Microsoft
A software company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen that made BASIC, MS-DOS and Windows.
Microsoft shows up in three ways: Excel as a tool AI agents plug into, a source of lessons for ex-staff, and a model for platform strategy. Codex works through Excel's add-in and hides git details from spreadsheet users. FLORA's founder copies Microsoft's path of owning the layer above the models. Fiona Fung led TypeScript and Visual Studio over 11 years, when CD shipping forced heavy planning. Lesson: fit existing tools and own the layer above.
- 1BASICFirst layer on personal computers
- 2DOSNext layer up
- 3WindowsLayer above DOS
- 4OfficeApps on top of Windows
From Weber Wong, FLORA founder
What was said about Microsoft
Codex works with Excel through its add-in instead of replacing it. Codex talks to Excel through the add-in. Excel users don't want git information, so the app stays simple for them.
The same approach worked for Premiere Pro. A videographer asked whether Codex could edit video, and it edited the backing files, then built an extension for Premiere that it could talk to. Codex's in-house videographer Brent edited all the Codex app launch videos this way. Quote: "built itself an extension that could be installed into Premiere Pro". The takeaway is to integrate with specialist tools and keep the app as the home base where work starts, ends and gets automated.
FLORA models itself on Microsoft's layer-by-layer path above the hardware. Founder Weber Wong wants FLORA to become the standard layer above the AI models, as Microsoft did with BASIC, then DOS, Windows and Office on top of personal computers.
She expects the era of obsessing over single model outputs to fade as professionals ask how to use models in their workflow. Next steps are making visual programs easy to build and share while adding control. Quote: "we're currently building the first layer right above that, the creative computing layer."
Shipping software on CDs forced heavy planning at Microsoft. Software shipped on CDs with fixed manufacturing dates, so teams planned heavily because engineering time was precious.
Fiona Fung spent 11 years at Microsoft and ran the teams that built TypeScript and Visual Studio.
How Bill Gates Works
Gates kept it lean and cash-rich, with 11 or 12 employees four years in, and bought DOS outright to resell it. It sold over $1 billion in software in 1990 and reached about $280 billion in revenue later, versus the $55 billion opportunity he saw in 1997.
Codex works with Excel through its add-in instead of replacing it. Codex talks to Excel through the add-in. Excel users don't want git information, so the app stays simple for them.
The same approach worked for Premiere Pro. A videographer asked whether Codex could edit video, and it edited the backing files, then built an extension for Premiere that it could talk to. Codex's in-house videographer Brent edited all the Codex app launch videos this way. Quote: "built itself an extension that could be installed into Premiere Pro". The takeaway is to integrate with specialist tools and keep the app as the home base where work starts, ends and gets automated.
How 80,000 companies build with AI: Products as organisms and the death of org charts | Asha Sharma
Plans in 'seasons' (prototyping, reasoning models, now agents) with loose quarterly OKRs and four to six week squad goals. Over 15,000 customers have built agents on Azure, with millions of agents running, and it uses agents for incident summaries and prototyping.
Shipping software on CDs forced heavy planning at Microsoft. Software shipped on CDs with fixed manufacturing dates, so teams planned heavily because engineering time was precious.
Fiona Fung spent 11 years at Microsoft and ran the teams that built TypeScript and Visual Studio.
Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada
Runs a Frontier program, a few weeks old, that gives early adopters experimental AI like a deep research agent post-trained for work, while the wider company changes carefully. Pushes 'demos before memos', though adoption is uneven. Endures because it gives non-coders real programming power, with a hard one-time learning curve that pays off in depth. Decades of signal from daily power users keep it ahead, and there are World Excel championships.
FLORA models itself on Microsoft's layer-by-layer path above the hardware. Founder Weber Wong wants FLORA to become the standard layer above the AI models, as Microsoft did with BASIC, then DOS, Windows and Office on top of personal computers.
She expects the era of obsessing over single model outputs to fade as professionals ask how to use models in their workflow. Next steps are making visual programs easy to build and share while adding control. Quote: "we're currently building the first layer right above that, the creative computing layer."
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years
Under Ballmer, revenue rose from $23 billion to $84 billion while the P/E fell from 75x to 14x. It lost consumer relevance but built the enterprise agreement annuity and Azure, and by 2007 55% of its $51 billion revenue came from enterprise agreements.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95
Founded April 4, 1975 to sell only software, it kept DOS licensing rights from the IBM deal and grew revenue from $25 million in 1982 to $12 billion in fiscal 1997. Gates still owned 49% at the 1986 IPO, and Windows 95 sold 7 million copies in its first month.
DHH: How to Build a Profitable Company Without Losing Control
Its 50,000-person organization can only build 50,000-person software, shown by overlapping Outlook versions like Outlook new (old). When Basecamp launched, people said Microsoft would just add it to Project.
Why OpenAI is merging Codex and ChatGPT and the future of knowledge work | Andrew Ambrosino
Codex talks to Excel through its add-in rather than replacing it. Excel users don't want git information, so the app should stay simple for them.
What happens after coding is solved? | Fiona Fung (Claude Code & Cowork)
Fiona spent 11 years there and ran the teams that built TypeScript and Visual Studio. Software then shipped on CDs with fixed manufacturing dates, which forced heavy planning because engineering time was precious.
Jason Fried: Your Only Competition Is Your Costs
Its first 30 employees were Bill Gates, his secretary and 28 programmers, with no fat. It was the first software company to reach a billion dollars in yearly sales of pure software.
