But I think he could possibly be right.
Windows is in a terrible spot. IOS brought a clearly superior computing paradigm that brought billions to the market. Microsoft missed the mobile revolution almost entirely. And while the company still dominates the workplace and has been successfully iterating its decades old products, it’s been clear that gen z, raised on apps, iPads, and chromebooks isn’t blessed with the computer savvy of the millennials.
At the same time, the information overload has hit the workplace too, with mountains of emails, endless Teams meetings, Sharepoint sites packed with decades of files, and databases packed with terabyte of data.
I think increasingly, the human mind is the bottleneck. I personally don’t think LLMs are on a path to AGI, but I do suspect they are going to simulate one, because the thing they are so good at predicting is not what token comes next, but what the human does next. A masterful human predicting machine could be AGIish just enough for Microsoft.
And at any rate, it’s been impressive to watch Bill’s old dog being to learn new tricks at a frantic pace. I have to give them points for risk taking and execution.