Microsoft, a pioneering force in the software industry, has transformed personal computing from a niche interest to a worldwide necessity over its 50-year history. The video retraces the company's journey through the leadership of its three CEOs—Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella—each marking significant milestones in tech history. From its inception riding the wave of IBM PCs, through leading software innovation like Windows and Office, to overcoming antitrust challenges and competing in cloud services, Microsoft has constantly adapted to the shifting tech landscape.

Satya Nadella's leadership marked a turning point, reorienting Microsoft towards cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), sparking resurgence in its market reputation. Microsoft’s strategic investment in OpenAI with ChatGPT exemplifies the company's renewed focus on AI and reflects Nadella's emphasis on agility and innovation amidst industry competition. The video discusses Microsoft's shifting strategies, including focusing on consumer AI and finding new foothold in the evolving tech ecosystem.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. indispensable [ˌɪndɪˈspɛnsəbəl] - (adj.) - Absolutely necessary or essential. - Synonyms: (essential, crucial, necessary)

It reminds me of a magic time. This feels like, you know, without it, there is no day that you can start Microsoft, an indispensable and inescapable force.

2. renaissance man [ˈrɛ.nə.sɑːns mæn] - (noun) - A person with many talents or areas of knowledge. - Synonyms: (polymath, intellect, genius)

Satya is like the renaissance man CEO.

3. hedging bets [ˈhɛʤɪŋ bɛts] - (verb) - Making multiple investments to reduce the risk of any one failing. - Synonyms: (diversifying, safeguarding, buffering)

The software giant has lasted this long by catching and capitalizing on technology waves, constantly hedging their bets over an uncertain future.

4. zeitgeist [ˈzaɪtˌgaɪst] - (n.) - The spirit of the time; the general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time. - Synonyms: (spirit of the age, trend, culture)

Until Satya, Nadella, and a big bet on OpenAI brought them back into the zeitgeist.

5. doggedly [ˈdɒɡɪdli] - (adv.) - In a manner that shows tenacity and grim persistence. - Synonyms: (persistently, steadfastly, resolutely)

They didn't catch them all, but just enough to stay relevant today.

6. cement [səˈmɛnt] - (verb) - To establish firmly or solidly. - Synonyms: (establish, secure, strengthen)

Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 when the company started to cement its position as the default operating system for the world.

7. monopoly [məˈnɒpəli] - (n.) - The exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service. - Synonyms: (domination, control, exclusivity)

Microsoft was accused of wielding its market power, bundling its browser with Windows to try to ride the Internet wave. They got big monopoly big.

8. antitrust [ˈæn.ti.trʌst] - (adj.) - Laws or regulations to promote competition and prevent monopolies. - Synonyms: (competition law, fair trade, deregulation)

Bill said the company could have died during the antitrust battle

9. intelligence [ɪnˈtɛlɪʤəns] - (noun) - The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. - Synonyms: (intellect, brainpower, aptitude)

The one I would highlight is the intelligence that you carry with you. That is your phone.

10. entrepreneurial spirit [ˌɒntrəprəˈnɜːriəl ˈspɪrɪt] - (noun) - An outlook that focuses on innovating, being creative, and taking risks. - Synonyms: (innovation, initiative, resourcefulness)

Microsoft’s journey begins with these two young hackers in the Pacific Northwest, Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Microsoft’s 50-Year Rise With Gates, Ballmer and Nadella - The Circuit with Emily Chang

Be honest. Do you still get excited when you hear the Windows startup sound? It reminds me of a magic time. This feels like, you know, without it, there is no day that you can start Microsoft, an indispensable and inescapable force. For 50 years, the company invented the software industry and changed the world as we know it, transforming personal computing from a nerdy curiosity into a global necessity.

I'll cheat a little bit. Yes. With three CEOs spanning five decades, each leader marked a distinct chapter in technological history. The thing they all have in common is this extraordinary curiosity. Bill is more of a reader. Steve studies numbers, finds patterns and pictures in them, and loves talking with people. Satya is like the renaissance man CEO. The software giant has lasted this long by catching and capitalizing on technology waves, constantly hedging their bets over an uncertain future. We're always thinking about, okay, what happens tomorrow? What's going to happen tomorrow? Will the company keep going?

