This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we’re featuring highlights from a live interview with Nathan Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures and former chief technology officer at Microsoft.

Myhrvold worked at Microsoft from 1986 to 2000, where he laid the groundwork for Microsoft Research, recruited top computer scientists, and played a key role in shaping the company’s technology strategy.

Since leaving Microsoft, he has worked across fields including energy, science, physics, paleontology, photography, and high-tech cuisine.

In this conversation, recorded at Town Hall Seattle as part of GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event, Myhrvold shares his thoughts on the rise of AI, his longtime collaboration with Bill Gates, the future of energy, the secrets of Microsoft’s success, and what’s next in his Modernist Cuisine book series.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights from Myhrvold’s remarks, edited for context and clarity.

On predicting Microsoft’s rise: In 1987 I told [Bill Gates] that Microsoft would be the most valuable company on Earth, and he’d be the richest man in the world, and it would take 10 years. And I was totally wrong. It took three… I had not figured that Sam Walton would die.

On Bill Gates’ brutally honest feedback: I remember Bill said, ‘Well, you’re new here, so I’ll forgive the stupidity of your remark.’ That was the type of supportive feedback [that he gave].

On Microsoft’s willingness to admit mistakes: They would admit they were wrong. For some people, especially big-shot CEOs, that’s really hard. But for Bill, it was more embarrassing to not admit it.

On the boom-and-bust fashion cycles of AI: AI is like clothes — it goes through cycles of being in fashion and out of fashion… When speech recognition became successful, they called it ‘speech recognition’ — that used to be AI, until it worked.

On where AI stands today — and how far it still has to go: Today, [AI] is a lot like personal computers in the 1980s… good for a bunch of things… but its potential is enormously higher. And that will require a whole lot of work by a whole lot of folks.

On the ‘miracles’ still needed for human-level AI: AI doesn’t yet have the ability to create new abstract concepts and reason about them. That’s at least one miracle that needs to be figured out. I’ve variously thought there are three to five miracles. It could happen tomorrow — or maybe it already happened tonight, and they just haven’t told us.

Why he’s not losing sleep over AI doom scenarios: Humans love really scary, nasty villains that aren’t actually real. Sauron, the Night King — those weren’t really going to get us. AI overlords destroying us is very similar… it’s a story you can get excited about, but we all know there’s no AI overlord outside that’s going to get us.”

On energy use, AI, and the global demand for more power: “The average American uses about 12 kilowatts — it’s like you had 12 toasters running 24/7… The poor world wants to get rich, and the rich world wants to do more things that require power, like AI.

On using AI to analyze thousands of pastry recipes: I’m writing a big, 2,500-page book on pastry… And I use AI in that. I’ll say, ‘I think this assumption isn’t necessary,’ and ChatGPT will always say, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ Oh my God, it’s learned how to butter me up.

On the surprising reactions to his latest food project: I’m writing a big, 2,500-page book on pastry… Literally, last week, I said to someone, ‘I’m writing a big book on pastry,’ and they immediately said, ‘It must be hard writing on pastry.’ And I didn’t know if they were pulling my leg or what.

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Audio editing by Curt Milton.

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we talk with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the company’s 50th anniversary, and where it’s headed from here.

Plus, highlights from Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event in Redmond, which featured a rare joint appearance by Nadella alongside former leaders Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

The day also reflected Microsoft’s role in an increasingly complex global landscape, with a CNBC interview focusing in part on the impact of tariffs on the company and the global economy, and a protest outside the event condemning the use of the company’s technologies to support Israel in the ongoing war in Gaza.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related coverage:

• Inside Microsoft’s 50th: Iconic moments, strong memories, and the realities of the outside world
• Interview: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the tech giant’s 50th anniversary — and what’s next
• Gates, Ballmer, Nadella and Copilot: Microsoft CEOs past and present engage in podcast chat with AI
• Inside the Microsoft Archives: How the tech giant preserves, shares, and learns from its history

Microsoft@50 is an independent GeekWire editorial project supported by Accenture.

More: Microsoft@50

REDMOND, Wash. — It had been eleven years since Microsoft’s three CEOs had appeared together on stage, and the public reunion Friday of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella for the company’s 50th anniversary brought back brought a flood of memories for all three.

“The thing that’s so amazing about both Steve and Satya is how great they are with people,” said Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and first CEO. “I wrote more code than either of these guys … but when it comes to picking people, motivating people, thank God for Steve and Satya.”

“Bill was Copilot for me,” said Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO from 2000 to 2014, referencing the company’s current AI assistant in crediting Gates for teaching him the ropes of the tech industry after Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980.

Earlier in the event, Ballmer had reprised his iconic “developers, developers, developers!” chant at the urging of the event’s host, actress Brenda Song. Then, on his own, Ballmer led the crowd in a new chant — “50 more, 50 more, 50 more!” — looking ahead to Microsoft’s next half-century.

Nadella, the current Microsoft CEO, paid tribute to both of his predecessors.

“I feel like all of us who grew up in the company they built, it just made us better,” he said. “The standards they set for how you get prepared, the work you do. … it gives me goosebumps.”

Watching from the audience, along with Microsoft employees in-person and via live stream, was a large group of current and former Microsoft executives from across the decades.

Among them: Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming; Amy Hood, Microsoft CFO; Craig Mundie, former Microsoft chief research and strategy officer; Bob Muglia, former Microsoft Server & Tools president; Kevin Johnson, former Microsoft platforms chief who went on to serve as Starbucks CEO; and Kazuhiko Nishi, the Japanese business leader who was a key figure in Microsoft’s early global expansion.

During the first portion of the event, focused on new Copilot features, Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s CEO of AI, told his own story of his history with the company’s products: When he was 11 years old, he persuaded his parents to buy a PC with a Pentium processor and 8 megabytes of RAM.

“That RAM was critical, because it let me install Windows 95,” said Suleyman, the British AI entrepreneur who joined Microsoft last year after co-founding Inflection AI and previously leading applied AI at DeepMind. “It’s no exaggeration to say that that machine completely transformed my life.”

Listening in the audience was Brad Silverberg, who led the development of Windows 95. Later, Silverberg said he was “very proud” to know that the work the team did back then inspired someone who would become one of Microsoft’s key leaders.

“We had big dreams, and this is even bigger,” Silverberg said. “The part that I really like about it is that it was worldwide. That was our goal from the beginning — it was aimed at everybody around the world.”

Later, as Nadella, Gates and Ballmer spoke, the drumbeat of a protest could be heard in the distance on the company’s Redmond campus. Two minutes later, the event inside was interrupted for the second time by an employee standing up and condemning the use of the company’s technologies to support Israel in the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

The demonstrations by the group No Azure for Apartheid, made up of Microsoft employees and other tech workers, mirrored similar protests at GeekWire’s independent Microsoft@50 event in Seattle two weeks ago. In the context of the Microsoft employee event Friday, the protests contrasted sharply with the reflective and celebratory mood.

Interrupted during the first portion of the event, Suleyman acknowledged from stage that he heard the protest, as the person was ushered out. Gates, Ballmer, and Nadella, being interviewed on stage by YouTuber Cleo Abram, waited without acknowledging the second protester, and continued their conversation after the disruption ended.

At the end of the event, Gates demonstrated his underrated knack for using humor to break tension when Abram asked the trio to imagine what Microsoft might be like in another 50 years, on its 100th anniversary.

“Well,” Gates said, “I hope Copilot’s a good CEO.”

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As the 2024 Partner of the Year in Business Transformation for Copilot, our unique alliance with Microsoft and Avanade positions us to reimagine the industry and reinvent the future through the revolutionary impact of AI. Together, we are partners in change.

Want to learn more?

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REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft on Friday unveiled a series of updates to its Copilot AI assistant for consumers, including a new personalized memory feature designed to recall details from a user’s life across conversations.

Microsoft says the new memory feature allows Copilot to retain information such as a user’s favorite foods, entertainment preferences and personal milestones, enabling more personalized responses, reminders and suggestions over time. 

“You’ll never need to start over with your personal Copilot,” said Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI CEO, during an event at the company’s headquarters this morning. “You can always work from a place of deep understanding based on what you choose to share, from what you like for breakfast, to what your big life goals are.”

In addition to controlling whether Copilot remembers information, the company says users will have options to manage or delete stored data through a dashboard.

Microsoft also announced new AI agent capabilities in Copilot that will take action on behalf of users; a new “Pages” feature that collects and organizes notes and other content; auto-generated podcasts based on user interests; an AI-powered shopping assistant; a deep research assistant, and new AI search capabilities in Microsoft Bing. 

The company made the announcements Friday morning at an event in Redmond where Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and others are be marking the company’s 50th anniversary. 

“What started out as a developer tools company 50 years ago is now a platform company where everyone can be a developer,” Nadella said as he opened the event. “Our mission is not changed. It’s only expanded.”

The latest Copilot updates underscore the intense competition among tech giants to build more personalized and capable AI assistants for consumers, attempting to move beyond business applications.

ChatGPT, from Microsoft’s key partner OpenAI, offers memory features that let the assistant recall user-shared information between sessions. Google’s Gemini AI offers a similar capability for premium subscribers. Amazon’s Alexa+, which is rolling out now, allows users to store information like family recipes or frequent flyer numbers and retrieve them later.

Microsoft says it’s also testing new ways for users to customize Copilot’s appearance and personality, hinting at more interactive and individualized experiences in the future.

Suleyman joined Microsoft last year after co-founding Inflection AI and previously leading applied AI at DeepMind. He has long described persistent memory as a critical milestone for the next generation of AI assistants, predicting that such a capability would bridge the gap between machine intelligence, emotion, and the ability to take action on behalf of users.

“The missing piece that loops all those together, I think, is memory,” Suleyman said in October at Madrona’s IA Summit in Seattle. He predicted that within 18 months, AIs would have “very good memory,” enabling them to form deeper, more useful relationships with users.

In public talks, Suleyman has maintained that AI is evolving from a tool into something closer to a relationship—something that not only responds but adapts and supports over time. 

“My team and I are now in the business of engineering personality,” he said. “We’re crafting a lasting, meaningful, trusted relationship. That is the new platform, as far as I see it.”

Maybe the fourth CEO of Microsoft will be some form of AI. Until then, artificial intelligence is left to serve as “host” in a conversation among the three men who have held the top job at the tech giant.

As part of the festivities around Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, current CEO Satya Nadella reunited with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer for a podcast-style discussion featuring the company’s Copilot personal AI assistant.

“I want you to ask a lot of sharp, playful questions. Make it feel conversational,” Nadella told Copilot (playing through his phone on the table in front of him). “Feel free to get involved and opinionated yourself on our answers.”

The AI kicked things off by asking Ballmer about the most thrilling tech battle or competition he could remember, and what he learned from it.

“It had to be the competition with IBM, to kind of body slam them, if you will, in the operating systems business,” Ballmer said. “They were the big bad machine of years past … and that was sort of a fight for all that essentially came afterward. It was scary, it was a lot of fun, and it’s not the last battle like that Microsoft will face, I think.”

Copilot moved seamlessly between the three, reacting in a natural voice to their answers and dealing with slight interruptions here and there, as it’s designed to do.

“I’ve got a playful one for Bill,” the AI said at one point. “If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice at Microsoft’s early days, what would it be?”

After discussing how he had to learn to manage people and build teams with diverse skill sets, Gates pivoted to a reflection on Microsoft’s antitrust battles.

“I might tell my younger self, ‘Watch out for the government. You might have a little bit of a tussle with them,'” he said. “I didn’t anticipate that. I was pretty naive about not engaging in Washington, D.C., as soon as I should have.”

Nadella shared the finale of the discussion with a video he posted on social media (above). He asked Copilot to wrap things up with an “AI roast” of each CEO.

The AI did its best to rib Ballmer about his signature high-energy enthusiasm and Gates about whether AI could be intimidated by the co-founder’s intense thinking face. “It’s like it’s waiting for a blue-screen moment,” Copilot said, as Nadella cracked up.

Copilot finished with Nadella, asking the CEO if he could envision AI running things at Microsoft while he sat back and enjoyed the ride. Nadella said if AI can perform as well as his favorite cricket player, that’s the day it can run the show.

Copilot signed off by saying “cheers” to all three, and Gates got in the last human word.

“Cheers,” he said. “Whatever that means to an AI. Does it drink?”

[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.]

What’s the significance of Microsoft in modern business and tech history? 

For the past several months, in the course of reporting GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 series, we’ve asked variations of that question in interviews and email exchanges with key leaders from the company, past and present.

Their answers provide not just a sense for Microsoft’s impact but also a blueprint for others looking to capitalize on major technological shifts.

As the company marks its 50th anniversary today, we’re sharing highlights from their responses, including perspectives from co-founder Bill Gates, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and current CEO Satya Nadella, among many others. Continue reading for their thoughts.

— Ray Ozzie, who succeeded Gates as Microsoft’s chief software architect, said the company’s lasting impact came from setting clear technical boundaries that enabled broad innovation.

“Constraints can be empowering,” said Ozzie, a pioneering software leader who created Lotus Notes early in his career. “At a key moment in the industry, Microsoft put forth a key constraint — the Windows API — and showered developers with love and attention.”

“When paired with several other key constraints — the PC hardware design and the x86 [architecture] — Microsoft catalyzed then-unprecedented growth of the economy and of tens of thousands of businesses globally.” 

“With a stable foundation,” he said, “innovation abounded.”

— Lisa Brummel, a former Microsoft executive who served as head of human resources and helped shape the company’s culture, said Microsoft’s lasting significance lies in its global reach and relentless customer focus.

“Microsoft was unique in bringing computing to the masses,” Brummel said. “Many companies had singular applications or features that were great and powerful. Apple certainly has an incredible consumer following but Microsoft truly did this at global scale.”

Brummel added, “As employees, we understood that we just had to be better – we had to be the best for everyone in the world. In my early days we were maniacal about it and we never wanted to let up for fear that someone would beat us.”

— Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, said the company’s most profound contribution to modern business and society has been the democratization of computing — expanding access to technology not just for individuals but for businesses of all sizes.

“Did Microsoft make that happen? Abso-frickin-lutely. No question,” Ballmer said. “Microsoft changed the world.”

He pointed to Office 365, Azure, and other cloud services as part of that same legacy — pushing the frontier of productivity and shifting IT from a backroom operation to a central driver of business.

“If you really go right down to what’s absolutely unique,” Ballmer said, “it’s the democratization of computing.”

[Related: Steve Ballmer on Microsoft’s first 50 years, its OpenAI deal, and why he’s still its biggest investor]

— Susan Hauser led global enterprise, finance, and commercial teams — serving for more than five years as corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Enterprise and Partner Group — as part of her 27-year career at the company. 

“In my experience, bold thinking and a belief in people and ideas at Microsoft fueled groundbreaking advancements—from revolutionizing personal computing to leading the charge in cloud technology, AI, and accessibility tools,” she said.

