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Comment by BrainVirus | Hacker News Reader

Imagine that you are a CEO of Microsoft. Someone in your company invented an AI tool that makes an average developer much better at coding (more productive, etc.). As a reminder: you company is a software company that itself employs tens of thousand of developers. What would you do?

a) Downplay the tool. Use it internally to completely crush competition by writing amazing software. License for exorbitant price to a select few partners, who will also crush their competition.

b) Hype it up as much as possible and license it to anyone who's willing to pay $10/month.

I think the rational choice is obvious, which also makes it blatantly obvious that Copilot is not seen as any kind of competitive advantage by Microsoft itself.

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That logic suggests Microsoft should simply never sell development tools, or even productivity software, because they would presumably be able to leverage the advantage of those tools internally in their own interests to crush all competitors.

Microsoft has long taken the position that its interests are served by there just being more computers being used by more people to do more things (‘a computer on every desk’ etc) - not by monopolizing all computer activity. That’s more IBM’s style.

Why I’d it better to ship it than keep it?

If you have a widget that makes software developers 10% more efficient, sure you can use it to make your own developers more efficient, but if your developers currently account for 1% of all the programming productivity on the planet you just realized a value equivalent to 0.1% of global programming potential.

On the other hand if you ship it as a product in exchange for, say, 10% of the increase in value produced, you contributed a value increase to the world equivalent to 9.9% of programming output, and captured .99% of the value of the market for yourself. That’s much more than the value you could have captured yourself and you grew the market meaning you can extract even more value on the next go around.

>That logic suggests Microsoft should simply never sell development tools

You employ faulty economic reasoning here. Most MS tools are not unique and aren't even best in their class. In cases where they are close, MS charges a lot of money for the privilege to use them.

To put it in simple terms, if Copilot worked as advertised it would cost significantly more than VS enterprise. At some point of usefulness the logic related to selling vs using it internally would work exactly like I described. This is why many companies develop their own software and don't sell it at all even if they could charge for it.

My company develops software for internal use and we've even been asked about selling it by some customers who have seen it. We don't sell it because doing so would require a ton of work to decouple it from our other internal services/processes and generalize it enough to maybe be actually useable by other enterprises, would give us a whole second set of customers in totally different industries from that of our main product, and would generally be a total pain in the ass. I suspect that there's a lot more of that sort of thing than the other.

Isn’t Microsoft the licensee though?

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/22/microsoft-teams-...

That's not how large companies works.

Microsoft is way too big to be able to make finely grained strategic decisions like that.

If a team within Microsoft want to ship something hard enough - and they can get sponsorship from the right execs (MS has thousands of execs) - they'll ship it.

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