They didn't catch them all, but just enough to stay relevant today. There have been so many twists and turns in the technological road. When I was in charge, you know, I'd sit up all night thinking, oh, we're gonna miss this, we're gonna miss that. The fact that we've been able to navigate this changing environment, kind of a miracle to me. You know, here we are, and now, you know, the road's got all these AI twists and turns that Tati, with a little bit of advice from Steve and I, gets to drive the car around these curves.

Microsoft loomed large for years, but as the land of tech giants got more crowded and more competitive, it seemed to drift into the corporate doldrums. Until Satya, Nadella, and a big bet on OpenAI brought them back into the zeitgeist. But the next generation of Microsoft has to do more than rely on ChatGPT's strategic advantage. We're at a really pivotal moment here. The company still needs to figure out a consumer centric vision, a consumer first vision, but it's not in Microsoft's DNA, and it remains to be seen if they can do it.

Welcome to Microsoft's 50th birthday. We're gonna go inside to watch the main event. Are we on the circuit? We're on the circuit right now. We're on the circuit. It's a cameo from the competition. Oh, my God. I'll open the door for you. I love the circu. Thank you. Welcome to the era of AI companions and of co pilots. It starts with Bill and Steve, who are both here with us today. Hi, we're waiting for Bill. He's finishing up an interview and then he's coming here. There's one more piece, Bill, if I hop in here. Okay. Bill, happy birthday.

Thank you. 50 years. So it's 1975. What's going on inside Bill's brain? Did you and Paul think you had something this big in your hands? Well, we knew that software would be important. You know, we said when people thought it was crazy, a computer on every desk and in every home. And so we saw it as this tool of empowerment. Microsoft's journey begins with these two young hackers in the Pacific Northwest, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They started obsessing over the emerging computer industry after spotting this cover of Popular Electronics. It's rudimentary stuff by today's standards.

A mini computer kit that you'd program by punching holes into paper. Gates and Allen were hooked and developed a new programming language for it that became the foundational software for Microsoft. People probably remember the Apple II, the TRS 80, the Commodore Pat. Those were the first computers that sold literally in the millions. And all of them included Microsoft basic. So the reason you could write a program, try things out was because we'd worked with each of those companies.

Then the IBM PC comes along. IBM now had 50% market share and was defining what a PC meant. Gates and Allen got their software on the first IBM PCs and in a stroke of business genius inked a non exclusive deal making it possible for other manufacturers like Apple to license it. What was the scariest this might not work moment along the way? Well, there were times in our relationship with IBM that were very complicated.

Very early on in the history of the company we had a dispute with our customer. They weren't paying us thereafter. I said I'm going to have enough money in the bank to pay everyone's salary for a year even if nobody pays me anything. So I was very conservative financially and we were always worried that once somebody realized what we realized, that they might do a good job as well.

So why didn't IBM, who had all the capital in the world and great people, why couldn't they do what we did? And we thought, well, we're more dedicated to software. We're going to price this stuff super, super low and make it available to everyone. Welcome to the Microsoft Ms. DOS 5 upgrade training. It's new productivity software was the hot new thing transforming the workforce. And Microsoft soon became the company to work for, attracting people like this guy.

This is a classic throwback video. I know, I know. My daughter makes a lot of fun of my accent even here. As you can see, the most important architectural requirement for this piece. So you're a technical product manager here. You're demoing Excel. Who's that guy? Like, what's he thinking at that time?

There's an Excel demo with, I think, a DB2 connector back to, at that time, a minicomputer. And it was the beginning of that client server era. Did that guy have any idea he'd be running the place one day? No chance. I was like hoping to stay there in my job for the next month if I could. I was lucky enough to get hired.

I never felt any job I was doing at Microsoft somehow was a path to the next job. The job I was doing was like the most exciting thing that I could be doing, and I gave it it all, and the rest is history. Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 when the company started to cement its position as the default operating system for the world.

Really, like the origin of Microsoft was this idea that you could make money off of selling software. Before that, everybody sold the hardware and you got software with it. But it was the idea that you could have a software company, and that was really revolutionary. Dina Bass is a Bloomberg tech reporter who's covered Microsoft since 1999. That's 25 years of war stories.

There have been so many ebbs and flows and waves and this and that. Some of it is routine where, you know, oh, another version of Windows. And some of it is a 4:30am phone call on your home phone with Microsoft PR talking into your voicemail about the fact that they're about to launch a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo and you're seven months pregnant and you're like, nah, nah, nah.