“Beyond innovation, Microsoft has always championed technology as a force for good. I was fortunate to witness this firsthand throughout my career — whether it was an elementary school teacher using OneNote to unlock a dyslexic student’s ability to read, AI helping farmers improve crop quality and distribution, or the power of Azure Cloud in sharing and analyzing data to improve healthcare and eradicate diseases.”

“Over the years, the words may have changed, but the philosophy never did: we ate our own dog food, embraced our own technology, learned from it, and used it to make a real difference for people and businesses.”

— Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO since 2014, said the company’s most enduring legacy is rooted in its original purpose: building technology that empowers others to build more technology.

“That was true in ’75, and that is true in ’25, and that will be true, I believe, in 2050,” Nadella said. “Technologies will come and go, but the idea that this company can stay relevant by producing technology so that more and more people around the world can create more digital technology … that, I think, is the core thread of Microsoft.”

[Related: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the tech giant’s 50th anniversary — and what’s next]

— Trish Millines Dziko, a former Microsoft program manager and senior diversity administrator, has served for nearly 29 years as executive director of the Technology Access Foundation. She recently joined the Microsoft Alumni Network board of trustees.  

“The most significant thing that sticks out for me is not what Microsoft created directly — even though they created some amazing software and hardware products — but all the companies and nonprofits started by former Microsoft employees,” she said.

“Microsoft revolutionized employee giving, which I believe led to employees knowing more about the communities they live in, and the power of individual philanthropy. Think about it, all these young folks all of a sudden making a lot of money, and the company encouraging them to give instead of just spending it on themselves.”

“Employees spent more time doing volunteer work and serving on boards of the nonprofits with causes that mattered to them. Eventually in the late 1990s, employees like me left the tech field to start nonprofits of our own.”

“By the early 2000s there was a bit of a boom of small tech companies started by former Microsoft employees. I’m talking about hundreds of companies! It almost became a rite of passage for anyone wanting to run their own company — work at Microsoft, make a big contribution to a product, network with other folks in the sector, dream up an idea for a product that Microsoft likely won’t create, then create a company of your own. That was the dot-com boom in the making.”

“Today, over 290,000 former Microsoft employees in 54 countries belong to the Microsoft Alumni Network where they continue to give to their communities/causes and support each other professionally. Now THAT’s a legacy to be proud of!”

— Charles Simonyi, the pioneering software architect who led the early development of Word, Excel, and other Office apps, said Microsoft’s achievement is its lasting leadership in an industry that has changed dramatically — and could have just as easily passed it by.

“This wasn’t automatic. It wasn’t a given,” Simonyi said. “A lot of work and a lot of difficult decisions had to be made.”

Simonyi returned to the company in 2017 with its acquisition of his startup Intentional Software. He credited Microsoft not only for its technical strengths, but for its ability to recognize and adapt to turning points — from personal computing to enterprise software, and now artificial intelligence. 

Simonyi sees parallels between the early days of the internet and the emerging AI era — a period of broad experimentation that will eventually converge on lasting ideas and business models.

“I think Microsoft is again going to have this leading way of bringing AI to businesses in a way that makes business sense and creates a very positive feedback loop,” Simonyi said.

— Bonnie Ross, who worked at Microsoft for more than 33 years, including 15 years leading the “Halo” video game franchise, said the company’s legacy lies not only in its technological reach but in its evolution toward a more values-driven culture.

Ross joined Microsoft in 1989 as a college hire and was quickly given far more responsibility than she expected. In that era of business, few companies “would have given a young person the responsibility that we all got at Microsoft,” she said. “That was so unique for its time.”

Microsoft’s male-dominated culture was especially difficult to navigate, especially in the early years, Ross said. But as the company evolved, she said, the cultural transformation under Satya Nadella’s leadership was one of the most meaningful changes she witnessed at Microsoft. 

“They’re not there all the way yet,” she said. “But Satya really came in and took a step back and said, who do we want to be? And he was the one that put it together. We need to be humble. We need to be customer-focused. We need to be curious. We need to think about growth mindset.”

Ross also praised Microsoft’s handling of ethical and policy issues, particularly around the use and protection of data, and the continuation of its DEI programs in the face of shifting political winds. 

— Brad Silverberg, who led the development of Windows in the 1990s, said Microsoft’s significance lies in how it turned computing into a mainstream, global force, benefitting from good timing.

He recalled the early 1990s as the “rocket years,” when Microsoft became a true driver of mass-market computing. The launch of Windows 95, he said, marked a cultural shift: “It was like going to a rock concert.”

Just as Microsoft ultimately embedded the internet into everything, it’s now aiming to infuse artificial intelligence across its applications, giving users new ways to access and capitalize on AI advances. 

“That’s when you know you have something really powerful and really exciting,” Silverberg said, “when it gets used in ways the inventors never imagined.”

— Steve Wood, one of Microsoft’s earliest engineers, who also served as general manager, said the company’s most primary impact in that era was shifting the focus of the tech industry from hardware to software.

“That was completely unpredictable to most people and inconceivable at the time,” in the hardware-dominated world at the time, he said.

Wood said Microsoft’s timing, leadership, and focus enabled it to concentrate and accelerate that shift. “Of course the technology was going to happen,” he said, but Microsoft was “in the right place, at the right time — and persistent enough to actually drive it all.”

[Related: Standing up for Microsoft: Recognizing the company’s employees, back to one of its first.]

— Julie Larson-Green, a longtime Windows and Office engineering and design leader, and former Microsoft Office chief experience officer, said the company’s legacy is grounded in making technology “more accessible, intuitive, and powerful — shaping the way we work, create, and connect.”

“From bringing personal computers into our homes with Windows to making Office a go-to for productivity, it’s been at the heart of modern life,” she said. “Whether you’re collaborating on Teams, building something amazing on GitHub, or just getting through your inbox, chances are Microsoft has helped make it happen.” 

“I spent 25 years at the company, and it was an incredibly fun and rewarding ride. Nonstop learning, creative problem-solving, and working alongside some of the smartest and most talented technologists, designers, and product thinkers out there. It was an honor to be part of a team that made technology more accessible and easier to use for billions of people.”

— Steven Sinofsky said the secret to Microsoft’s early success was that it didn’t just build technology, but enabled entire ecosystems. The former Windows president also ran Office and served as Bill Gates’ technical assistant, among other roles, during his 23 years at the company. 

Sinofsky compared the rise of PC software to the Apollo-era space race and the iPhone revolution — moments of massive scaling that shifted the world.

“Microsoft created a new level on the stack,” Sinofsky said. “So instead of buying a computer where the assumption was you had to program it to do anything, you could get programs from other people, and not just that — you could make a living doing it.”

— Mark Zbikowski, one of Microsoft’s earliest software architects, said the company’s enduring contribution has been its ability to make technology approachable — and genuinely useful.

For every new technological advancement — from 16-bit processors to networks to multi-processors to AI — Microsoft made complex technology concrete and usable, helping people solve real problems.

“The technology isn’t an end in and of itself,” Zbikowski said. “It’s a means to an end, which is helping people with their lives.”

— Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, said the company’s strength comes from its long-term vision for software.

“It’s kind of this miraculous thing,” he said.

In the early days of the PC revolution, computing was becoming effectively free, when compared to the time-share systems on which Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen originally learned to program. That opened the door to vast opportunities for developing software.

“Now what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free,” he said, “and that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.”

Gates, who continues to advise Nadella and Microsoft’s product teams, said the pace of innovation in this new era “will have to be very, very fast … and these tools will just improve very rapidly.”

“I hope Microsoft can lead the way,” he said.

[Related: Bill Gates on Microsoft at 50, and what’s next for AI and innovation]

GeekWire Contributing Editor Alan Boyle contributed to this report.

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Accenture proudly joins GeekWire in recognizing Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, marking over 35 years as a trusted partner and change driver.

As the 2024 Partner of the Year in Business Transformation for Copilot, our unique alliance with Microsoft and Avanade positions us to reimagine the industry and reinvent the future through the revolutionary impact of AI. Together, we are partners in change.

Want to learn more?

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[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.]

Satya Nadella sees in Microsoft’s history a blueprint for its future.

“That very first product of ours — that BASIC interpreter for the Altair — I think says it all,” the Microsoft CEO said in an interview with GeekWire this week, as the company prepared to mark its 50th anniversary.

By developing a programming tool for one of the first personal computers, Nadella explained, Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen were creating technology to help others create more technology.

“That was true in ’75, and that is true in ’25, and that will be true, I believe, in 2050,” he said. “Technologies will come and go, but the idea that this company can stay relevant by producing technology so that more and more people around the world can create more digital technology … that, I think, is the core thread of Microsoft.”

Nadella is just the third person to serve as Microsoft’s CEO, following Gates and Steve Ballmer — both of whom are expected to join him for a rare joint appearance at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters Friday in recognition of the company’s first half-century in business. 

Now in his 12th year as Microsoft’s CEO, Nadella has led a resurgence of the venerable tech company, helping Microsoft find its footing in the cloud and stake its claim in the new world of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft is one of the world’s most valuable public companies, with a market capitalization hovering around $2.8 trillion as of this week, second only to its longtime rival and partner Apple by that measure. 

Leveraging its partnership with OpenAI, the company jumped out to an early lead with its GitHub Copilot coding companion. It has been aggressively rolling out AI in an effort to update its flagship franchises like Windows and Office, and offering AI tools via its Azure cloud platform.

But as Gates pointed out in an interview with GeekWire, the competitive landscape is fundamentally shifting.

In the past, Gates explained, the major players in tech have carved out different corners of the tech world. He cited Google in search, Microsoft in Office and Windows, and Amazon in cloud computing and retail.

“Although there’s some intense competition and overlap, we each have some areas of very high strength,” Gates said. 

But now, as all of these companies race into AI, the lines are blurring, the pace is accelerating, and the battle is becoming “hyper competitive.”

“The pace of innovation will have to be very, very fast, despite the capital costs involved. And these tools will just improve very rapidly,” said Gates, who continues to advise Nadella and Microsoft’s product teams. 

With a tone of cautious optimism, the famously competitive and paranoid Microsoft co-founder added, “I hope Microsoft can lead the way.”

In addition to intense competition, challenges for Microsoft will include the massive capital expenditures that come with its AI infrastructure buildout — expected to total $80 billion in the current fiscal year alone.  

Microsoft also needs to navigate its complicated partnership and investment in OpenAI, the AI pioneer best known for developing ChatGPT. 

Ballmer, the company’s largest individual shareholder, said in an interview that he understood the pragmatic trade-off at the heart of that relationship, given Microsoft’s decades of investment in its own AI research.

“What Satya did with OpenAI, I think was brilliant — and I think it’s fraught with peril, but I know they know that,” he said. “It’s sort of a juggling act.”

One big question looming over all of this: Can Microsoft deliver the killer app for AI — the defining breakthrough that cements its role in the next era of computing? 

There are more parallels here to the early days of Microsoft and the PC, when applications like spreadsheets and word processors opened the eyes of the industry and the public to the power of new technology. 

In the interview this week, Nadella said he sees signs of that same potential in tools like GitHub Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered coding assistant, which he described as a turning point that opened his eyes to the potential of generative AI. 

“When I started seeing code completions is when I started believing,” Nadella said. 

The features later expanded to include chat functionality, enabling developers to ask questions and get AI-generated answers directly in their coding environment. Then came multi-file editing, followed by AI agents capable of making changes across entire code repositories.

“We are going from a pair programmer to a peer programmer,” Nadella explained. “That’s the type of system we now have.”

Nadella pointed to similar advances across Microsoft 365, where Copilot tools and agents now assist with everything from research to data analysis — tasks that once required teams of humans or hours of manual work.

Just prior to the interview this week, Nadella said, he had three customer meetings. Beforehand, he asked his Microsoft 365 Copilot Researcher agent to get him up to speed.

It created comprehensive briefing documents comparable to what a human analyst would produce, from internal and external sources including Office documents, a CRM database, and the web.

“It’s unbelievable,” Nadella said. “These are products I use all the time with high intensity. I think we’re beginning to see the value, just like Excel and PowerPoint or Outlook did it back in the day.”

Without divulging Microsoft’s product plans, Nadella offered a deeper explanation of something both he and Gates have alluded to in recent months: the need for a new type of inbox for the AI era.

He described a future in which knowledge workers are supported by fleets of AI agents — researchers, analysts, coders — each performing tasks autonomously or in coordination with their human counterpart. 

In this model, users issue instructions, sometimes staying in the loop, sometimes delegating entirely — while still needing a clear way to coordinate and manage the flow of these AI agents. 

That’s where it starts to feel like “a new type of inbox,” he said, “where the coordination of the work agents do, with us in the loop, will require new types of organizing layers.”

Back in 2014, when Nadella became Microsoft CEO, Ballmer encouraged him to be his own person. “In other words, don’t try to please Bill Gates or anyone else,” Nadella wrote in his 2017 book, Hit Refresh.

In that spirit, Nadella has brought his own global perspective and personality to the role — including his longtime love of poetry. 

In an interview in 2017, after his book’s release, I asked Nadella to cite a line of poetry that he thought best described the future at that time. He quoted a line from Vijay Seshadri’s Imaginary Number: “The soul, like the square root of minus one, is an impossibility that has its uses.”

Nadella said at the time that the line captured the force inside us “that seeks out the unimaginable, that gets us up to solve the impossible.” 

These days, the line also conjures up images of quantum technologies, a field in which Microsoft recently claimed a breakthrough that it says will advance the world beyond traditional binary computing, promising to ultimately help solve some of the world’s most difficult problems.

So I asked this week, is there another line of poetry that Nadella would cite in 2025 to reflect his feelings about Microsoft, the industry, or the future?

This time, Nadella referenced one of his all-time favorite lines, from the mystical Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote that “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” 

Nadella called this “a beautiful thing” for technology builders — the people for whom Microsoft has been making technology for five decades now. To make the future a reality, first you have to live it. And that, the Microsoft CEO said, “is probably the best ‘builder’ line that I’ve ever heard.”

Watch GeekWire’s interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella above.

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A coalition of Washington state business leaders released a letter Wednesday urging state lawmakers to reconsider recently proposed tax and budget measures, echoing concerns raised by Gov. Bob Ferguson this week.

The proposals, if approved, “would result in the largest tax increases in state history, perpetuating a dangerous trend of unsustainable spending growth,” reads the letter to state House and Senate leaders, signed by the executives of four major business organizations and 65 other business leaders from across the state.

“I actually think it’s an almost unprecedented outpouring of support from across the business community,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith in an interview. “From the border of Idaho to the Pacific Ocean and from Canada to Oregon, the business community in the state is remarkably united on this.”

