breaking through. People are just going to use those devices and that software no matter what.”
63 / belief
“Without taking anything away from Satya, because I think he does absolutely deserve a ton of credit for knocking it out of the park on execution, I think all of the credit for the vision for it and the championing it for the initial seven years within Microsoft goes to Steve and to Ray.”
64 / evaluation
“Microsoft said, we told you we can’t do that, but you’re a judge and you’re ordering us to, so they do and surprise, surprise, when you just disable a bunch of code that other code depends on, it doesn’t work.”
65 / belief
“Totally. I think Xbox Live is debatable. We’ll come back to this with Azure. Xbox Live was one of the original pioneering internet services, subscription services across any category of software and technology.”
66 / belief
“I just want to double underline and highlight this one because I think also this same dynamic played out in the building and evolution of Microsoft’s enterprise business.”
67 / belief
“I have more. I think you guys are using some of our stuff. I don’t want to sue you.”
68 / belief
“I think there are two gigantic benefits. Look, the gaming market is massive and important.”
69 / belief
“Famously they did a pilot program with Energizer, the battery company, selling just sort of, I don’t think it was the Office productivity suite, but it was SharePoint and stuff I think as a service, as Software as a Service.”
70 / belief
“I had a Microsoft XP tablet edition I think is what it was called PC in college.”
71 / evaluation
“To this point, Microsoft has not changed their business model. They simply vanquished a potential future that was dangerous for them.”
72 / evaluation
“The pilot code, millions of users. Marc doesn’t work there anymore, but it seems to be working.”
73 / recommendation
“You have to write a Windows desktop app at this point in history because it’s where a bunch of the users are.”
74 / evaluation
“Not only is it amazing because you get that 75% versus 29% of gross margin, it’s also an amazing way to scale because you do a deal with every OEM, as you’re going down the line, it’s the Visa networks of networks thing that I think we alluded to this last episode too.”
75 / prediction
“I guess there was no formal challenge of that change in rule, and part of it probably was just because they realized they had a long way to go with the judge and didn’t want to agitate too much.”
76 / evaluation
“We made it all the way to 2009 before they settled their EU version of this antitrust case.”
77 / evaluation
“In that settlement, they agree to enter into what folks may know, the famous words, a consent decree. That means they consent in this case, that they are not going to tie the sale of Microsoft application products to the sale of Windows.”
78 / evaluation
“For Brad to come in and say like, I’m going to be the guy who is able to disregard the past and figure out how we—I use this phrase in the first episode—become a trusted partner to governments around the free world, how crazy is it that this Microsoft that we just talked about for the last hour became the Microsoft that can do no wrong from a regulatory perspective.”
79 / prediction
“That was not day one, but they knew they had to and they were going to. It was just a, hey, we’re not going to do this right away because the company would organ reject this so hard, but we are moving in that direction and we will be AWS.”
80 / evaluation
“The new strategy had to be, we will dictate really intense hardware requirements because now with Windows Phone, we are making a promise to users to compete with the iPhone where Microsoft is backing that up.”
81 / prediction
“Probably, I don’t know, I haven’t done a sum of the parts analysis, but I think you can say probably at least half is Azure propping up that market cap.”
82 / evaluation
“My opinion on this is they clearly had no idea what to talk about in the keynote because the one feature that I can really remember as a flagship feature is that alt-tab switcher that was 3D that kept bringing the windows closer and closer and closer to you.”