When I moved to Seattle, it was really a different place. It was the late 90s and there was just this whole culture of the stock had gone crazy in that decade. So there was this whole culture of Microsoft millionaires. Tech employees are a unique breed. Do they still call them Microsofties? I think so. I mean, at least we've progressed from microservice, right?

Microsoft nearly dominated the PC market, practically printing money by selling new versions of Windows and Office. But shipping software back then had an entirely different meaning. When the company would finish work on a product, it was called RTM release to manufacturing. That was when you froze the code and you sent it off to the nice people that publish disks, which for your younger viewers is a circular thing that you put in a computer.

There'd be cascading turns of people signing off on their own code signing off that they were done. And at the end of it there was a giant party. People would end up in the fountains. People would end up getting thrown into Lakeville. We saw Steve Ballmer jumping into Lakeville. I like to be excited. There was so much to be excited about at Microsoft.

We were doing great things and you know, trying to really, if you will, be cheerleaders for a whole industry. And that was a lot of fun. People brought super soakers to campus and there was a giant water fight basically to prepare for this. Microsoft, which has a very nice and pricey art collection, would take the art down from the walls because they didn't want it to get damaged. But it was a young culture that was kind of fun, which I think people don't really associate with Microsoft.

Microsoft reached a pinnacle with the launch of Windows 95. It was a cultural moment. We had Jay Leno and it was kind of maybe the time when people realized Microsoft was quite a unique company. Office had come together, the graphics interface had come together on all the different systems, whether it was Apple, Macintosh or Windows. On the PC we were providing the top application.

So that was definitely a fun day. That showed that we had some special sauce. People lined up around the block to get their hands on the latest operating system. Eager to explore ways to click, type and create with computers. Microsoft sold over 40 million copies in its first year.

And in that moment, there's also kind of the seeds of their kind of downfall. Because in Windows 95 they don't have anything Internet oriented. They don't realize it's going to be a thing. And all of a sudden you see browsers come up, you see the Internet start to become important and they're completely flat footed.

So you have a few things going on at once in that kind of canonical evil empire era. This is when the company started to get in trouble with the US Government. Microsoft was accused of wielding its market power, bundling its browser with Windows to try to ride the Internet wave. They got big monopoly, big.

According to the Department of Justice. How many of you use a PC without Microsoft's operating system? Gentlemen, that's a monopoly. You were criticized for your aggressive business tactics and being anti competitive. How do you reflect on that period?

Well, we were so successful and one of the great rewards if you're, you know, that successful is the government comes in and says, okay, you know, do they have to do things to help out your competitors? Did you follow all those rules? So yes, at that same time as the Internet era was coming along, in the 90s, we were involved in a US government lawsuit. Then Brad Smith came along. Microsoft President Brad Smith joined in 1993 as a budding technology lawyer.

You can find him at places like Davos, liaising with heads of state, or at Microsoft's Treehouse. You helped navigate Microsoft through one of maybe one of the most challenging times in corporate history. Bill said the company could have died during the antitrust battle. What stands out to you from that time?

We needed to figure out how to resolve disputes and not just figure out what it might take to win them. And that really meant making peace. And when I got the job of general Counsel Back in 2001, when I was selected, I said to Bill and Steve and others, look, if you want to go make peace and negotiate agreements, I'm probably the right person. And if you don't want to do that, then I'm probably not the right person because I had a strategy I believed in. We were able to work a settlement out with the government.

And we've been a lot more aware of, okay, let's constantly be in touch with the governments around the world, make sure they're good with what we're doing. And so we haven't had anything intense like we did there in the late 90s. The Microsoft antitrust case has relevance for both Google and Meta. Today, both companies are facing down lawsuits in a bid to break up dominant tech companies once again.

That was sort of the beginning of a challenging time for innovation at the company. Was it bad for Microsoft but good for the industry in a way? No company will ever hit every wave better than everyone else. It's just that's not the way the world works now. It is the case that if you're distracted, you're much less likely to hit the next wave. And I think it is always worth remembering it is a big world. If you don't hit a wave, somebody else will. You have the opportunity to get the next one.

Some people will blame that on the distraction from the antitrust case, but some of it really was just a failure to understand where the market was going, understand what consumers wanted, what Office users wanted. Right? So they miss search, they miss mobile. Right. They miss social, basically. And the stock is flat for years.