Two weeks ago, Senate Democratic budget leaders unveiled their revenue proposal for the 2025–27 budget. The plan includes a new 5% payroll tax on large employers, along with a “financial intangibles” tax targeting high-net-worth individuals.

The proposal comes amid a projected state budget shortfall of up to $16 billion. Additional measures under consideration include lifting limits on property tax increases and reducing the statewide sales tax rate.

At a news conference Tuesday, Ferguson said he would not sign the current 2025-27 state budget proposals from either the House or the Senate. He cited what he described as excessive tax increases and a reliance on what he considers a legally uncertain wealth tax, saying it would be immediately challenged in court.

“It would be irresponsible to rely on an untested new tax to balance our budget,” he said. “What’s the plan if the wealth tax is declared unconstitutional after the session ends? I have not heard a satisfactory answer to that question.”

While Ferguson rejected the current tax proposals, he also acknowledged the concerns driving them. He said he’s open to a conversation about a limited version of the wealth tax — capped at no more than $100 million in state revenue annually — that could serve as a test case in court without jeopardizing the broader budget.

Ferguson also voiced support for making the state’s tax system more equitable, calling it the second most regressive in the nation. He did not directly endorse the proposed sales tax cut included in the legislative budgets, but emphasized his openness to ideas that shift the burden away from lower-income residents.

Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, vice chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, told the Washington State Standard that she was “very glad” to hear Ferguson acknowledge the need for tax reform.

“I think he opened the door for ongoing conversations and set the bar for progressive revenue,” she said.

Smith has been outspoken in expressing Microsoft’s opposition to the proposed taxes. Speaking at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event two weeks ago at Town Hall in Seattle, the Microsoft president and vice chair said the proposal would increase prices for consumers, reduce jobs, and hurt the tech industry.

In an interview after Ferguson’s press conference Tuesday, Smith said spending restraint and cost controls could help to close the budget gap. In addition, he cited the Office of Financial Management’s projections for 6.8% tax revenue growth in the next biennium, calling that a sizable amount even without new tax measures.

Smith also called for renewed emphasis on economic development in Washington state, citing other states’ investments in innovation hubs as a model.

“It’s going to be a lot easier to help grow the state’s economy if we have a sensible approach to taxation,” he said.

See the full text of the letter below, signed by executives from the Bellevue Chamber, Association of Washington Businesses, Washington Roundtable, and Seattle Metro Chamber as part of a broader coalition of business leaders.

Washington state – Business Community Budget Letter by GeekWire on Scribd

[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.]

REDMOND, Wash. — You’ve probably seen Microsoft’s iconic 1978 team photo. But have you read the memo that made it happen?

“As a suitable culmination of Microsoft’s productive stay in Albuquerque, I have arranged a sitting to make a company-wide portrait,” read the Dec. 6, 1978, memo from early Microsoft employee Bob Greenberg, under the subject “ESPRIT DE CORPS,” providing the logistics and suggesting “Regular informal attire.”

They definitely followed the dress code, resulting in a classic photograph that captured the moment in time before the company relocated to the Seattle region.

This memo is the kind of gem that can be found in the Microsoft Archives, which includes a 4,300-square-foot, climate-controlled vault in Redmond that holds everything from original boxed software and prototypes to internal communications, campaign buttons, and press materials. 

For this installment in our Microsoft@50 series, my GeekWire colleague John Cook and I explored the Microsoft Archives with Patti Thibodeau, Microsoft Archivist; and Kimberly Engelkes, Director of the Microsoft Library and Archives.

We were there for more than an hour. The collection is so immense, we could have spent weeks unearthing Microsoft’s history from the meticulously labeled boxes.

Founded in 1986 and staffed by a team of six, the Microsoft Archives preserve nearly 135,000 physical artifacts, 170,000 digital records, and half a petabyte of digitized video content. The Microsoft Archives has been in its current building in Redmond since 1997.

There are costumes from the Halo TV series; a doorframe from Bill Gates’ former Microsoft office; “Save the Blibbet” materials from an internal protest over the company’s 1980s logo change; and a computer server that accompanied former CEO Steve Ballmer during a launch event. 

“It became a historical artifact the moment that it was on stage with him,” Thibodeau explained.

One wall display features historical images of Microsoft leaders, including current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, giving a demo about the power of Microsoft Excel.

Inside the vault, a nearly life-sized cardboard cutout of former Microsoft President Jon Shirley has been carefully preserved for posterity in a plastic wrapping.

A wall-sized collage of newspaper and magazine clippings recalls the media frenzy surrounding the launch of Windows 95 — including a BusinessWeek cover story explaining, “How it will change computing.”

Nearby is a sign from the Windows XP launch, autographed by the development team, that once counted down the days to RTM, or release to manufacturing.

A display in the Microsoft Archives lobby includes a custom-painted Windows XP launch guitar, a gold commemorative plate from the opening of the company’s office in Hyderabad, India, and a shirt from an early Microsoft cloud initiative.

But it’s not just about the successes. A framed poster near the door, for example, commemorates the launch of Microsoft’s ill-fated Zune music player. 

Wrapped in plastic inside the vault are two Clippy costumes, sometimes used for internal events, with the famous Groucho eyebrows that defined the discontinued Microsoft Office assistant.

A display table in the vault includes a pair of ActiMates interactive dolls — Arthur and a Teletubby — illustrating Microsoft’s foray into smart toys and educational tech in the 1990s. It was an ambitious effort that never quite took off but hinted at future directions in artificial intelligence and interactivity.

Next to those is a product box for the Microsoft Kin mobile phone. “If you ever get asked what the shortest product in Microsoft history was, it lasted three months before it got pulled from the market,” Thibodeau said.

“We want to make sure that we’re able to look back to see all the amazing things we’ve done, but also possibly learn from our mistakes,” she explained.

Thibodeau joined Microsoft in 2023, bringing an unconventional approach to her role as archivist. With an MBA, a degree in anthropology, and a background in museum studies, she was drawn to the field because she wanted to work with people and tell stories, not just manage data.

The goal is “to collect, preserve and share out the history of Microsoft,” she explained. “There’s this stereotype sometimes that archives are a black box — things come in and don’t come out. And so we’re trying to reposition the archive as a living community archive for Microsoft.”

With Microsoft set to mark its 50th anniversary this week, the Microsoft Archives staff has been especially busy. Requests have roughly doubled in recent months, as teams across the organization dig into the past to prepare for milestones, campaigns, and retrospectives.

It’s especially important for new Microsoft employees to have access to the company’s historical context, said Engelkes, the Director for Library and Archives at Microsoft, who oversees four physical libraries and an online content portal for Microsoft employees.

A library scientist with an MBA, Engelkes was hired as a researcher at Microsoft in 1998. She worked on projects like the Surface Table, Xbox, and MSN products, and started Microsoft’s Competitive Intelligence program, establishing legal and ethical guidelines for data collection. 

“We have people coming in now who weren’t even born yet when Microsoft was founded,” Engelkes said. “For them to understand our cultural history, our technological history, our place in the world right now, and in the past, gives them a sense of depth of who they’ve come to work for.”

The facility isn’t just about memories and nostalgia. The Microsoft Archives regularly fields inquiries from Microsoft’s legal team, often to retrieve original packaging, license agreements, or sealed copies of legacy software needed for ongoing cases or compliance reviews. 

It’s also used by branding, product, and communications teams looking to reference past initiatives or provide historical context for current work. 

Exhibit materials are drawn from the Microsoft Archives for internal events and public displays, including those at the Microsoft Visitor Center. Some teams request artifacts to illustrate the company’s history in presentations or internal campaigns and occasional giveaways of extra items.

In addition to responding to requests, Microsoft’s archivists track major product launches and internal milestones, reaching out to teams and collecting materials while they’re still recent. The idea is to capture history in the moment, before documents are lost or forgotten.

“We want to know what we’ve done. We want to have copies of our product,” Thibodeau said. “But we also want to know how we got there, because so much can change in that process.”

The Microsoft Archives receives donations primarily through internal referrals and word of mouth. (Have an item to donate? See information below.) Often, employees or teams who are moving offices, shutting down labs, or cleaning out storage will reach out and ask, “Would you want this?” 

Archivists also build relationships with product teams, especially around major launches or anniversaries, to encourage contributions.

In some cases, items arrive unexpectedly — like the expected 50 VHS tapes that turned out to be 50 boxes containing a variety of media, including vintage Betacam tapes. The team reviews, catalogs, and evaluates each donation to determine what’s historically significant and worth preserving.

But not everything in Microsoft’s history can be boxed up and stored on a shelf. The rise of cloud computing and AI has introduced a new set of challenges. Unlike shrink-wrapped software or branded hardware, many modern Microsoft products exist only as digital services — automatically updated, distributed online, and constantly evolving.

“How do you archive the cloud, or AI?” Thibodeau said. “Ten years from now, when someone’s wondering what was going on when Microsoft was launching AI, how do we make sure we’re able to tell that story?”

In short, they’re still figuring it out. 

To start, instead of collecting just physical media, the team is gathering internal communications, promotional materials, product documentation, and other digital records that capture how cloud and AI technologies are developed, launched, and discussed inside the company. 

They’re also working with Microsoft researchers to explore long-term solutions such as emulating software environments, so people in the future will be able to experience what it feels like to use today’s technology.

In the meantime, there are plenty of physical artifacts to preserve.

Walking into the Microsoft Archives vault, two walls of software packages line the entrance, and rows of boxes stretch across metal shelves, each labeled, cataloged, and climate-protected at a constant 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 45% humidity.

The climate-controlled environment is optimal for preserving paper, tapes, CDs, textiles, and other materials.

The Microsoft Archives uses museum-quality, archival-grade materials such as acid-free paper, special archival plastics, and custom-built boxes to protect unique artifacts. These storage materials are proactively replaced every 5 to 10 years to ensure long-term preservation.

Extensive metadata is compiled to describe items in the Microsoft Archives, in conjunction with a database and barcodes for locating objects. And the archivists aim to keep three copies, at least, of Microsoft software: one for preservation, one for display, and one for research.

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft will make it to 100 years. But in the meantime, these precautions will help to ensure that its history does.

“If we can’t tell our story,” Thibodeau said, “someone else will.” 

MORE INFORMATION

For a public glimpse of the collection, Microsoft’s Visitor Center at Building 92 features selected artifacts from the Microsoft Archives.

The Microsoft Archives is not open to the public. (A previous Microsoft Museum closed in 2020 at the onset of the pandemic.) Limited tours of the Microsoft Archives are offered for employees, and their friends and family.

If you have an item you’d like to contribute, Microsoft suggests contacting artifact@microsoft.com so that potential donations can be assessed.

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[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.]

Next time you right-click on a mouse, thank Paul Allen.

In the early 1980s, before the Microsoft co-founder left the company, he made the call to go with two green buttons on the beige Microsoft Mouse.

When Allen mentioned this to Steve Jobs during a visit to Palo Alto, the Apple co-founder dismissed the idea. Jobs, who became famous for his devotion to the one-button mouse, believed in simplicity — sometimes to a fault.

“At Microsoft, we tried to balance simplicity with power,” Allen wrote in his 2011 memoir, Idea Man. “I considered the trade-off worthwhile if an extra feature made a program or device more functional.”

As Microsoft prepares to mark its 50th anniversary, company veterans are reflecting on the pivotal role of Allen, who started the company with Bill Gates in 1975 after spotting the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics — rushing to tell his childhood programming buddy that they were being left behind.

That sparked the software vision that would define Microsoft’s future. Allen was a driving force in Microsoft’s early years, including pushing the company to expand beyond operating systems and programming languages into applications. 

“Paul deserves so much credit for what Microsoft is,” said Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, remembering Allen at GeekWire’s recent Microsoft@50 event. “Without Paul’s genius, without Paul’s push, without Paul’s insight, there’s no Microsoft, just not a chance.”

The partnership between Gates and Allen started at Seattle’s Lakeside School, where they met in the computer room after the school acquired a time-share system.

Allen, who was two years older, later came back to help Gates finish a complex scheduling program for the school after the death of Gates’ friend and previous collaborator, Kent Evans.

“Paul loved handing me challenges,” Gates said in an interview, recalling those early days at the computer terminal. “I had done so well on a math exam that Paul was literally the one who said, ‘Oh yeah, you think you’re so smart, can you figure this thing out?’ And [that] kind of drew me into it.”

Allen left Microsoft in 1983 after a battle with Hodgkin’s disease and an incident in which he overheard Gates and Ballmer discussing the idea of reducing his stake in the company — for which both later apologized. 

His post-Microsoft career included a wide array of investments, companies, sports teams, community initiatives, and philanthropic pursuits.

Allen’s legacy in tech and science continues to this day through the Allen Institute non-profit bioscience research organization; the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, focused on open-source AI; and the Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

He died in 2018, at the age of 65, after he was diagnosed with a recurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 

In a 2005 interview for the Seattle P-I newspaper, on Microsoft’s 30th anniversary, I asked Allen if he could have ever imagined the partnership he and Gates started growing into what it had become at the time.

“It’s a funny thing,” Allen said. “I think our dreams were a lot more modest. We used to talk about how we might have dozens of employees back when we first wrote BASIC and brainstormed about having our own company.”

Allen recalled that he would always be reading up on new developments in technology and hardware at the time, while Gates would be reading Fortune and wondering what it would be like to run a big company.

“It’s amazing how some of those dreams came true,” he said.

And so did his vision for the mouse.

“The Microsoft Mouse thrived through many incarnations—optical, wireless, laser, Bluetooth—as one of the company’s longest-lived products,” he wrote in Idea Man. “And every one of those mice had more than one button.”

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The crowd at GeekWire’s recent Microsoft@50 event included many current and former employees and executives from the company, and we capitalized on the opportunity to recognize them.

First, the Microsoft Alumni Network provided buttons featuring Microsoft’s different logos through the years, which attendees wore to show when they worked there.

During the program, we asked everyone in the crowd to stand up, and then had people sit down based on when they started at Microsoft.

Ultimately, there was one person standing: Steve Wood, a former Microsoft engineer and general manager, who joined the company in 1976 in Albuquerque, N.M.

Wood is in the upper left of the iconic Microsoft photo taken in 1978 in Albuquerque, not long before the company moved to the Seattle region.

Wood grew up in Seattle, but he didn’t know Microsoft co-founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates until he was hired at the company in New Mexico. A Stanford graduate with experience in microprocessor technology, he was finishing his master’s degree in computer science in 1976 when he saw a Microsoft recruitment notice.

He was brought on to expand Microsoft’s offerings, initially working on the development of a Fortran compiler.

As he recalled in an interview with GeekWire last fall, he was either employee No. 5 or 6, depending on how you count. He ended up working on a wide variety of projects, and his duties later expanded to include general manager.

“It was a family,” he recalled of the Albuquerque crew. “We spent hours and hours at the office together, long days, and then a lot of evenings we’d spend together. … We would play chess, random card games. We’d just talk. We’d watch movies. We’d listen to Paul play guitar. … It was a very close group of people.”

