Paul Thurrott (67:29)
What he's working on is one 600 word blog post he publishes every six months, apparently. Because that's all I've seen come out of this guy. And what he did in this blog post was blame his customers for talking about slop and not understanding the, you know, the value of this. And if you would just start paying us for this, you would see how important it is and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And I think I reached the point where I'm like, no, no, it's not just insertification, right? It's insertification with cancer. It's with cancerous growth. It's insertification exponential. You know, when you say that insertification is a company that is literally harming its own customers and partners to advantage itself. Because that makes economic sense, by the way. That's money management. That's when that makes sense, when you have so much money to Leo's point, right? And that is what Microsoft is doing right now. So I am, I wrote this in the thing and I've said this before, I'm not an AI skeptic. That's not the point. I will talk about AI in the back of the book. We'll talk about it later, whatever. There's good stuff going on with AI, but AI is not 80% of our industry from a functional or financial perspective. They're just faking it. Faking that it is. The AI features that you see being added to Windows or being added to Microsoft 365 just to keep it in our little world are the things you would get for free. It's not really free, but for free in the past because you were paying for that thing. You know, if you go back and find an episode of the show from eight years ago where five years, whatever time frame, and there was a segment on Microsoft 365 and all the new features they added that month, they didn't raise the price of your subscription or triple it in most cases, right? You just got it because you were paying them. And this is a good relationship. It's like we're going to keep this thing fresh, we're going to keep adding features, we're going to make it better. And you're like, yep, I love it. It's a no brainer. Windows, same thing. No, like I said, they have a problem with Windows especially because they can't really. No one is going to pay them for any Windows. Like no one. So you know, they're like, look, we're developing new features. Their AI features are so stupid expensive. You know, we need to figure that out. But here's the thing. I look, we could always criticize Microsoft, right? Microsoft going back to the beginning of Microsoft, the concerns about the quality of the product and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But the thing is if you wanted to buy something from Microsoft, pay them for something, whatever it was, whatever product or service there was a value, and if you saw that value, you would do it. And they became super successful. They are the most powerful company in the world. For a long time. That's what they used to do. I remember this. You all remember this, right? They do not do this anymore. I just talked about a coloring book feature in Paint. Like, not that it doesn't. I mean, it's fine that it's there. That's not really the issue. And that's not really the problem. It's that they're selling us on this vision where the thing that makes that possible, which five years, 10 years ago, would have been a feature, who cares? Today requires an astronomical financial investment that outweighs the profits this company generates every single quarter now. And I'm sorry, I don't see it. Here's the thing. If you went to any shareholder, logically, because you can't talk to them this way, but if you could, you could say, look, we're not going to add markdown support to Notepad. We're not going to add the coloring book feature to Paint. We're just going to sell the product we have and be like, okay, that makes sense. Or. Or we could spend 30, 35 billion, whatever we're at now, a quarter building out an infrastructure that will be a nuclear wasteland in three years or something. I don't know. The. The set of a neck. The next Planet of the Apes movie. What am I talking about? You know, it's crazy. So I, I, The. The way I told this story, like, we were in a. We were in the taco bar, which, sadly, Richard was just here and wasn't able to go there because they were closed the days he was here. But we were sitting there on a. Like, a dead night. There was no one there. So we know those guys were hanging around. They're giving me alcohol to try. Here's a Mexican something. Here's this, Whatever. And so, you know, they keep going back to the Mezcal. They're like, you should try this. I'm like, I don't like Mezcal. I don't like smoky drinks. He's like, but you should like it. Yeah, yeah, I get it. And I feel like that's what Copilot is. And AI at Microsoft, it's like, you know, I don't want this. Literally every single customer, they have pretty much. And they're like, yeah, but you should like it. Yeah, no, I hear you. I Don't like it. You know, they're not doing it for you. That's the problem. They're doing it for Wall Street. They're doing it for investors or shareholders. I guess they're doing it to rig the system so that through money management, they retain their position in the world. And we are so far removed from a company that used to sell a product or service to people or customer, whatever businesses that saw value in it, that it's not even the same thing anymore. We're not playing the same sport. I just think it's tragic. Richard brought up developers not kind of following along from like, we used to develop Windows apps and then we would go to build and they would. All they would talk about is the cloud. Like there were built entire builds where they never mentioned Windows. And all these guys are sitting in the audience, they're like, we just paid $2,000 a ticket and then a week in a hotel in Seattle or wherever we are. And what are you talking about? And what they were talking about at the time was something that made more sense for Microsoft than them and they were trying to sell you on. But there's an opportunity here and you're like, all right, maybe there is. And now they're doing again with AI. The difference is the, with the cloud, you could say, look, it's going up like this. The, the potential exposure to customers is humongous. With AI, the only way you can do this is the cost and it's just not the same thing.