This is the Steve Ballmer era. How much do you think this advanced operating environment is worth? Employee number 30 at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer is the energetic, exuberant sales whiz who led Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He put the big in big tech. When it was Bill to Steve, it was sort of Obvious because Steve was the president of the company. He had been Bill's co pilot, if you will, for basically 20 years.

When I first stepped in the role, I said, wow, this is actually quite different. I really understood what it means to be in the buck stops here. Position. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. It's part of my greatest hits, I guess, and I'll never shake it.

Your 25th anniversary, you jumped out of a cake. I want a do over. I didn't even remember that. You know, I miss bomber style product launches. Do you think tech's too serious now? I always thought, okay, you're gonna have fewer characters. You know, Bill Gates, a character larger than life.

Larry Ellison, a character larger than life. Steve Jobs, obviously. And yet I think there's still some characters. The AI thing is tricky because if you don't seem serious enough, then people won't trust you with the privacy, you know, the issues that AI generates uniquely. So I see a little bit less of the, hey, let's do the big joke thing, because it's just tougher with these kinds of products.

During Ballmer's tenure, Microsoft wandered into its wilderness years, battling fresh challenges from Google in search and Apple in mobile. A new acronym emerged that described the big tech stocks of the moment, and it didn't include Microsoft. The company just couldn't connect with the shifting needs and tastes of consumers. The company missed mobile and social and search. Do you ever look back and think, what if not too much actually.

Did the company meet, missed search? No, because all the stuff, including Satya, who worked on that stuff, all that stuff is now fundamental to what's going on in AI. So yes, there was a cycle of it. The company missed. The one I would highlight is the intelligence that you carry with you. That is your phone.

That's the one I say, and I know why I we missed it. Missed meaning we don't have a strong position, we have no position anymore. But I think that the company has really thrived despite that. I'm proud of that. And you know, are there things that Satya's missing right now? I'm sure, you know, 15 years from now he'll look back and say, ah, could have done that, Sorry. Oh, shoot, could have done that one better. But there you have it.

We ran a bunch of charts that tried to track his performance. If you looked at profit, if you looked at, at revenue, it went up. The chart that just was down was the stock. And there was just, it seemed like there was nothing they could do right at that point. And again, it's not totally accurate to say they miss mobile. They knew it was going to be big. They couldn't figure out what people wanted.

Bill Gates loved the idea of a tablet computer, a pen computer he called it in the 90s. It's a tablet and there's a pen here. He had wanted to do that forever and they finally released one in the early aughts and, and it's not something that anyone wants. And then Steve Jobs gets up there with the iPad and it's exactly what people are looking for.

Now. There's a couple of exceptions. In 2001 they released the Xbox, which remains the, you know, the biggest American gaming empire. It was a tough decision for them to make. Bill and Steve both were unsure at various points. There was a lot of screaming and yelling around that decision.

Bill in a very foul mouthed tirade at a meeting on Valentine's Day, accused the team working on it of I'm not going to use this exact wording on television, but messing up everything he had created at the company. Steve at this point is six weeks or so into his tenure as CEO and this is the first major decision he has to make. Am I going to greenlight this Xbox or not? And he decides to go for it, but not before raking the team over the cold.

That ended up being a really prescient decision by Steve Ballmer though. The other thing that Steve did that was really important, he decided to do some really smart things in terms of cloud. Ballmer became the bridge from Microsoft's PC era to its cloud future. A transformation sparked by a competitive threat next door. Amazon identified that cloud computing would be the next opportunity.

So Ballmer put together a team led by Satya Nadella to try to catch up and get a piece of the emerging market. Microsoft then launched Azure and brought Office apps to the cloud. It's a really pivotal moment because Microsoft at this point has been surveying customers about whether they want to move to the cloud and customers are telling them we're not ready.

And so the person that preceded Satya in that division basically told tell Steve Ballmer, customers don't want it, we shouldn't move this quickly. And Steve looks at that executive guy named Bob Maglia and says, well then Bob, you're not my guy. And he replaces him with Satya and there's like a sliding doors moment where that doesn't happen. Satya never becomes CEO and you know, God only knows where the company is.