After leaving Microsoft in 1980, Wood worked in commercial microprocessors for a public company at the time called Datapoint. He later reunited with Allen to work on companies including Asymetrix, Starwave, and Interval Research, as part of a long career as a business and technology leader in the Seattle region.

Watch a video above of the alumni recognition at the Microsoft@50 event.

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On this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast — part of our Microsoft@50 series — former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reflects on his remarkable tenure at the company he helped shape for nearly 34 years.

Ballmer talks about his early days working alongside Bill Gates and Paul Allen — describing Gates as “the smartest guy I’ve ever known,” and crediting Allen for his instrumental role in building the company.

“Without Paul’s genius, without Paul’s push, without Paul’s insight, there’s no Microsoft. Just not a chance,” he says.

He identifies his most consequential decision as Microsoft CEO, shares his thoughts on the biggest mistake during his tenure, and offers his perspective on the company today as its largest individual shareholder.

“Cultures don’t change totally. And the notion of being hardcore and pushing forward and driving — I know that’s part of Microsoft,” he said. “Do I love the company? Do I even know the company? And the answer is, only sort of. But I love what the company does.”

He also opens up about his post-Microsoft pursuits — from his data-driven mission with USAFacts to transforming the NBA fan experience with the L.A. Clippers.

And we hear his emotional message to his former Microsoft colleagues, including many key figures in attendance for the conversation at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event at Town Hall Seattle last week.

“I just have such wonderful memories. And there were good times, bad times, tough things, easy things,” he said. “But it’s a reminder to me of just how cool it was to work together, and I thank you for that.”

Listen above, watch a highlight below, and continue reading for more.

On the tensions that came with his transition to CEO: “I knew how to work for Bill … but Bill didn’t know how for me to be his boss, or for Bill to work for me. And it took us a while, really, to get that down.”

Competing with open-source software: “There’s not a lot of businesses that have to compete with free things. We survived.”

The most impactful decision of his tenure: “It’s got to be the move to the cloud … Without that building block, it just doesn’t happen.” (This set the stage for Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and the company’s AI infrastructure.)

His biggest mistake: “I would have stopped the project that was Cairo (which became Windows Vista) three or four years earlier. … We had basically a team of thousands tied up for eight years to put together a release that wasn’t as good as the one that preceded it. It doesn’t sound very good.”

The failed attempt to acquire Yahoo during his tenure: “If we bought it, we would have made a lot of money, and if we didn’t buy it, we saved a lot of money.”

Microsoft’s current capital expenditures: “If they need $80 billion, they should spend $80 billion. I don’t care. I’m a long term shareholder. … I’m about the only shareholder who tells them, Hey, why aren’t you spending more?”

His philosophy as an investor: “Most portfolios should probably have three things in it. Number one is something that’s completely safe… Secondly, if there’s something you really care about and you really think you know, sure, invest in it. … And then you can have something that you’re kind of screwing around with.”

Working on the Intuit Dome for the L.A. Clippers: “I knew more about what I wanted in that arena than in any other product I was ever involved with.”

The importance of transparency in government data: “Numbers are the least partisan thing you can have, in the sense that adjectives can make things sound big and small — they can get partisan. Numbers are just what they are.”

On Microsoft finding its way in AI under Satya Nadella: “Somebody asked me, why weren’t you guys the first guys to do LLMs?… But guess what — they pivoted. They got it right. … You just have to give Satya all the credit in the world.”

Listen to the conversation above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related Links

• Microsoft@50 recap: Company faithful mark first 50 years and look to future at GeekWire event
• Steve Ballmer on Microsoft’s first 50 years, its OpenAI deal, and why he’s still its biggest investor
• Bill Gates on Microsoft at 50, and what’s next for AI and innovation
• Microsoft’s CEOs have this trait in common, says exec who has worked closely with all three

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Microsoft’s Teresa Hutson has taken the role of corporate vice president for the company’s newly created Trusted Technology Group.

“We believe — I believe — AI can change the world. But we must build it — and all technology — so that it is both useful and trusted,” Hutson said on LinkedIn.

Microsoft is modifying its mission-focused “four pillars,” which include working to expand opportunities, earn trust, protect fundamental rights and advance sustainability. The revised construct merges the “trust” and “fundamental rights” pillars, Hutson said in her post.

The reorganization will reflect that change, creating the Trusted Technology Group that combines the corporation’s Privacy, Safety and Regulatory Affairs Group; its Office of Responsible AI; and its Technology for Fundamental Rights Group.

Hutson holds a law degree and has been at Redmond, Wash.- based Microsoft for more than 16 years. Her roles have included legal work on cross-border employment and immigration; serving as VP of Tech and Corporate Responsibility; and corporate VP of Technology for Fundamental Rights.

— In other Microsoft news, Rima Alaily is now head of the Infrastructure Legal Affairs team at the company. Alaily has also been at the company for 16 years, previously serving as corporate VP of the Competition and Market Regulation Group since 2018.

In announcing her new position, Alaily similarly referenced Microsoft’s increased focus on AI.

“While we have always been and will continue to be a product and services company, we are also increasingly an infrastructure company,” she said on LinkedIn. “This fiscal year we will invest about $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to power our AI transformation and more important the AI transformation of our customers.”

— Siteimprove hired Christy Marble as chief marketing officer. Marble previously served as CMO for companies including SAP Concur, Pantheon Platform and Visier.

Siteimprove is based in Copenhagen and has an office in Bellevue, Wash., where a majority of its executive leadership team is located. Earlier this month, the company announced Nayaki Nayyar as its new CEO. Siteimprove provides AI-powered marketing, analytics and search engine optimization.

— MicroVision appointed Glen De Vos as its chief technology officer. De Vos was at the automotive components company Delphi for 25 years. That business later became Aptiv, and DeVos held leadership roles at both companies.

MicroVision, which has operations in Redmond, Detroit and Hamburg, Germany, builds automotive lidar sensors for automotive safety systems, autonomous vehicles and non-automotive applications.

— RealWear announced Sebastian Beetschen as its new CEO, taking over from co-founder Chris Parkinson. The Vancouver, Wash., company provides rugged, hands-free, voice-controlled technology for front-line workers. Its devices include smart glasses that incorporate AI features and thermal cameras.

Parkinson helped launch RealWear in 2016, after previously founding Integral RFID, which provided Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies. He is now CEO of QBH.ai, a company that’s in stealth mode.

Beetschen was formerly CEO of the Swiss startup Almer Technologies for almost four years.

— Armoire, a Seattle startup offering online apparel rentals, appointed longtime Nordstrom leader Scott Meden to its advisory board.

Meden joined Nordstrom in 1985 as a salesman and worked his way up the ranks, serving as a buyer and merchandise manager, and president of Nordstrom Rack. He retired in 2022 as Nordstrom’s chief marketing officer.

Meden said he was “honored” to join the startup’s board. “The company’s innovative approach to sustainable fashion resonates with me,” he said, “and I look forward to contributing to Armoire’s growth and success.”

— Icertis, a Bellevue-based contract management software company, appointed Shashi Mandapaty to its strategic advisory board. Mandapaty has held leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble. Icertis recently raised $50 million in a new investment.

— ZeroAvia announced former Federal Aviation Administrator Billy Nolen as its senior strategy and regulatory advisor. Nolen will help the sustainable aviation company pursue the certification of its electric propulsion system and hydrogen-electric powertrains. ZeroAvia is based in California and the United Kingdom, and has R&D and manufacturing operations in Everett, Wash.

— Seattle startup Opanga welcomed Neville Ray, former president of technology at T-Mobile, to its board of directors. Opanga focuses on using machine learning to boost software used by telecom companies and network operators. Its Opanga RAIN product is an AI-powered radio access network optimization platform.

— Redmond Mayor Angela Birney joined the board of Greater Seattle Partners. The organization is a public-private partnership focused on regional economic development. It works to bring together business interests, foreign companies, investors, education leaders and government.

It would be hard to imagine three personalities more different than those of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella, the three people who have served as Microsoft CEO in the company’s 50 years of existence.

But apart from their shared history in the role, they have something else in common: curiosity.

That’s the take from Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, who has worked closely with Gates, Ballmer, and Nadella at different points in his 32 years at the company.

“All three of them embody a common attribute that I have found to be present in most truly great leaders in multiple fields, and that’s curiosity,” Smith said when I asked him to compare and contrast the three Thursday night during GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event in Seattle.

He explained that they are “curious in different ways.”

• Gates is known for devouring books and learning through reading, as he details in his new memoir, Source Code, which focuses on his early years.
• Ballmer can “read a spreadsheet like no other human being on the planet” and finds insights through talking and numbers, as Smith observed.
• Nadella, meanwhile, has an extraordinary range of interests. Smith remembered when Nadella, on a trip to Finland, asking a local executive deep questions about poetry, politics, and real estate.

“If you ask me these questions about Seattle, I would be like, I give up,” Smith said.

Nadella sounded a similar theme in a recent interview on the Minus One podcast from South Park Commons, when asked to give advice for future generations in the age of artificial intelligence. In this emerging world, he said, it’s possible that there will be a bigger premium on curiosity than on expertise.

Watch the video of Smith’s comments above, and listen to the full conversation with him from the Microsoft@50 event on this week’s GeekWire Podcast.

PREVIOUSLY: The surprising way Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella uses AI to consume podcasts on his commute

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: A conversation with Microsoft President Brad Smith, on stage at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event this week at Town Hall Seattle, discussing the company’s anniversary, the key issues for Microsoft today, and what’s next for the industry and the world.

Smith traced the company’s history from the early days of the personal computer to Microsoft’s present-day focus on empowering people — quoting what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would say to recruits: “If you want to be cool, go work for Apple. If you want to make other people cool, come work for Microsoft.”

He offered his perspective on Microsoft’s three CEOs — Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella — saying that they share a trait that he believes defines great leadership: curiosity.

Smith also addressed tough topics, including Microsoft’s antitrust history, and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty and tensions, which were underscored by a protest at the event over the use of the company’s technologies to support Israel in the ongoing war in Gaza. (Read more in our recap here.)

Discussing economic pressures facing Washington state, Smith spoke out against a new slate of tax proposals, saying that he fears they could hinder the innovation and job growth that have contributed to the state’s success.

Listen below, and continue reading for key quotes and highlights.

Microsoft’s early mission: “A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software — yes. But the notion was that you could take these devices and make them useful and affordable to everyone.”

Surviving antitrust: “My conversations with Bill would usually start by him telling me that I was about to destroy the company, and then he would be supportive.”

Learning from failure in diplomacy: “Part of what it took to put all those really challenging things behind us… was to fail gracefully with people so you could put the pieces back together again.”

The shared trait of Microsoft’s three CEOs: “All three of them embody a common attribute that I have found to be present in most truly great leaders… and that’s curiosity.”

Current tax proposals in Washington state: “I have, frankly, never been more worried about the future of the tech sector in Washington state, as I am today.”

The symbiotic relationship with the state: “You can’t have a healthy company without a healthy community, but you can’t have a healthy community without healthy business. And that, I believe, is at stake.”

Microsoft’s global role: “We want the people of Ireland and South Africa and Poland and elsewhere to know that they can count on us, and we will be a source of stability even in what can sometimes feel like an unstable time.”

On the importance of product builders: “If truth be told, the people that matter the most are those who design and build the products. Which has never been me.”

The challenge ahead: “The challenge of year 51 is the same challenge it has been for all 50 years: you’ve got to win a year, a year at a time.”

Listen to the full conversation above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Related Links

• Microsoft@50 recap: Company faithful mark first 50 years and look to future at GeekWire event
• Microsoft president: Proposed Washington state business taxes would weaken tech sector

Links discussed in the podcast intro:

• Using AI to uncover allegations in the JFK files of the CIA secretly funding a series of spy novels to influence public opinion in the 1960s.
• Fireballs, foxholes, and cryogenic suspension: Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman’s greatest quips

Will artificial intelligence ever catch up with human intelligence? And if it does, is humanity doomed? Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold, who had the job of predicting the future of tech during Microsoft’s early years, was ready with some answers at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 anniversary event Thursday night.

The feature that AI still lacks is the ability to create a new abstract concept, “imbue it with meaning and then reason about it,” said Myhrvold, who joined Microsoft in 1986 and served as the company’s first chief technology officer.

“I think we’ll get there, but that’s at least one miracle that needs to be figured out, and I variously have thought there was like three to five miracles that need to be done. Who knows?” he said during the event at Town Hall Seattle. “And that could happen tomorrow, or maybe it already happened tonight, and they just haven’t told us. Or it could take another 10 years.”

GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop returned to the topic a minute later. “Did I hear correctly that we’re three to five miracles away from AI that’s as powerful or as intelligent as humans?” he asked.

“Yes,” Myhrvold replied.

When it comes to tech predictions, Myhrvold has chalked up more hits than strikeouts. Three decades ago, he foresaw a time when computers would merge with consumer electronic devices like telephones, when videos would be available online and on demand rather than on tape cassettes, and when long-distance voice calls would essentially be bundled for free with data services.

Today, it doesn’t take a tech guru to see that AI is becoming more capable, and that Microsoft is taking a leading role in partnership with OpenAI. But Myhrvold said the field is moving so fast that it’s hard to predict what will happen exactly when.

“Two years ago, you wouldn’t have guessed where we were today,” Myhrvold said. “There was a small set of people at OpenAI and at Microsoft who believed a crazy proposition — which is, if only we pour billions of dollars of computing at it, we’ll get there. They had some reasons, but people had tried the same thing with AI many times since the 1960s, and it had not been successful. So, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion, but that’s the kind of calculated risk you have to take. And that’s partially how Microsoft has gotten to be in one of the best positions in AI, because they were able to take that calculated risk.”

Myhrvold said he would compare the state of AI today to the state of the personal computer industry in the 1980s. “I think its potential is enormously higher, and that’s going to require a whole lot of work by a whole lot of folks,” he said.

The important thing now is to figure out how best to use AI. “That’s what application programming is all about,” Myhrvold said. “It’s about saying, ‘Well, gee, I can move bits around the screen, but now I can have Microsoft Word put nice letters together and have fonts, and I can make documents, and I can make presentations.'”

Today’s generative-AI agents may be able to churn out a serviceable limerick or Shakespearean sonnet, but there should be far more practical innovations ahead, Myhrvold said. “We’ve only scratched the surface,” he added.

Microsoft Word can be used to write a bestselling novel or a terrorist manifesto, and AI might well be used for a similar range of applications. But Myhrvold said he doesn’t worry about AI overlords eventually enslaving humanity.

“We love having really scary, nasty villains that aren’t actually real,” he said. “So, Sauron — OK, none of us felt personally threatened by Sauron. The Night King and his army of the undead? They’re not really going to get us either. And so when people conjure up these stories about AI overlords destroying all of us, it’s very similar to that.”

