Topic

MSFT

A collection of 24 issues

Hyperscalers vs AI Labs Debate, and the Moving AI Frontier

I thought I would cover Microsoft’s earnings today, but let me first respond to a tweet by SouthernValue and then I will share some thoughts on the state of AI models. I recommend you read his pushback to my yesterday’s piece before you read the rest. I will

Defending the Enterprise Castle from the Model Layer

If Microsoft’s lagging stock performance didn’t already cause a tinge of nervousness among its shareholders, Satya Nadella has been writing several pieces on X almost to clarify why Microsoft may be in a spot of bother in a world where model layer eventually becomes utterly dominant in capturing

Owning the Hill

Satya Nadella spent part of last weekend writing a think piece on X titled “A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable”. I mostly nodded along while reading the piece, but there was also a lot of cynicism from many corners about his prescription of not mortgaging your IP to

The Honeymoon Phase of Capacity

Although I am yet to write any Deep Dive on any neocloud, I still like to pay close attention to what they are saying during their earnings calls. Both CoreWeave and Nebius had some interesting nuggets in their 1Q’26 call. Let’s start with CoreWeave. Just like the hyperscalers,

Digital Advertising Industry Snapshot 1Q'26

As I do after every quarter, let me share the snapshot of the overall digital advertising industry. Please note that digital advertising industry is defined as Alphabet’s advertising revenue+ Meta’s advertising revenue+ Snap revenue+ Pinterest revenue+ Microsoft Search advertising revenue+ Amazon advertising revenue+ Trade Desk revenue+ AppLovin revenue.

Microsoft FY 3Q'26: Multi-Model Mirage, Copilot Momentum

Programming Note: While I typically don’t write on company specific topics on Sunday, I’m making an exception during the earnings season. Microsoft’s own narrative about their future has evolved quite a bit following the ChatGPT moment in 2022. While they used to highlight how their exclusive access

The Fat-Tailed Economics of AI

Anthropic yesterday disclosed that their run-rate revenue has surpassed $30 Billion (I appreciate that unlike most people in tech, they didn’t call it ARR). To contextualize how mind boggling the growth is, Anthropic ended 2025 with annual run rate of just $9 Billion which then shot to $19

The Pendulum Between Intelligence and Knowledge

Over the last week or so, I have started noticing an interesting development that is worth highlighting. Let’s start with Microsoft’s announcement yesterday. From Microsoft’s blog yesterday (emphasis mine): “Today, Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot’s deep research agent for work—takes a significant step forward. Designed to

Nadella's Flip-Flop

There are perhaps few things in the current AI revolution that keeps my opinions grounded than watching Microsoft’s evolving position in the post-ChatGPT world. It can be tempting to imagine investors just frenetically changing their labels to Microsoft as “AI winner” or “AI loser” every few months, but

The Neocloud Trojan Horse

One of the most frequent pushbacks that I have received to my recent posts on AWS (see here, and here) is that the neoclouds are not a legitimate concern for hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure in the long term. Frankly speaking, I myself operated under this assumption for the