I understand that Bill spent a lot of time succession planning when he handed the reins to you and that you also spent a lot of time succession planning when you passed the reins to Satya. What's the key to building a company that outlasts its founder? It was super important to let Satya have his space. And I think that was a key learning, because when Bill and I, we sort of had a long handoff. And so, in a sense, the long goodbye, I think is difficult because role reversal is difficult.

And I think I learned that enough to say, look, I love you. I might think I have a lot you can learn from me. And I said to him, but don't listen to old CEOs. Former CEOs are former CEOs. You're going to know what to do. And anything you don't know, you're going to figure out.

What was it about Satya? Satya was not beholden to the past. He was not beholden to making sure that Office helped Windows. And so he was able to make sure decisions. I think, in a way that was a little bit freeing. Steve famously got upset when employees had iPhones. Satya wanted everybody to experience everyone else's products, to know about them.

I remember talking to someone, an executive from another company had been at a conference with Satya, and every single business leader in the room kept pulling out their BlackBerry, checking their email. Satya didn't look at it the whole day. He just listened. Brett, I mean, how confident are you that Nadella can bring this company back from where it's been and sort of restore Microsoft to greatness and win in the places where it can?

There's not a tech leader who doesn't respect Satya Nadella. He's really taken an extremely complex and large company and genuinely changed its culture and strategy with Satya. You know, his first reaction when the succession process was announced was not to throw his hat in the ring. I mean, he literally said, I don't think you need me. Wow. And then a couple months later, he said, well, I think maybe you need me.

This company's had three CEOs. They're all right here. This is all. Not everybody knew him as well. He had only been running the cloud business for a little less than three years. If it had been two years later, I think it would have been been obvious. So it was a bet. You are credited with leading Microsoft's comeback, and you came in as kind of a wartime CEO.

Is it peacetime now or is it still war? I mean, those metaphors are interesting to me. I feel like the Microsoft I grew up in was that there was no such thing as oh wow, we won anything. So at least the core DNA and the core posture I've had in throughout my 32 years at Microsoft is we better get our act together to make sure we are learning fast enough about what the next big thing is. It's all about, hey, are we being relevant in the future?

That's the only way to survive. When Satya Nadella took the reins in 2014, he challenged the Windows obsessed hierarchy and reoriented Microsoft around the cloud and AI. It worked. And the stock talked to the delight of Ballmer, Microsoft's largest shareholder. Everything's three times as big, revenue's three times as big, profit is three times, market cap's more than three times as big. All good by me. So everything is scaled so much it's amazing.

Microsoft surged back to Wall street glory with the magnificent seven shorthand for high performing tech stocks with market caps bigger than some countries. The hardest lesson you've learned as CEO, I think the hardest one is to be able to really live that right the deliver the present and, and then prepare for the future. That ability like as a CEO, what is it that you have to do each quarter?

You have to create magic, right? That's kind of what every 90 days the market expects you to create magic. And that's kind of the reality of the world we live in. While at the same time building alongside institution and the accountability that goes with it. Being able to sort of understand what it takes to have that ultimate accountability to both deliver today and for tomorrow and to be able to get that balance right.

It's a much more complex job today. I have to say I'm in great admiration for how Zen he is, you know, picking the things he's going to focus on and all the, you know, choices. He's very good about drawing both Steve and I in. So whatever expertise we have, he gets the benefit of that. So I think he's kind of a model.

He wasn't there in the early days and yet of all the tech companies, I think he's been the best at carrying forward even the original spirit of what made Microsoft special. Nadella's legacy includes big investments and acquisitions from LinkedIn, GitHub, Activision Blizzard to what some have called the deal of the decade. A $13 billion bet on OpenAI, Microsoft's biggest hit.

Windows biggest Ms. Clippy. It was just ahead of its time. It was just ahead of its time. It's back again. Biggest surprise, the biggest surprise was Maybe, maybe this OpenAI ChatGPT having a chat interface become a hit was a real surprise.

The concept of a chatbot isn't new. They tried before with Clippy, Cortana and Tay, the bot that had to be shut down 16 hours after launch. Soon Tay was ranting about Hitler. But ChatGPT was a massive success, giving Microsoft a surprise jump in the AI race. The deal with OpenAI, was it smart, lucky or a quick fix?