Other highlights from Myhrvold’s fireside chat:

• As he reviewed his history at Microsoft, Myhrvold acknowledged that his powers of prediction weren’t infallible. He said he told Bill Gates in 1987 that Microsoft would become the world’s most valuable company and that Gates would become the world’s richest person. “And it would take 10 years,” he recalled saying. “I was totally wrong. It took three.”
• In addition to his role as CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures, Myhrvold serves as vice chairman of TerraPower, the nuclear power venture founded by Gates. Myhrvold said next-generation nuclear power will have to be part of the solution for the challenge of rapidly rising energy demand — a challenge made all the more challenging by the proliferation of power-hungry data servers for cloud computing and AI processing. “You have to think of a world in which the total energy demand in this next century grows by a factor of five to 10,” he said.
• Myhrvold is the author of several science-oriented cookbooks, including “Modernist Cuisine,” “Modernist Bread” and “Modernist Pizza.” The focus of his latest culinary composition is pastry. “We do use AI for that,” he said. Myhrvold said he and his collaborators have compiled a massive database of recipes, including more than 1,000 recipes for chocolate chip cookies. “We can then analyze them statistically and figure out, ‘Why so many recipes? What would the best one be like?'”

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Our global team provides comprehensive services spanning 150 countries across Microsoft’s entire enterprise. Our unique alliance with Microsoft and Avanade is one-of-a-kind and positions us to deliver transformation and innovation for the next 50 years and beyond.

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Longtime Microsoft employees, key executives, company faithful and tech community members celebrated the tech giant’s 50th anniversary Thursday night in Seattle during Microsoft@50, a GeekWire event to mark the company milestone.

Hundreds of people turned out at Town Hall to mingle and share stories about where they were, who they knew and what they worked on over the years at the Redmond, Wash.-based company.

Attendees included many pivotal figures from Microsoft’s past and present. And the on-stage program featured three speakers uniquely positioned to offer insights across business, policy, and technology in the context of Microsoft’s position in society and the industry, looking back and to what’s ahead.

Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith, who has been with the company for 32 years, said one of the things that stands out when he looks back at 50 years of Microsoft is the company’s ability to survive — something that’s not typical in tech.

“… And do more than survive,” Smith told GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop during a fireside chat. “And often be at the frontier of technology as we have, not every year, but many years. I think it’s fair to say we’re in a pretty good place today.”

Related: Microsoft president: Proposed Washington state business taxes would weaken tech sector

Nathan Myhrvold served as Microsoft’s CTO from 1986 to 2000, during some of the most pivotal moments in its history, and he reflected on the company’s impact.

“Beyond business history, we live in a technological world. We all interact with technology constantly,” Myhrvold said. “And Microsoft was an absolutely fundamental, foundational part of that.”

Myhrvold also weighed in on the present and the future when it comes to the artificial intelligence revolution.

“There’s a persistent thing with the tech industry that people overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term,” he said. “In the long run, AI has tremendous potential. I put AI today a lot like personal computers in the 1980s. It’s good for a bunch of things, but I think its potential is enormously higher. And that will require a whole lot of work by a whole lot of folks.”

Related: Human-level AI is just a few ‘miracles’ away, Microsoft pioneer Nathan Myhrvold says

The final speaker of the night was former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who took the stage to applause reminiscent of the energy he brought to his famed “developers, developers, developers” chant in 1999.

Ballmer, who left the company 11 years ago, remains Microsoft’s biggest shareholder. He was asked what he still loves so much about the company.

“I still love the notion of forward momentum,” he said in part. “I’m sure cultures have changed some, but cultures don’t change totally. And the notion of being hardcore and pushing forward and driving — I know that’s part of Microsoft.”

Ballmer was one of just three CEOs to lead Microsoft, including current CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates, who spoke with GeekWire about the anniversary in a prior interview. Ballmer got emotional when asked about Paul Allen, the company’s other co-founder, who died in 2018 at age 65.

“When I think about the things that really made the company, kind of the germs of the ideas that really constituted the early company, I think of Paul,” Ballmer said. “Paul deserves so much credit for what Microsoft is, and without Paul’s genius, without Paul’s push, without Paul’s insight, there’s no Microsoft.”

Attendees included David Marquardt, Microsoft’s first investor and former board member; Steve Wood, employee No. 6; former Windows chiefs Terry Myerson and Steven Sinofsky; former Office and Windows leader Julie Larson-Green; former Xbox chief Robbie Bach; Microsoft CMO Takeshi Numoto; former Microsoft executive Dee Dee Walsh; RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser; Mary Snapp, VP, strategic initiatives; Jean Paoli, former president of Microsoft Open Technologies; Lili Cheng, VP, conversational AI and research; Sanjay Parthasarathy, former Microsoft VP; Charles Fitzgerald, former GM of platform strategy; Trish Millines Dziko, executive director, Technology Access Foundation; and many more.

Thursday’s event was sponsored by Accenture. Thanks also to gold sponsor We. Communications, and silver sponsors, Microsoft Alumni Network and First Tech Federal Credit Union for helping to make the event possible.

The event also featured the unveiling of a new Innovate State celestial map, showcasing Washington state as an innovation hub. Partnering on this project are Greater Seattle Partners, Microsoft, the Tech Alliance, WTIA and GeekWire.

The event drew a protest from roughly 50 people associated with No Azure for Apartheid, a group made up of Microsoft employees and other tech workers who condemn the use of the company’s technologies to support Israel in its ongoing conflict in Gaza. Organizers Abdo Mohamed and Hossam Nasr said they were fired by Microsoft last fall for their pro-Palestinian actions on the company’s Redmond campus.

“The message that we’re leading with today is no tech weapons for genocide,” Mohamed told GeekWire.

Different speakers addressed the crowd outside Town Hall, and protesters blocked traffic in front of the venue. Three people were escorted out of the event after they stood up and protested at different times during the Smith and Ballmer sessions.

Keep scrolling for more photos from Microsoft@50:

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Our global team provides comprehensive services spanning 150 countries across Microsoft’s entire enterprise. Our unique alliance with Microsoft and Avanade is one-of-a-kind and positions us to deliver transformation and innovation for the next 50 years and beyond.

Want to learn more about Accenture’s capabilities?

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Microsoft named Kathleen Hogan, its longtime chief people officer, to the new role of executive vice president of strategy and transformation, reporting to CEO Satya Nadella.

Hogan will focus on “defining our overarching corporate strategy and structure and leading our continuous transformation as a company,” Nadella wrote in an email to employees outlining the changes Wednesday morning.

“As we’ve seen time and again throughout our 50-year history, times of great change for the world and for our industry require us to have a mindset that enables us to continually adapt and transform ourselves,” Nadella wrote. “There’s no question that we are at the forefront of another such moment, with the rapid changes across every industry and business function in this AI era.”  

Amy Coleman, who has led Microsoft’s corporate HR functions for the past six years, will succeed Hogan as chief people officer, and join the company’s senior leadership team, also reporting to Nadella.

Hogan’s new role expands the CEO’s office, potentially giving Nadella more ability to focus on Microsoft’s technical and product strategy, the competitive landscape, and interaction with product groups, customers, and partners.

The change in HR leadership comes as Microsoft looks at overhauling its performance-review process, according to a Business Insider report. The company’s latest job cuts, in January, were focused on job performance.

Hogan has been Microsoft’s chief people officer since November 2014, succeeding Lisa Brummel in the role.

Satya Nadella is a fan of multimodal AI interfaces — the ability to interact with a chatbot not just through text but through voice, for example — so much so that it has completely changed the way he “listens” to podcasts.

Speaking recently on the Minus One podcast from South Park Commons, the Microsoft CEO said he has set the Action Button on his iPhone with Apple CarPlay to activate Microsoft Copilot voice mode. That allows him to easily engage with Microsoft’s AI in the car, including an alternative way of consuming podcasts.

“The best way for me to consume podcasts is not to actually go listen to it but to have a conversation with the transcript on my commute using my Copilot. Who’d have thought?” he said.

“But it is more convenient because of the modality, the fact that I can speak to it, I can interrupt it,” he said. “Think about it, right? This full-duplex conversation which was never possible — that is a fantastic new modality. … There’s no going back.”

This resonates with me. I’ve done this not just with videos and podcasts but also with entire books (as a way of refreshing my memory before an interview with an author for example).

Having a conversation with a transcript like this is doable in Microsoft Copilot and other AI tools, particularly if the podcasts are on YouTube, with transcripts.

In Microsoft Copilot, for example, one way would be to start the conversation on a computer in the Edge sidebar before leaving the house, and then continue it in the Copilot app in the car, assuming you’re logged into your account in both places. You could do something similar in ChatGPT or other AI tools.

But it’s not always seamless, or at least not obvious to most users. It can also be tough to find the transcript for a podcast, depending on where it’s published. It makes me wonder if there’s a startup opportunity here.

[Editor’s Note: Microsoft@50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.]

Bill Gates and Paul Allen brought Microsoft into the world. Gates and Steve Ballmer saw the company through adolescence. Ballmer was in charge for high school and college. Satya Nadella is taking Microsoft into adulthood.

That’s how Ballmer sees it these days.

“I look back, I have great pride,” he says, reflecting on his Microsoft years during an interview in an L.A. Clippers-themed conference room at the Ballmer Group’s Seattle-area headquarters. “I have great pride, and great joy, that the thing that we built has continued to flourish.” 

What does he remember most about his more than 33 years there?

Ballmer grins and makes a clarification. He was at Microsoft for almost 34 years. Technically, it was 33 years and just under 8 months — from June 1980 to February 2014 — including 14 years as CEO.

“I usually roounnnddd up,” says the 68-year-old business leader, his voice rising with his trademark energy, the gleam in his eye indicating that he’s kidding, mostly. He’s always been a numbers guy, legendary for his ability to find the troubling little detail that the product team tried to hide deep in the deck. Precision counts, especially when you’re figuring out the future of multi-billion-dollar products.

Long before Elon Musk began trying to rein in federal spending, Ballmer founded a non-profit, non-partisan group, USAFacts, that tracks and reports on the government’s key financial numbers.

Behind the scenes, especially these days, Ballmer is not the caricature from YouTube, or the NBA owner cheering wildly for his team from the baseline. He speaks deliberately and thoughtfully about the things that matter to him. And clearly, Microsoft is still one. 

“Hell, even my kids will say, it’s the closest thing I have to a child that’s not my kid,” he says.

For this installment in GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 series, Ballmer sat down to reflect on Microsoft’s history, and his own history at the company, in advance of the tech giant’s 50th anniversary. The interview also served as research for my upcoming on-stage conversation with Ballmer at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event in Seattle on Thursday, March 20.

He talked about milestones and missteps, reminisced fondly about many of the people he worked with, and shared his core Microsoft memories — from overseeing the formal incorporation of the company to making his final sales call as CEO. He dove eagerly into the historical Microsoft financial statements that I brought with me, going over the numbers to jog his memory about pivotal moments.

Microsoft’s largest shareholder

But this was not just an exercise in nostalgia. Ballmer is still the company’s largest individual shareholder. Microsoft still makes up roughly 80% of his portfolio, with the rest in index funds. While he hasn’t disclosed his total holdings since leaving in 2014, his 4% stake at the time would be worth about $120 billion today. 

“I’m happy as an investor, and I’m loyal. It’s my baby,” Ballmer said. “Do I have exactly the same number of shares that I did the day I left? No, because we started our philanthropy; I bought the Clippers. On the other hand, do I have a lot of Microsoft shares? Am I the largest investor? Yes to both of those things.”

To what extent does his continued investment in Microsoft come from his belief in the business, vs. his natural tendency to be loyal?

“On this one, there’s a bit of both,” he said. “I mean, if I thought Microsoft was literally headed for a crash landing, I don’t know what I’d do. But I don’t. I think they’re in a good position.”

Ballmer follows Warren Buffett’s philosophy of investing for the long haul. Maybe he could get 1% or 2% better return by moving his investments around, but that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

“Why would I screw around and worry about all that?” he asked.

And so far, at least, the approach has more than paid off. Microsoft stock has risen ten-fold over the past 11 years, from about $38 per share in February 2014 to more than $380 per share as of this week.

The growth in the stock has been “pretty damn good — very damn good,” Ballmer said. “So the company has certainly performed.”

“The stock price, to me, is less important than the innovative health and the profit growth,” he said. “You’re always asking, what happens next? We keep a pretty keen eye on what they’re doing.”

Through that lens, he offered his take on one of Microsoft’s most consequential decisions of the post-Ballmer era: The company’s investment of more than $13 billion in OpenAI, and its complicated relationship with the ChatGPT maker. 

“What Satya did with OpenAI, I think was brilliant — and I think it’s fraught with peril, but I know they know that,” Ballmer said. “It’s sort of a juggling act.”

As someone who has been in the Microsoft CEO’s seat himself, Ballmer understands the inherent trade-offs in these situations. There’s a pragmatism in Microsoft partnering with an outside company in such a high-stakes area, considering how much the company itself invested in its own AI research, going back multiple decades.

“Since AI is the thing that will, in many ways, drive the future, I can say I’m super impressed he did the partnership,” Ballmer said. “That was good. He’s going to have to manage it well. So far, he’s done that.”

Microsoft’s AI initiatives also build on investments made under Ballmer’s leadership in areas such as cloud and search.

“Thank God Microsoft is in the search business, because you can’t make the AI stuff work without the search technology,” Ballmer said. “Think how much less-useful AI would be if it didn’t have a current corpus of the internet, which you only get through search. So that investment has paid off.” 

Ballmer said he believes Microsoft is in a strong position in the cloud and AI, with the leadership team and the deep pockets to take the company to the next level. 

How does OpenAI compare to Microsoft’s past partnerships? The closest comparison, Ballmer said, was the company’s alliance with IBM, developing operating systems for early personal computers. 

“That’s a place where there was really shared innovation,” he said. 

The IBM partnership didn’t end well, I pointed out, alluding to the bitter split over OS/2, which saw Microsoft pivot to Windows in the late 1980s while IBM struggled to gain traction in the PC market. 

“It actually ended well — for Microsoft,” Ballmer said.

Still, it might be tempting to see the outcome for IBM back then as a preview for Microsoft now, as the tech giant of today. But there’s a major difference between the PC revolution and the AI era.

“Big behemoths have a special place in this world, because you need all of that capex to run these businesses,” Ballmer said. “So it’s not like you can avoid big companies. You must embrace big companies.”

That puts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a much different position than Microsoft was when the company broke things off with IBM.

“Sam knows that,” Ballmer said. “He can’t do what he wants to do without Microsoft, or Oracle, or somebody who’s cash-rich.”

But the IBM partnership is just one of Ballmer’s lasting memories from his nearly 34 years at Microsoft. 

Key milestones and memories

Many of his recollections revolve around the people he worked with. For example, he remembers going campus-to-campus with Allen in the early days, interviewing and hiring new graduates and setting the framework for a college recruiting program that became “the lifeblood” of Microsoft’s growth, especially on the engineering side. 

Many of Microsoft’s current leaders, such Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud + AI, and Rajesh Jha, executive vice president of Experiences + Devices, were hired directly out of school.

Other highlights included interviewing and hiring Brad Smith, now Microsoft’s president and vice chair, and Amy Hood, now CFO. He remembers his first trip with Nadella, a customer visit with Walmart. That’s when he began to realize, “This guy has a lot of potential.”

Ballmer has strong memories of working with David Cutler on Windows NT and Azure; with Jean-Philippe Courtois on Microsoft’s international business; and with Steven Sinofsky to get Windows back on track after delays and technical problems with Longhorn/Vista.

The list goes on and on — a who’s who of Microsoft’s leadership history, including many executives who have since left or retired.

But he especially loved going into the field to connect with the company’s salesforce. “You didn’t see ’em everyday,” Ballmer said, with his signature enthusiasm. “So it was always a BIG THING when you went, and you’d talk about the business, and you’d be intense.” 

In his nearly 34 years at Microsoft, Ballmer’s roles evolved alongside the company’s rapid growth. He joined in 1980 as its first business manager, bringing structure to an ambitious but scrappy startup. 

He later took charge of sales and marketing, spearheaded Microsoft’s enterprise expansion, and helped to solidify the company’s dominance in personal computing. As CEO from 2000 to 2014, he led the company through the dot-com crash, the resolution of antitrust battles in the U.S. and Europe, and the rise of cloud computing — with both successes and missteps in areas like search and mobile.

“I have strong memories of looking at where we could really get in the phone business much before we actually did,” Ballmer said. “I think it was three or four years earlier. I made a bunch of trips to Taiwan. We were looking, at that time, at maybe acquiring HTC, because it was already clear we would have to do hardware.”

Mobile, M&A, and tech rivalries

Years later, Microsoft ended up acquiring Nokia’s smartphone business, a story with enough twists and turns to fill a novel. Nadella ultimately pulled the plug on the business after taking over as CEO.

Ballmer said Microsoft’s problems in mobile went back to its original approach to the category.

“I’ll take blame for this: We wanted to maintain too much similarity to Windows, and so we had a goofy UI,” he said. “But it also relates a lot to the business model, and not having that well thought-through, and being wed to the past.”

We talked extensively about Microsoft’s history of mergers and acquisitions — a topic worthy of its own installment in this series. Discussing the 2011 acquisition of Skype, which Microsoft has since announced it will shut down, Ballmer called it a smart deal that was poorly executed, saying the company spread itself too thin by simultaneously investing in its Lync enterprise calling platform.

“It was really only mine for a short period of time. Instead of really doing the right thing with Lync and Skype, they let them go their own direction,” he said. “Neither one got any strength.”

Throughout his career, Microsoft faced a wide range of competitors, from operating system rivals to cloud challengers. In his early years as CEO, Linux and OpenOffice were seen as existential threats to Microsoft’s dominance in operating systems and productivity software. 

The company successfully fended off these challenges on the desktop. I asked Ballmer, in hindsight, if the open-source threat wasn’t as serious as it seemed at the time. He vehemently disagreed.

“We fought over every deal. We marketed the hell out of Office. We came in with strategies to really make it desirable for companies to adopt it broadly. We worked intensely with OEMs on the advantages of Windows versus Linux,” he said. 

“Dude, people act like we were asleep in the early part of the 2000s and we were resting,” he said. “No, we had real competition.”

Microsoft also worked hard in the enterprise market to ensure that Windows Server remained a viable alternative to Linux, helping to set the stage for the company’s subsequent expansion to the cloud.

Along with Apple in computing and Sony in game consoles, Google emerged as one of the Redmond company’s biggest adversaries —  expanding beyond its search business to challenge Microsoft with its Chrome browser, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, and Google Docs. 

Google’s ability to leverage the cloud as a delivery model made them “tougher to just defeat” as a competitor, Ballmer said. 

Gates, Ballmer, and Microsoft’s impact

Over the years, Ballmer’s relationship with Gates also evolved significantly. In the early years, they worked closely together on key projects like the IBM partnership, with Gates leading on product vision while Ballmer focused on business operations and company growth.

After Ballmer shifted to run Microsoft’s sales operation in the 1990s, they didn’t work together as much. Ballmer became CEO in 2000, with Gates serving as chief software architect and chairman of the board. 

Ballmer describes that first year as CEO as especially difficult. Things got better after that, but the structure still made it challenging.

“I’m CEO, so the buck stops with me, so I have to now start questioning and wondering about our technical strategy,” he said. “But I’m not always firm enough about some of the things, and it never worked quite as well in that period, from about 2001 to 2004.”

As Gates began stepping away from his day-to-day role, from 2006-2008, Ballmer assumed responsibility for Microsoft’s product direction. He looks back on the years that followed as some of his best, guiding products like Azure, Office 365, and Windows. 

The tension between them over Ballmer’s 2014 departure has been documented over the years by Vanity Fair, Bloomberg and others.

Gates, in a recent interview with GeekWire, said Microsoft wouldn’t exist as it does today without Allen and Ballmer — including the “mind-blowing energy” that Ballmer put into the business.

“Bill is still, to this day, the smartest person I’ve ever met,” Ballmer said. “His ability to collect information, see patterns in his head, and do inference, it’s really unique.” Is he infallible? No. But he’s a “genius, absolutely,” and “a difference-maker in the world.”

As Microsoft approaches its 50th anniversary, Ballmer says the company’s unique contribution to the world has been the democratization of computing, for people and businesses, across the desktop and server, while transforming the IT industry in the process. 

“Did Microsoft make that happen? Abso-frickin-lutely. No question,” Ballmer said. “Microsoft changed the world.”

Sponsor Post

Accenture proudly joins GeekWire in recognizing Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, marking over 35 years as a trusted partner and change driver.

Our global team provides comprehensive services spanning 150 countries across Microsoft’s entire enterprise. Our unique alliance with Microsoft and Avanade is one-of-a-kind and positions us to deliver transformation and innovation for the next 50 years and beyond.

Want to learn more about Accenture’s capabilities?

Click for more about underwritten and sponsored content on GeekWire.

With recent announcements of new quantum computing advancements, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have set a new countdown clock ticking on today’s encryption — now an even shorter race than expected.

In one lane: those building quantum computers that can easily break the encryption that makes today’s internet private. In the other lane: those building post-quantum cryptography (PQC), the next generation of encryption that can stand up to quantum computers.

It’s not clear right now who’s going to win this race and what security and privacy on the internet will be (or if it will be at all). But it is clear this is now coming faster than expected.

Effective encryption relies on algorithms that are computationally infeasible to crack. These algorithms are used to encrypt and decrypt data, keeping it private from everyone except those who have the keys.

But all encryption can be cracked with enough computing power. This is why over the past 30 years we’ve seen encryption algorithms retired and replaced; computing power has rendered the old ones ineffective. The old 1024-bit key encryption that was at the heart of the “crypto wars” of the 1990s is long-since retired and quaint now for that very reason. Cracking that encryption today is barely a speedbump.

The recent announcements from AWS, Google, and Microsoft make clear that the computing power that can be directed to break encryption is about to increase by an order of magnitude we’ve never seen before.

In December, Google announced “Willow.” In February, Microsoft announced “Majorana 1.” And less than two weeks after Microsoft, Amazon announced “Ocelot.” All three announcements represent major, different innovations around quantum computing, a fundamentally different approach to designing processors that almost literally will put these new computers light years ahead of today’s. Google’s announcement gives good context:

Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote on LinkedIn: “We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years.”

These developments represent significant leaps forward in terms of computing power, leaps that are truly unprecedented.

As with all unprecedented leaps forward, we can’t begin to understand all the changes this will bring. But we can see one thing clearly in what Google and Microsoft say: in a few years, there will be computational power available that makes what is computationally infeasible today a problem solved in mere seconds.

That means that tomorrow’s quantum computers will be able to crack today’s encrypted information in mere seconds, or less. All of your encrypted information today will be easily readable when quantum computing becomes readily available.

Fortunately, there has been work underway in anticipation of this eventuality. The National Institute of Standards (NIST) has been working since 2016 on it Post-Quantum Cryptography project. NIST has been in the lead on encryption throughout the history of our industry and it is making progress on this project. In August, NIST released its first three finalized Post-Quantum Encryption Standards.

Microsoft, AWS and Google aren’t only doing work that can break today’s encryption: they’re also actively involved with work on the solution of post-quantum cryptography.

All three have recently provided updates about the work they’re doing in conjunction with NIST and its work to develop and deploy PQC. Google’s announcement was in August; Microsoft’s in September; and AWS’ in December. These predate the new, recent hardware developments but all show the kind of broad, deep commitments that a problem of this size and scope requires. This is a good thing.

But having encryption standards that are being adopted is not broad deployment. There’s a very long road ahead before your online banking app is regularly using PQC invisibly to protect your information. In technology, the devil is in the deployment: it always comes down to the “last mile” problem of getting the newest technology into the hands, homes and offices of regular people. Historically it’s taken years for new encryption to achieve wide adoption.

That is why we’re in a race now. And why everyone in technology needs to get engaged and start thinking about PQC today. Startups need to start making the question of “how are we going to deal with PQC” part of their plans and design decisions now.

Two truisms in the industry apply here. First, it’s easier to break than it is to build. Second, encryption is hard and easy to screw up. These mean effectively defending encryption against quantum computing is going to take a lot of hard work. Work that needs to start now.

These latest developments are showing us that the road ahead for encryption is going to be very fast moving and very bumpy. Today’s encryption is facing an extinction-level event from quantum computing. And companies that don’t move fast will get caught up in that extinction-level event.

GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event, marking the tech giant’s milestone anniversary, will feature on-stage conversations with Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith; former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; and Nathan Myhrvold, who served as Microsoft’s CTO during some of the most pivotal moments in its history.

The event will take place the evening of Thursday, March 20, at Town Hall Seattle. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. Register here to join us.

Special thanks to Accenture, presenting sponsor of Microsoft@50.

In addition to the event, GeekWire is running a multi-part editorial and podcast series marking Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, looking at what’s next for a company that reshaped the technology landscape. The goal of the series, and the event, is to understand not only Microsoft’s history but also where it’s headed next.

Our three speakers are uniquely positioned to offer insights across business, policy, and technology in the context of Microsoft’s position in society and the industry.

• Smith, the Microsoft president, is an influential figure not only inside the company but across the industry, with insights into public policy and key issues from Washington state to Washington, D.C., and beyond.
• Myhrvold, the former Microsoft chief technology officer, is a prolific inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, author, and photographer whose career spans technology, science, and the culinary arts.
• Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, leads the Ballmer Group philanthropy with his wife, Connie. Chairman of the L.A. Clippers and founder of the nonprofit USAFacts, he remains Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder.

The event will also feature special surprises and ways for Microsoft alumni to recognize their time at the company.

Thanks to gold sponsor WE Communications, and silver sponsors, Microsoft Alumni Network and First Tech Federal Credit Union for helping to make the event possible.

Learn more and register here, and see you on Thursday, March 20.

Microsoft announced two AI agents for sales that double as a competitive response to Salesforce in an area where both companies are placing big bets.

Sales Agent and Sales Chat, unveiled Wednesday morning, are designed to work in conjunction with Microsoft’s own Dynamics 365 business applications and with Salesforce, whose CEO, Marc Benioff, has criticized Microsoft’s AI initiatives while rolling out Salesforce’s competing Agentforce platform.

The company also introduced a new program intended, in part, to help businesses “migrate off legacy CRM vendors,” without citing Salesforce by name in that case.

[Update: Salesforce announced its own updates to Agentforce on Wednesday morning, dubbed “2dx,” including new technologies to integrate AI agents into existing business processes and workflows.]

Both new Microsoft agents automate data retrieval and customer outreach for sales.

• Sales Agent identifies and qualifies potential customers, schedules meetings, and follows up on leads. It can complete some basic sales independently. The tool gathers information from customer databases, company pricing sheets, and Microsoft 365 emails and calendars to personalize its responses.
• Sales Chat gives sales reps summaries and insights based on customer relationship management records, emails, meeting notes, and online sources. Users can request information with natural language prompts, such as identifying at-risk deals or preparing for upcoming meetings.

“They connect to both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, so sales reps can nurture and close deals without even opening their CRM,” wrote Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer for Microsoft AI at Work, in a post Wednesday. “And they can be fine-tuned to connect to all your business data, ensuring accurate, actionable responses.”

Microsoft says the new agents will be available in public preview in May, accessed via Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat for businesses. 

The announcement follows Microsoft’s introduction last fall of ten AI agents for its Dynamics 365 applications, including a prior version of its sales agent. 

Along with its new sales agents, Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new program called the “Microsoft AI Accelerator for Sales,” to help businesses create and implement agents, with help from Microsoft AI experts. 

The program is “designed to help more customers experience a new way of working with copilot and agents, transform your sales organization and migrate off legacy CRM vendors,” wrote Bryan Goode, Microsoft corporate vice president of Business Applications and Platform, in a post Wednesday.

Benioff has been vocal in his criticism of Microsoft’s AI investments, questioning the long-term value of its capital spending and calling Microsoft a “reseller of OpenAI.” He also criticized Microsoft’s Copilot, comparing it to the infamous “Clippy” assistant and suggesting it exposes user data to security risks.

“Be aware of the false agent,” Benioff told analysts last week. “Go out there and take a look who is really talking about it and who’s really delivering.”

Brian Millham, Salesforce president and COO, said on the same call that Agentforce was deployed by thousands of brands in its first quarter of availability, describing adoption as faster than the company expected.

However, the company’s revenue forecast for the year was lower than expectations, which Reuters attributed in part to slower-than-anticipated adoption of Agentforce.

Oracle, IBM, and ServiceNow are among the other major companies developing and offering agentic AI technology for sales and business applications.

Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, observed in a LinkedIn post last month that Benioff’s “borderline obsession” with Microsoft’s AI initiatives follows a playbook that the Salesforce CEO published many years ago — positioning one’s company as or against the market leader to create drama and media attention.

“It can be, as Marc notes, great marketing in the short term to highlight competitors,” Shaw wrote at the time. “Of course, the challenge is that long term success requires actual competition. We’re still waiting.” 

Microsoft released a list of two dozen customer case studies Wednesday in an effort to show how its corporate customers are using Copilot and agents. 

The company says more than 160,000 organizations have used its Copilot Studio to create more than 400,000 custom agents in the past three months.

Despite the competitive jabs, Microsoft and Salesforce seem to have similar visions for the potential of AI agents to change the nature of work and the workforce. The core idea is to augment human capabilities and automate tasks to boost productivity, efficiency, and overall business results.

