Very different business, of course, but Databricks v. Fabric reminds me a lot of Slack v. Teams.

Regardless of the relative merits now, I think everyone agrees that a few years ago Slack was clearly superior. Microsoft could have certainly bought Slack instead of pumping probably billions into development, marketing, discounts to destroy them.

I think Microsoft could and would consider buying Databricks—$80–100B is a lot, but not record-shattering.

If I were them, though, I’d spend a few billion competing as an experiment, first.