It's hard to argue anything other than smart. The original deal back in 2019, nobody really, really knew if it was going to work out the way they said. Right. And Bill Gates. And Bill Gates opposed that deal on technological grounds because Bill thought that the way that the technology of the AI market would play out was going to be a different way and that what Sam and company wanted to do wasn't going to be how it would work. Lucky that they picked the right horse.

Perhaps the OpenAI Microsoft partnership delivered a hit, but there have been some bumps along the way. It is full mutiny within the world's most important AI company. Who's going to be CEO of OpenAI tomorrow? You tell me. I will leave it to OpenAI and its board.

What's Satya like in a crisis? Satya to me that weekend was like a duck. He was completely calm above the water and underneath the water, he was paddling furiously. You pointed out to me that quote about, you know, Microsoft being above them, below them, around them and, you know, which sounds kind of scary, but really it's true.

The contract that Microsoft had struck and with OpenAI really give them access to everything, no matter what happened. And at the same time, things are starting to change on the basis of that. Microsoft is building its own models, OpenAI is making other friends, and your partnership ends in 2030.

Are you trying to tell the kids that maybe this marriage isn't forever? This is another thing I've learned in the last 50 years is, you know, you approach all partnerships and create long term stable partnerships which are win, win. Right. So I hope that for decades to come, Microsoft and OpenAI will be partnered in a variety of different ways. Will they have other partners? Absolutely. Will we have other partners? Absolutely. But the relationship is changing, right? Like, how is it changing and what happens when that deal is.

I think any company that has gone from being a research lab to one of the most successful product companies of this age, obviously things have to change for them and for, for us. And in the context of the partnership. Right. We have IP rights. We're thrilled about that access we have. We are infrastructure providers. They're the biggest customers of ours.

And so to us, having that multifaceted sort of partnership is what we are really focused on. And so why would any one of us want to go upset that still, business is business. And it seems like there's always a new twist on tap in that relentless pursuit of relevance. As we saw with search and your competition with Google, sometimes you just can't fight the verb.

It's habit forming. And chatgpt is the verb right now. So how much do you worry that Microsoft loses the mindshare game? Every day the ChatGPT succeeds is a fantastic day for Microsoft. Every time you search on ChatGPT, Microsoft makes money, right? Yeah. In some sense it even proves the point that markets can evolve and hit products. Products can be created from anywhere and what have you.

How will the AI wars play out? Like, does it feel different than the mobile or the browser wars? Like who wins? Well, we don't know. We know that the level of investment by the leading companies is pretty mind blowing. You know, Google's a great company. Microsoft OpenAI, we're out there, you know, every day, you know, making copilot better.

You obviously have a booming enterprise business. When you look at what Google is doing and Apple and Metta and Amazon, how important is it to you to win in consumer AI and how do you do that to me, I want us to play to our strength. Like if I look at even what we are doing with copilot, right. How do we build a copilot that is the new browser effectively in this intelligence era that has a unique characteristic that is Microsoft. Whether it's helping you with your travel planning or whether with shopping or with your homework, but do it in a way that it uniquely telegraphs what I think Microsoft's signature would be in it.

In what is going to be a new way to litigate what is the consumer market outside of video games, Xbox, Satya and team have just not figured out consumer and it's becoming potentially more of an issue because our generation grew up in Microsoft products. The generation that's in school now does not. They live in Google, they have Apple devices. You have a generation growing up and the question for Microsoft is what is their entree to Microsoft products if they're not growing up with them?

Microsoft got a head start with exclusive access to OpenAI's models. But the boardroom drama and big tech competition pushed pushed Nadella to innovate from within. Hello. Hey, good to see you. Great to see you. Mustafa Suleiman is head of Microsoft's consumer AI team who came in house in a Buzzy Aqua hire. Suleyman's job is to make Microsoft's own chatbot copilot as essential as Excel or Windows. In a big bet on the next era of computing.

Everything is about to shuffle. Whether it's search or the browser or apps or the operating system, these models are just completely different to any one of those last generations of software. So right now, you feel like you have a once in a decade opportunity. I really do. I think these next couple of years are going to be a defining moment. We're going to look back and be like, this was the era of real agents, you know, forming a lasting, meaningful relationship with an AI companion that becomes the primary way that you do computing in the world.

He's trying to create a seamless and futuristic consumer AI experience. A new mission for Microsoft. The number one priority for us is that we have to produce beautiful, elegant consumer products that regular young people love, Right? And that is not the way that young people think of Microsoft products today. And that's a very big shift in our thinking.