“What we are seeing is Copilot, plus agents, disrupting business applications,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the company’s Jan. 29 earnings call.

This week on the Geekwire Podcast: Google prepares to say goodbye to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, we get ready to say farewell to Skype; and we take a quantum leap with one of Microsoft’s top technical leaders in the field: theoretical physicist Chetan Nayak, technical fellow and corporate vice of quantum hardware for the company.

Related stories and links:

• End of an era: Microsoft to shut down Skype, shifting users to Teams, 14 years after $8.5B deal
• Microsoft quantum breakthrough promises to usher in the next era of computing in ‘years, not decades’
• Amazon’s new quantum chip joins race to enable next era of computing
• Google sets long-term plan to exit Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, consolidate in South Lake Union
• Tech investors on why AI makes this a great moment for startups — with one caveat

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire’s Taylor Soper and Todd Bishop; Audio editing by Curt Milton

Before Zoom, before FaceTime, and before video-calling became a default feature of today’s messaging apps — there was Skype.

Microsoft paid $8.5 billion in 2011 to acquire what was once a dominant player in voice and video calls over the internet. But conflicting internal development efforts and tough competition have taken their toll.

And now, more than two decades after it launched, Skype is hanging up.

Microsoft confirmed Friday that it is officially retiring Skype in May and consolidating its consumer communication services into Microsoft Teams.

Skype users will be able to migrate to Teams by logging into Teams with their Skype credentials to access their chats and contacts. Those who do not migrate can export their Skype data, according to a blog post from Microsoft.

“Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and enabling countless meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of the journey,” wrote Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps + Platforms.

The company had planned to announce the news next week, before it leaked Thursday night, through a message about the transition in the underlying code for the latest Skype for Windows preview.

There are no headcount reductions associated with the change at this time, according to a spokesperson. Employees working on Skype will continue to work on Teams.

Founded in 2003, Skype was acquired two years later by eBay for $2.6 billion. eBay sold a majority stake to investors in 2009, and Microsoft bought the company in 2011.

At the time, it was Microsoft’s largest acquisition, and remains its fourth-largest deal behind Activision Blizzard ($68.7 billion, 2023), LinkedIn ($26.2 billion, 2017), and Nuance ($19.7 billion, 2021).

Microsoft already had technology similar to Skype’s services for video calling and messaging. But it was betting that Skype’s popularity would help the tech giant find its footing online.

Skype was synonymous with video calling at the time. It had an iconic ringtone, and “Skyping” became a common verb, much like “Googling” — a status coveted by tech companies. The brand appeared frequently in pop culture and media.

“Skype is a phenomenal product and brand that is loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world,” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO at the time, said in a news release announcing the completion of the acquisition.

Microsoft would go on to integrate Skype into its ecosystem, including Windows, Xbox, Outlook, and Office. This continued as recently as last year, when Microsoft integrated AI-powered Bing into Skype.

However, the company also maintained its Lync messaging, calling, and video-conferencing service for businesses for several years after the acquisition, diluting its efforts and keeping it from building a stronger, unified brand.

Eventually, the company turned Lync into Skype for Business. But technical struggles and a flurry of competitors, such as WhatsApp, also contributed to Skype’s downfall. Microsoft announced plans to retire Skype for Business in 2017 and replace it with Teams, which it had unveiled earlier that year.

Skype had 40 million daily active users in March 2020, when Zoom’s video conferencing tools began attracting wide adoption amid the pandemic.

Overall Microsoft Teams usage reached 320 million monthly active users in December 2023.

Microsoft urged the Trump administration to change Biden-era limits on chip exports, warning that provisions of the regulations could give China an advantage in the global AI race if allowed to remain in effect.

In a post Thursday morning, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote that the Biden administration’s interim final AI Diffusion Rule “puts many important U.S. allies and partners in a Tier Two category and imposes quantitative limits on the ability of American tech companies to build and expand AI datacenters in their countries.”

Examples cited by Smith include Switzerland, Poland, Greece, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, where Microsoft and other large tech companies have major data centers.

“The unintended consequence of this approach is to encourage Tier Two countries to look elsewhere for AI infrastructure and services,” Smith wrote. “And it’s obvious where they will be forced to turn. If left unchanged, the Diffusion Rule will become a gift to China’s rapidly expanding AI sector.”  

He drew parallels to the manner in which China was able to spread its 5G technology throughout the world, raising security concerns for the U.S. and its allies.

The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, reported that the Trump administration is considering changes to the rule.

Nvidia, the leading AI chipmaker, previously spoke out against the rules, saying they would “weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead.”

The impact of Microsoft over the past 50 years will be the focus of a special GeekWire event in Seattle next month as we gather with key leaders from the tech giant’s past and present — including former CEO Steve Ballmer, who will join us for a fireside chat. Early bird pricing ends this Friday, so grab tickets here.

During Microsoft@50, we’ll revisit defining moments for the Redmond, Wash.-based company, explore new challenges and gain insights into what lies ahead.

The event will be held at Town Hall Seattle on March 20 at 6:15 p.m.

In addition to the event, GeekWire is also running a multi-part editorial and podcast series marking Microsoft’s 50th anniversary and looking at what’s next for a company that reshaped the technology landscape.

Special thanks to Accenture, presenting sponsor of Microsoft@50.

Microsoft made an equity investment in Veeam, deepening its partnership with the Kirkland, Wash.-based data protection and ransomware recovery company, focused on their joint work in cloud and AI technologies.

The companies did not disclose the amount of Microsoft’s investment or the size of its stake. Private equity firm Insight Partners remains Veeam’s majority owner, Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran told GeekWire. Eswaran said Microsoft’s investment reflects the strength of their partnership and Veeam’s leadership in the data resilience market.

Microsoft and Veeam last year announced a partnership to integrate Microsoft’s AI services into Veeam’s data resilience platform. Their joint engineering work is focused on areas including AI-based threat detection, security-focused AI assistants for customers, AI-generated data insights, and the protection of data used by AI models.

Large language models “are based on data, and so you need to start thinking about protecting those LLMs,” Eswaran explained. “So we are getting on a roadmap to protect the very data that fuels AI in the first place.”

Microsoft’s investment follows Veeam’s announcement of a $2 billion secondary share sale in December, which valued the company at $15 billion.

As a privately held company, Veeam doesn’t disclose detailed financial information, but Eswaran said its revenue run rate surpassed $1.74 billion in 2024, with more than $500 million in adjusted cash EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), a key measure of profitability.

Because of that profitability, Veeam doesn’t need an initial public offering for financial liquidity, Eswaran said. However, the company plans to go public at some point in the future, and it’s watching the market and macroeconomic environment to determine the right moment, he said.

Veeam last year officially relocated its headquarters from Ohio to the Seattle area, drawn by the close proximity of major cloud providers and the deep pool of technical talent. It now employs more than 5,500 people in 50 countries, including nearly 100 in the Seattle area, many of them based out of its Kirkland headquarters.

The company has 550,000 customers in more than 150 countries.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we discuss Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough; a Washington state bill that targets Uber and Lyft surge pricing; the latest update to the GeekWire 200 ranking of Pacific Northwest startups; and Amazon’s move to take creative control of the James Bond franchise.

Related Links

• Microsoft quantum breakthrough promises to usher in the next era of computing in ‘years, not decades’
• GeekWire 200 update: Here are the hot tech startups moving up our list for Q1 2025
• Lawmakers take aim at Uber and Lyft with bill targeting surge pricing after big events
• Amazon MGM Studios strikes deal for 007, takes over creative control of James Bond film franchise

With GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop and editor Taylor Soper. 

Listen above or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

There will be no more apologies about Chime from Amazon employees to outsiders joining their meetings.

That ritual of logging on to an Amazon Chime meeting will become a thing of the past with the news that the company is ending support for its meeting and calling application one year from now, on Feb. 20, 2026.

It’s an example of Amazon paring back in an area where its impact was limited beyond its own virtual walls. In fact, the biggest impact will be inside Amazon: the company is shifting to Zoom as its default for virtual meetings.

“When we decide to retire a service or feature, it is typically because we’ve introduced something better or our partners offer a solution that is a good fit for our customers as well as our own employees,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “In Chime’s case, its use outside of Amazon was limited, and our partners offer great collaboration solutions, so we will lean into those.”

The move not impact the Chime SDK, which lets customers put communications features in their own apps, Amazon points out in its support update.

Meanwhile, Amazon is rolling out Microsoft 365 applications across the company, including Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint, in addition to Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Loop.

Amazon told employees in a memo, “Zoom is replacing Amazon Chime as the standard meeting application for Amazon internal meetings,” noting that Microsoft Teams can also be used “where full integration with M365 is needed.” Webex will be another option for meetings with customers who use the Cisco tool

Business Insider was first to report on Amazon’s shift to Zoom.

Zoom is a big Amazon customer, noting in its annual report that it uses Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud “for the hosting of certain critical aspects of our business, as well as Microsoft Azure for limited customer-specified managed services.”

Even though Amazon is rolling out Microsoft 365 applications, it makes sense for the company to go with Zoom as its internal default rather than Microsoft Teams, given Zoom’s status as a partner/customer, and Microsoft’s position as a rival to Amazon Web Services through its Azure cloud platform.

Amazon unveiled Chime in February 2017, building on its 2015 acquisition of Biba, a San Francisco-based company that makes chat, video and audio conferencing tools for businesses, as reported by GeekWire at the time.

Chime was basically adequate, based on our occasional experience using it to meet virtually with people inside Amazon, but it was missing many of the advanced features of other virtual meeting services.

The lack of widespread use also meant that it took the uninitiated a little longer to figure out how to join a meeting and change settings for audio and video, etc., which was the primary reason for those apologies.

In a new blog post on Wednesday, Microsoft’s research department debuted a new generative AI model called Muse that it describes as a “breakthrough” for gameplay ideation.

Muse is a World and Human Action Model, or WHAM, built by the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge in conjunction with the British game developer and Xbox subsidiary Ninja Theory.

For years, Microsoft Research has used Ninja Theory’s multiplayer shooter Bleeding Edge as a testbed for experiments in how to create more human-like CPU opponents: bots that act and perform more like humans would. With Muse, it’s used the equivalent of roughly seven years of continuous human gameplay as training data, in order to create a new type of model that possessed a detailed understanding of the 3D game world.

“The impressive abilities we first witnessed with ChatGPT and GPT-4 to learn human language are now being matched by AI’s abilities to learn the mechanics of how things work, in effect developing a practical understanding of interactions in the world,” wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft Research president, in a post on the official Microsoft blog.

This allows Muse to generate virtual gameplay sequences of up to two minutes based upon preprogrammed criteria such as controller actions. According to Fatima Kardar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of gaming AI, Muse is already being used in-house to develop a “real-time playable AI model” using training data from other first-party games from Xbox Game Studios.

In addition, Kardar suggests that Muse could be used as a method of preserving and updating classic games.

“Today, countless classic games tied to aging hardware are no longer playable by most people,” Kardar wrote in a post on Xbox Wire. “Thanks to this breakthrough, we are exploring the potential for Muse to take older back catalog games from our studios and optimize them for any device.”

Kardar continued, “We believe this could radically change how we preserve and experience classic games in the future and make them accessible to more players.”

Lee also notes that Muse’s ability to visualize and navigate 3D spaces could lead to future breakthroughs in fields such as interior design or architectural modeling.

The details behind Muse are further explored in a post on the official Microsoft Research blog by senior principal research manager Katja Hoffman, as well as a new paper in Nature, “World and Human Action Models towards gameplay ideation.”

Hoffman further announced that the weights and sample data are being made open source. Interested researchers can test Microsoft Research’s WHAM model now on Azure AI Foundry.

Microsoft says it has developed a new quantum processor based on a novel state of matter, giving it a clear path to achieve quantum computing’s long-term promise of solving some of the world’s most difficult problems.

“We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years,” wrote Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a LinkedIn post about the news.

Microsoft’s approach differs from Google, IBM, and others that have been pouring their efforts into using large numbers of existing quantum processors to overcome errors. Microsoft is instead focused on developing new quantum technologies designed to be more accurate in the first place. 

“I think it fundamentally changes the competitive landscape,” said Chirag Dekate, a Gartner analyst who covers quantum computing. While the approach still needs to be proven to work at scale, he said, the advances appear to give Microsoft a deep competitive moat against other key players pursuing quantum breakthroughs.

Just as transistors replaced vacuum tubes in modern computing, Microsoft has created the “transistor for the quantum age” with its latest advances, said Chetan Nayak, a Microsoft technical fellow and corporate vice president of quantum hardware, in an interview with GeekWire.

The innovations are the result of a 19-year quantum computing initiative at Microsoft — currently the longest-running research-and-development program inside the company. 

“It is a moment we’ve been dreaming about for a long time,” Nayak said.

Microsoft says it sees huge potential for quantum computing in areas such as chemistry, biochemistry and materials science — significantly advancing fields such as healthcare and manufacturing, especially when used to refine and improve artificial intelligence models.

The company also said it has been selected by DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to build a prototype fault-tolerant quantum computer based on its innovations. 

If the advances announced Wednesday represent the transistor for the quantum age, Nayak said, this future fault-tolerant quantum computer would be the integrated circuit. 

Microsoft describes its scientific breakthrough — enabling the creation of the world’s first “topological” qubit — in a research paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. 

[Update, Feb. 20: Outside experts are asking for more empirical evidence from the company, expressing skepticism that Microsoft has successfully created a working topological qubit, as detailed by Fortune.]

Qubits are the basic unit of information in a quantum computer. Unlike classical binary computers that switch between 1s and 0s, qubits can exist in multiple states simultaneously, thanks to quantum mechanics, unlocking much larger computational capabilities.

“Topological” refers to the way Microsoft’s new qubit stores information. The approach relies more on the overall design of the material and less on the individual underlying atoms.

Google made headlines in December with the announcement of its own quantum chip, Willow, which uses a large number of an existing type of qubit to reduce errors exponentially. Google and many others in the industry use an approach called Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum, or NISQ, that relies on scale to overcome errors.

However, with its new topological qubit, Microsoft is instead looking to make the fundamental components of quantum computing more stable and less prone to errors, resulting in much greater efficiency at larger scale.

The company says it has placed eight topological qubits on a chip — which it calls the “Majorana 1” — that’s designed to ultimately contain 1 million qubits.

“A million-qubit quantum computer isn’t just a milestone — it’s a gateway to solving some of the world’s most difficult problems,” wrote Microsoft’s Nayak in a post Wednesday morning. He explained that “quantum computing at this scale could lead to innovations like self-healing materials that repair cracks in bridges, sustainable agriculture, and safer chemical discovery.” 

The key to all this is a new material that causes electrons to form “quasiparticles” that mimic the properties of Majorana (my-or-ana) particles. Majorana particles, originally proposed in 1937 by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, split an electron into two separate locations. Both locations need to be disturbed simultaneously to change the qubit, reducing the chances of disruption.

This is the key to making a more-stable qubit. 

Microsoft first reported in 2022 that its researchers had found evidence of what’s known as a Majorana zero mode, which exists at both ends of a precisely tuned nanowire. Following that discovery, the company announced in 2023 that it could control Majorana quasiparticles.

Key to the latest advances was the creation of topoconductors, a new category of material that is made by combining aluminum with indium arsenide (used in applications like infrared detectors) through a process of extreme cooling. These topoconductors enable a new state of matter — called topological superconductivity — that is neither solid, liquid, nor gas.

At the same time, the company says it has come up with a precise way of reading quantum information from topological qubits, which uses what it calls a “quantum dot,” a tiny capacitor that allows the system to count whether there is an even or odd number of electrons. 

Microsoft says the resulting efficiency and stability promise to ultimately enable the scale and accuracy needed to start achieving the promise of quantum computing. 

“I think that this discovery actually does speed up that timeline,” Nayak said, when asked to put the news in perspective. “So I don’t think we’re decades away. I think we’re years away.”

[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.] 

Xbox was a product of Bill Gates’ paranoia. 

Back in the late 1990s, the Microsoft co-founder actually wasn’t very interested in getting into video game consoles. But he and Steve Ballmer, who would soon become Microsoft’s CEO, were worried enough about Sony’s Playstation to give the project the green light. 

“It was easy for Bill and Steve to imagine Sony moving from gaming on the TV to editing documents on the PC, which they saw as an existential threat to Microsoft,” write Dean Carignan and JoAnn Garbin in the new book, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft.

After launching the original Xbox in 2001, the team innovated in cloud gaming and social networking with Xbox Live in 2002, expanded the console’s functionality and footprint with the Xbox 360 in 2005 — and faced a huge backlash against the Xbox One in 2013. 

Avid gamers rejected the concept of an entertainment-oriented, always-connected console with digital rights protections that would prevent them from playing used games. 

Meanwhile, the inclusion of a Kinect motion sensor boosted the price to nearly $500, about $100 more than the rival PS4 — which initially outsold the Xbox One by a ratio of nearly 2:1.

It was a classic example of misalignment in a framework that had been expressed by J Allard, one of the original Xbox leaders, as “BXT,” or “Business, eXperience, and Technology.” Xbox One focused too heavily on business and technology, to the detriment of user experience. 

Facing widespread backlash, Microsoft reversed course before launch, removing the always-online requirement and later unbundling Kinect to lower the price.

Two years later, in 2015, the company started to win back many of its loyal fans with backward compatibility, allowing the Xbox One to play many older Xbox 360 games. 

In the ensuing years, Xbox reinvented its business model with its Game Pass service, and Microsoft expanded its footprint again with its $68.7 billion Activision-Blizzard acquisition.

“It’s funny how clearly you can see it in retrospect,” said Carignan, who was on the Xbox team at the time, describing the “BXT” misalignment in the original vision for Xbox One. “To the organization’s credit, they pivoted back, and they really changed the product itself.”

That’s one of several case studies in the book that draw universal business lessons from inside Microsoft. The book identifies recurring patterns in the company’s successes and failures by looking at different Microsoft products and teams in various stages and scenarios.

The book was written by two Microsoft business strategists and innovation leaders: Carignan, who now focuses on AI in the company’s office of the chief scientist, and Garbin, who created and led Microsoft’s Regenerative Datacenter of the Future program as part of its sustainability initiatives.

It’s a testament to Microsoft’s famed “growth mindset” under CEO Satya Nadella, but the authors don’t shy away from the company’s missteps. Instead, they examine those struggles to understand and explain what the company learned.

“One of the limitations in writing on innovation these days is that we often only see the successes, and we see the stories compressed down into this very rarefied form where it looks like it was easy, fast and without struggle,” Carignan said. With that in mind, he explained, “We decided we would tell both sides of the story.”

The book coincides with Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, but the case studies focus mostly on the past 20 years, including sections on Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Office, Bing, Cognitive Services, Microsoft Research, and the company’s approach to responsible innovation.

Listen to a conversation with Carignan about the book on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, and continue reading for more highlights.

Microsoft’s Cognitive Services team, which helped the company gain early traction in artificial intelligence APIs, emerged from the failure of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, the book explains.

When Microsoft realized it couldn’t win the mobile platform war, a small team decided to focus on serving mobile developers instead. The Cognitive Services team took existing AI models from Microsoft Research and made them available as cloud-based services that developers could easily integrate into their mobile apps.

They had senior-level sponsorship from Microsoft executive Harry Shum, which gave them the support and cover to focus on enabling others rather than building their own big organization.

“What I love about that case study is that they didn’t build a huge organization,” Carignan said. “They went out and they connected the teams that already had the bits and bytes to pull it together. And they were very, very purposeful about making sure their partner teams got all of the credit.”

Microsoft’s Bing team had to shift the company’s mindset from being the market leader to being the underdog challenger to go up against Google in internet search, as described in the book.

The Bing team developed very granular metrics to track small gains in market share, which allowed them to run experiments, make incremental improvements, and celebrate small wins.

They also got creative within tight financial constraints. Bing embraced new AI technologies like deep learning earlier than the broader search industry, because the constraints forced them to find more efficient ways to compete.

There is also a broader lesson for the company in this case study. “In the browser wars, the mid to late 90s, we were late, but we followed and we became dominant, and that did breed probably a certain amount of complacency, maybe even arrogance,” Carignan explained. “But what cured us of that was losing search.”

Seeing Google run away with the search market was “a real wake up call,” he said. “If a new business model and a new way of operating a company comes forward and gets enough momentum, you’ll never catch up.”

“And so I think that really cured the company of arrogance and complacency,” he said. “We would say things like, let’s not get Googled. Let’s not let that happen again. And I think it’s a characteristic of Microsoft to learn from those mistakes and to actually internalize and respond, and to not make the same mistake again.”

A few more takeaways from the book:

• Companies need to create an environment that encourages and rewards risk-taking and good decisions, creating an opportunity to learn even when the immediate outcome isn’t successful.
• Frequent, small-scale “flights,” rather than monumental releases, can reduce anxiety and encourage more experimentation and risk-taking. Microsoft Office, Bing, and others have adapted to this approach.
• Connecting different parts of the organization through “boundary crossers” — people inside the company who bridge different groups — helps drive innovation by bringing together diverse perspectives.

While the book was written to resonate broadly, part of the goal was to make sure that people inside Microsoft have a deep understanding of what the company has learned and overcome in its 50 years.

“Once a company has reinvented itself once, it becomes easier to do it again, because you have the model for doing it, and you have the experience,” Carignan said. “It’s kind of like corporate neuroplasticity — the way our own brain can actually repeat things and do them over and over.”

The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft is available now, published by Post Hill Press, with a foreword by Eric Horvitz, Microsoft chief scientific officer.

Listen to the full conversation above, or subscribe to the GeekWire Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

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[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.]

Back in 2008, during an interview at Microsoft headquarters shortly before leaving his day-to-day role, Bill Gates bluntly dismissed the question of whether he could ever imagine needing to return to run the company full-time.

“No,” he said. Next question.

But in a recent interview, nearly 17 years later, Gates acknowledged that he did grapple with this concern at times in his Microsoft career, when he considered what it would be like after eventually stepping down.

“I always thought, Oh God, I’m going to leave and the company’s going to get screwed up, and I’m not going to know what to do,” he recalled. “Do I go back? Do I not go back? Oh, this is going to be torturous.”

He hasn’t needed to deal with that dilemma. Microsoft’s continued strength has been “a great thrill for me,” he said.

As planned when he left his full-time role, Gates still contributes as a part-time advisor to the company. He meets regularly with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the company’s technical and product teams to review their work, and offer feedback, direction and insights.

In that role, he takes the long view — describing the rise of artificial intelligence as the repetition of a pattern that he recognized in the early days of the PC revolution.

“Now, what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free,” he said, “and that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.”

For this latest installment in our Microsoft @ 50 series, we talk with Gates about the company’s 50th anniversary, parallels between AI and the early days of the PC, and where he sees the next big opportunities for innovation.

This is part of a wide-ranging interview coinciding with the release of his new book, Source Code: My Beginnings. We published Part 1 of the interview last week, focusing on his upbringing in Seattle, the influential people in his life, the early days of the company, and his perspective on events now unfolding in the world.

Listen to the rest of the conversation below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for clarity and brevity. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

In many ways, the story that you tell in this book is still unfolding. I’m wondering if you see any parallels between the early days of the PC revolution and the current era of AI in the business models and technologies.

Bill Gates: Well, this era is new and different, and it’s a continuation.

So the mind-blowing thing about the PC era is how few people are involved. … For Paul and I, we thought, OK, this is not only going to replace mainframes and minicomputers, very expensive machines before then, but also create a whole new modality of use, which is why we said, “a computer on every desk and in every home.” Other people were like, “What? In every home, what’s that?”

My way of describing that was that computing was becoming free. And because it was free, could we use it for word-processing or spreadsheets or email, or things like that? I and others we were evangelizing this as this incredible tool and then connecting them together.

Now, what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free. And that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.

I went back and reread The Road Ahead from 1995 and 1996, your book at the time, and spoke with Peter Rinearson, one of your coauthors on that book. One of your visions was for software agents, and you’re now just seeing this start to happen. How do you see this unfolding from here?

Gates: Well, it’s moving pretty quickly. We have a lot of work to do on reliability. In a certain sense, say, doing a medical diagnosis, we in many respects are better than humans at that, the AI software. But there are times where it gets off the path and it’ll make mistakes humans won’t make.

There’s a wide range of opinions of how quickly we’ll drive that reliability for it. I tend to be somewhat on the optimistic side, seeing exactly how that’s going to work. There’s a fervor here and some pretty profound tools in education and in health and scientific discovery. The Gates Foundation is applying these things.

Have we yet seen the killer app for AI? Is it ChatGPT?

Gates: Well, ChatGPT is kind of a horizontal tool. And they’ve done a great job getting user usage and momentum.

There are things like, “organize all my messages,” where the way it works today, you go into your text messages, your mail messages, your Instagram messages, they’re all separate. You don’t really trust the computer to [organize] them for you. …

We’re finally changing that. “I want to plan a trip with my kids to go see some colleges. Gather data from websites, look at my calendar, show me the information about the colleges.” You can take very high-level tasks, and the software will be working at your level.

Can you take a few moments to reflect on what Microsoft has become from that two-person partnership that you and Paul Allen started in 1975, to what the company is today?

Gates: Well, we had crazy ideas early on that software would be important, and that we would know how to hire people, write better software tools, and we would do just all kinds of software.

Many of our competitors were single-product companies. … Until Google comes along, there really is not another horizontal company that’s thinking about software in this very, very broad way.

By the late ’90s, we were so successful that even I could say, “OK, we might even make a few mistakes and not disappear.” Because I was always running scared, it’s not until 1998 or ’99 that I said, “OK. Yeah. We are in pretty good shape with what we’ve done.”

Then we get into the question of, are we adapted to the internet? And what about this antitrust thing?

And so we have this schizophrenic thing: are we so obsolete that nobody should care about us? Are we so dominant that we have to be split into pieces? I mean, which one is it? Just tell me because we’re dealing with both of those. Both had an element of truth to them.

Steve took over and put his mind-blowing energy into it. And both Steve and I were saying to the board, hey, we think Satya’s the one. I knew he would do a great job. He’s done even better than I expected.

So, it’s nice. I always thought, “Oh, God, I’m going to leave, and the company is going to get screwed up, and I’m not going to know what to do. Do I go back? Do I not go back? Oh, this is going to be torturous.” The fact that, along with many other companies, it’s doing incredibly well is a great thrill for me.

What do you hope the next ten years will be like for Microsoft? Do you have a sense for where this company could go and where it might be in another decade?

Gates: Well, software is more important today than ever. We are going to face the challenge of success in how powerful the software is. Everybody wants that. This is hyper competitive.

I do think that hyper competition will be beneficial to users. The pace of innovation will have to be very, very fast despite the capital costs involved, and these tools will just improve very rapidly.

I hope Microsoft can lead the way. I certainly brainstorm with the product groups at Microsoft about what we’re doing, trying to make sure, whether it’s AI to help write software or AI to do drug discovery, that Microsoft is in the lead.

Listen to the full conversation above, or subscribe to the GeekWire Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Sponsor Post

Accenture proudly joins GeekWire in recognizing Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, marking over 35 years as a trusted partner and change driver.

Our global team provides comprehensive services spanning 150 countries across Microsoft’s entire enterprise. Our unique alliance with Microsoft and Avanade is one-of-a-kind and positions us to deliver transformation and innovation for the next 50 years and beyond.

Want to learn more about Accenture’s capabilities?

Click for more about underwritten and sponsored content on GeekWire.

More in GeekWire’s Microsoft @ 50 series

• AI Dreams: Microsoft @ 50, Chapter 1
• Microsoft’s startup story: How the company became a tech giant, and what we can learn from it today
• A new era for Windows: Can Microsoft’s longtime engine power another tech revolution?
• ‘The Road Ahead’ at 30: What Bill Gates’ classic book about the future says about the world today
• Microsoft alums were surprised by the sheer scale of its success, new oral history project shows
  
  

Elon Musk’s $97.4 billion bid for the nonprofit that controls OpenAI could have significant implications for Microsoft, as the ChatGPT maker’s biggest investor and key commercial partner.

But if one believes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s take, that Musk’s primary goal is to slow down a competitor, the situation shows the benefit of the recent loosening of ties between Microsoft and OpenAI.

The best outcome for Microsoft would be to use this moment to double-down on its own homegrown AI initiatives, while making sure it can still benefit from — but not depend on — OpenAI’s technologies.

Even with more than $13 billion invested in OpenAI so far, Microsoft is in a decent position to avoid the distraction. It helps that the company isn’t on the OpenAI nonprofit board, not even as an observer, due to the scrutiny that followed the prior drama involving Altman’s temporary ouster as CEO.

Microsoft did get pulled into Musk’s ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI last year, but Satya Nadella and team can leave that to the company’s lawyers for the time being, focusing on their own AI strategy.

In the meantime, OpenAI is looking to the likes of Softbank and Oracle to enable and fund its future growth, further lowering the implications of the Musk bid for Microsoft. While there’s long-term risk in other investors getting involved, Microsoft still has the right of first refusal for OpenAI’s future cloud requirements even after the recent rejiggering of their contract.

“I try to just wake up and think about how we’re going to make our technology better,” Altman said in an interview with Bloomberg News, doing his best to brush aside Musk’s bid as a sideshow.

No doubt that sentiment is echoing through the halls of Redmond this morning.