How FLORA is Reinventing Creative Design with AI
Weber uses Microsoft as the model for FLORA: become the standard layer above the models as it did with BASIC, then DOS, Windows and Office.
How Larry Ellison Thinks
Ellison picked Microsoft and Bill Gates as the perfect enemy so Oracle would be compared with giants, and the fight put him on the cover of Fortune. He calls its engineers skilled copyists but says Gates puts what is right above who is right.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI?
It struck a $1 billion deal with OpenAI in 2018 and put in another $10 billion in January 2023 for 49% of the for-profit. Nadella said AI-powered Bing would make Google dance.
A 4-step framework for building delightful products | Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)
At checkout for a roughly 120 euro coffee machine, Edge offered the guest's husband a 15% coupon he had not looked for. It is the example of exceeding expectations with an unrequested gain at the moment of payment.
Google Part II: Alphabet
Over 90% of Google queries ran on Windows and Internet Explorer, so Microsoft was the threat behind Google's strategy. It nearly bought DoubleClick, paid $6B for aQuantive, and its productivity business earns over $120B a year.
Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)
Its CTO Kevin Scott became an early champion of MCP, helping adoption of the open protocol.
How Gamma Grew to $50M in ARR in 2 Years
Noronha started as a product manager on Bing image search, with hundreds of millions of users and heavy A/B testing, and left because big companies were not for him. PowerPoint is the incumbent Gamma wants to make feel broken.
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more | Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26)
Products from Mayur's internship had not shipped three or four years later, which contrasted with Binance shipping every hour. Cited as a company whose DNA works against mobile.
Superhuman's secret to success | Rahul Vohra (CEO and founder)
Superhuman supports it because enterprise IT must control which apps save attachments or receive pasted email text. That requirement delayed the mobile app.
Behind the founder: Marc Benioff
Salesforce is running aggressive marketing against Microsoft Copilot as part of the Agentforce launch. Benioff welcomes Microsoft's agents as healthy competition.
Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more
It beat WordPerfect because coworkers needed to share the same format, so users spreading it made it work better.
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)
Raaz led security products there, including Azure Sentinel, before Wiz. Wiz's CEO had led all of Microsoft's cloud security products, and Microsoft bought the founders' earlier company Adallom.
Meta
Its guaranteed-rate ad deal lifted Facebook revenue from $9M in 2005 to $153M in 2007. In October 2007 it invested $240M at a $15B valuation, and became the exclusive worldwide display ad network.
5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker)
It kept its PC operating system share but holds about 0.4% of smartphones and 4% of tablets, so its share of smart-screen minutes plummeted. The last exciting Windows update was Windows 95.
Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers)
It is Helmer's example of a company that would not exist without chips. Antitrust documents show Buffett told Gates he could not invest because he did not understand it, so he missed its network economies.
Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market
It is a risk-free add-on to Office 365, so it sits on Main Street rather than in the bowling alley or tornado.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy | Richard Rumelt
Rumelt cites Microsoft's response to AI as good strategy in action: diagnose the challenge of adapting to AI, invest in a major AI leader, and build it into its search engine.
Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
Its vision of a computer on every desk and in every home is an example of a vision you can picture and that is realistic.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang
Its DirectX rollout was incompatible with Nvidia's first architecture, and it already held the developer relationships that made it the platform. Nvidia chose to build the best hardware for DirectX instead of fighting it.
The Biography of Steve Jobs (The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader)
Gates saw that software alone could be a business, and Microsoft became the first company to sell a billion dollars of software in one year. Jobs closed a deal in which Microsoft committed to Office for the Mac for five years and invested $150 million in Apple.
How to become a category pirate | Christopher Lochhead (Author of Play Bigger, Niche Down, more)
Ballmer told his team to copy the Apple Stores exactly, and Microsoft Stores reportedly lost $400 million to $1 billion.
An inside look at Figma’s unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire)
Microsoft adopted Figma team by team through credit cards, starting with Xamarin, with no sales process. The company later asked for security review, account management and procurement to control a tool that had spread without it.
Nvidia Part III: The Dawn of the AI Era (2022-2023)
It put in $1 billion in 2019, another $2 billion around 2021 and $10 billion in January 2023, and became OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider. That made generative AI a product that needs GPUs through the cloud.
The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon)
Failure rate was about 66%, and about 8% of experiments had a sample ratio mismatch. By 2019 it ran 20,000 to 25,000 experiments a year, about 100 new treatments per working day. Office shipped on a three-year cycle and only adopted experiments after seeing Bing's results.
The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)
Began as a defensive move to protect Office and has become mostly video conferencing. Many Fortune 500 companies use both Microsoft's suite and Slack.
An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
Cited as an example of a rival whose distribution and pricing power largely sets how fast a category leader can grow.
An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
Its specs covered every case, even a table for exactly what happens on an error. That contrasted with YouTube, where one PM could not specify everything, which taught Yuhki to own the why.
The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher)
The example of a maximization pricing strategy, which sits between skimming and penetration.
Amazon Web Services
Lost about five years to internal politics and a platform bet with Azure Cloud Services instead of lift and shift. Azure now holds about 21% share after Ballmer split it off and put Satya Nadella in charge.
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006)
It built triangle-based Direct3D into Windows, which stranded Nvidia's quadrilateral design, and it drove a hard bargain on Xbox chips. It captured nearly as much value as Nvidia with far less risk, which keeps Nvidia's grade at an A.
How to Build a Minimum Viable Product (Part 2) - App Startup Series
Described as the old-school option for mocking up screens and systems, usable by beginners.
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