Microsoft's product suite still, I think, has a lot of challenges and in many ways can feel dated, like Excel. You're making me cry. When are we banning Microsoft Outlook spent two hours today trying to open an email. You have one job. How do you make it smarter, but still simple and delightful?

So you, you clearly want it to reason over your past data, use your personal information, and then get really good at taking actions inside the browser, searching for things on your behalf. And that's just an iterative process that you know is going to take many, many quarters to come to pass. What do you think your approach, your secret is going to be?

I think humor is going to be central. It's got to have a sense of itself, a little bit of character. It needs to remember you and know who you are. And that range of personalization, that's going to be a key differentiator. All right, we're going to try out some different voices looking for answers or a new perspective. Let's chat and figure it out together.

Whoa. I want to hear your big ideas. I can write stories, brainstorm ideas, and I can sound like this. If you choose. That sounds a lot like Mustafa to me. Hey, copilot, does it sound like Mustafa to you? So I have a big tech conference coming up, and I'm trying to think of people we should invite to interview.

Do you have any ideas you could consider inviting? Satya Nadella for insights on AI and cloud, Sheryl Sandberg for social media and leadership. I find it Interesting that Satya is your first choice. Is that because he's your boss? Not at all.

Are we all just gonna be talking to our computers and our phones? Is that the next. I think the Voice is gonna be one of the next platforms. It's not gonna replace all the previous platforms. It's like a fork. It enables a completely different way of talking to your computer.

No matter which chatbot wins, demand is expected to grow, sending big tech on a massive spending spree. Microsoft's putting out $80 billion of investment. You know, clearly that's a sense that, wow, we have something that customers are going to want.

We're willing to invest at a level that's completely unheard of. I mean, that's, it's a pretty mind blowing number. We're in this new computing era. Tech giants, including you, are building these AI data centers. Do you have any concerns about the size and scale of this bet? Like, are we building the future the right way?

I think the scale is pretty stunning. But the real test here, Emily, is what happens in the real economy. The real test is not some benchmark or what have you of AI. It's one simple fact, which is when we start seeing higher growth rates around the world and the benefits of that growth rate, by the way, being much more broader cross sectorally and by economic strata, then I think we would have achieved something.

The emergence of Deep SEQ from China. You told your team to quickly integrate it into Azure. Why don't you think it's a risk? And what do you think of China's role in this fight? The thing that I think about is there'll always be open source and if anything, what DeepSeek has proven is open source can come from any place.

In this case, it happens to come from China. The next model may come from some other country, it may come from the lab in the United States. It doesn't matter. In this industry, we better sort of really face up to the fact that this is a rate of diffusion that's faster than anything before and it's worldwide.

There's a version of AI that's a security and privacy nightmare. How do you think about it? Well, I think that it's just an imperative for us to protect security and privacy in every aspect of technology, whether we're talking about AI or social media or the content we created work. The aspect of AI that is most interesting is that it is sort of the ultimate tool and the ultimate weapon.

So the question I wanted to address today is really simple. What does all this mean? Well, stop Our Shame on you. You say you claim that you care about using AI for good, but Microsoft tells AI what good to the Israeli military. I hear your protest. Thank you. Shame on you.

Microsoft is a war profiteer. Microsoft is a war profiteer. Not everyone is along for the tech industry's ride to the AI promised land. There are consequences and challenges ahead as this new underlying technology embeds itself into everything. Do you think we're going to really look back on this march of progress as positive?

You know, I've heard Bill talk about how he never thought that tech could be negative until the era of social networking. I guess I wonder if this sort of relentless march of progress could in the future mean fewer jobs, fewer opportunities, less meaning in our lives. I think it's super important to acknowledge the uncertainty around what's going to unfold over the next 10 or 20 years.

Anyone who is confident is probably wrong. And so that means that we have to be alive to the fact that this really is different to other types of technology. It is not just a simple tool. It's dynamic, it's emergent, it adapts to you on the fly. And that means there could be all kinds of third degree effects that are quite hard to predict.

You've said that the age of complete human dominance will be over and 10 years. What does that really mean for us? What it means goes beyond, you know, which company actually delivers that or what their stock price is. It's a much more profound thing than just like the browser wars were. I mean, it didn't matter to people really who won the browser wars here. The, the capacity, the intelligence will give humans a lot of choices.

