Will Microsoft Ever Make the AI Big Leagues?
The biggest name in software released its first AI large language model only recently. Can it catch up to the juggernauts Anthropic and OpenAI? Or will they continue to focus more on GTM than GPT?
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In one of the first issues of AgenticMSP I told the story of how Satya Nadella stood on stage at Ignite in Chicago in October 2024 and welcomed us all to the arrival of “the agentic age.” It sounded like a majestic manifesto filled with great vision that excited everyone in the audience.
It was actually a press release for something Microsoft didn’t own yet, dressed up to look like a breakthrough.
I’ve watched Microsoft run this same play since 1981, when I sold my first Microsoft product. The pattern never changes: announce the vision before you’ve built the substance, let the trade press do the marketing for you, and backfill the technology later if the market forces your hand. Think “BPOS”, the Business Productivity Office Suite which eventually became Office 365 and then Microsoft 365. Think Lync, which survived through many iterations of Microsoft Communications Server to finally become Teams. Think SharePoint, which began as about a dozen different products that got slammed together and marketed as one. Dynamics CRM went the exact same way and offers the same feature bloat.
Ignite 2024 was that exact pattern in its purest form, played out for the age of AI.