It's a complicated picture for the software giant. Its mission is the future of work, but it's investing in technology that's reshaping the future of opportunity. AI powered coding assistants are changing how software gets built. Automating tasks normally handled by junior developers. That's become a bragging point at the very top.

And so I'd say maybe 20, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software. What about you guys? I don't know. Maybe half the development is going to be done by AI.

Is AI going to make engineers obsolete? AI is going to vastly change the way software gets built. It will. And yet there's still going to be people who have to figure out what the world needs, how to give it to them. Will all of the code crunching activities of yesterday be around tomorrow? No. A lot of Those will go away.

But I'm an optimist. People say, oh, you know, are you going to put people out of. And this happened every time, you know, will this cause a loss of jobs? Will that cause a lot of jobs? You know what I'd say? Somehow the world's always created new jobs. It can be hard, the dislocation. People say, oh, shoot, it's my skills that became obsolete. But there will be new jobs, important skills people need.

What's going to be the IT job of the future if it was a software programmer in your era? Well, I'm not sure there's any IT job. If you love math and software, great, go be a software programmer. But that was, you know, the percentage of the labor market that was, you know, nerding people like me, you know, where you'd be writing code, you know, is pretty modest. All of that, those capabilities where you bring it as a human, I think will still be fairly important.

But it is a period where answering these questions is probably harder than at any time in history. I think it takes like, unique human arrogance to believe that AI cannot supersede humans. But what about that scares you? So many things, right? This is like, you know, what does it mean to build something that is more capable than ourselves?

Like, what does. There are folks out there, including Sam Altman and OpenAI, who believe super intelligent, super powerful AI is right around the corner. What's your bet? I think that we are definitely on a path to have more powerful systems pretty soon. Is AGI being built on Microsoft's campus right now? Like, can we go find it?

No, you can't find it. It doesn't exist. How confident are you that AI's promise will outweigh the perils? I'm not confident, but that's what we need to get oriented around. That's why I was surprised. AI wasn't really an issue in the last election. It's definitely got to be shaped. Hearing you say you're not confident is kind of scary.

People should think through how is AI going to reshape our lives. It is a profound change agent. And I don't think it should just be the people who know the technology, because there's a lot of choices about how it gets used. It will change learning, it will change the job market. And, you know, I think we can shape that in a, in the right way, but it'll be, you know, just like nuclear energy, nuclear weapons. It'll challenge us.

Thank you for your vision, your leadership, your passion, and for building the Microsoft that we know, today a company that has truly changed the world. What is Microsoft in 50 years? Like your best guess? I mean, a petri dish with a couple of cells connected to like an AI being that controls everything. I don't know that we know what it is in five years because we're talking about the technological innovations here and how do they lead with their own products and not just because they pick the right model. Microsoft.

Microsoft is preaching this gospel of AI changing everything about the way we work. What Satya wants to see is for that to be proven out first at Microsoft. Microsoft changed the world. Will Microsoft change the world again? I go back to that founding moment when Bill said, you know what? The software industry didn't exist. And he and Paul sort of said, oh, we should build software and hopefully we can monetize and they will be an industry.

I mean, it's crazy. Hopefully they will come. Yeah. And it all happened. But the other thing about it though was that core of wow, we want to build software so that others can create more software. That I think is what gives us relevance. I always say this longevity is not a goal. Relevance is.

And the framing of this company from 1975 to 2025 has been the same, which is, can you do things that allow others to do more things? If you could time travel to 2075, what advice would you give your successor? The advice I got from Steve Ballmer when I took on the job is the advice that I think of all the time, which is be bold.

Because if you're not bold, you're not going to do anything. And be right, because if you're not right, you won't amount to much. And so that ability to sort of get past the status quo by really boldly thinking of a future that doesn't exist, but then executing right at the end of the day, business is about being able to earn the stripes one step at a time. And I think that's what this company has exhibited, it has taught me all through my career at Microsoft, which is you gotta dream and execute, dream and execute. And you know, we've not gotten it always right, both either on the dream side, the of, on the execution side, but on the batting average, it's pretty good.

TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION, LEADERSHIP, MICROSOFT, FUTURE OF WORK, SOFTWARE INDUSTRY, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS