Dance Lessons
Recently, Satya Nadella sat down with Fareed Zakaria and delivered a warning to corporate America: hand your data and your prompts over to somebody else's AI model, and any firm that doesn't keep that control, he said, won't remain a firm, because it will have "essentially outsourced your thinking." He recommended businesses build their own gateways, keep their own weights, retain the receipts on how their employees actually use these tools. It's the kind of thing a man says when he has learned, the hard way, what happens when a company bets its future on somebody else's technology and finds out the technology didn't deliver what was promised.
It brought to mind his 2023 interview with Nadella practically levitating off his chair, calling Google the "800-pound gorilla in search" and promising to be the one who finally made it move. Prometheus was baked into Bing, ChatGPT was six weeks old and already reshaping the internet, and Redmond had the swagger of a twenty-year underdog who'd finally found the loophole. He wasn't talking about outsourcing anybody's thinking then. He was talking about a $13 billion bet that OpenAI's model, running inside Microsoft's own products, was going to be the thing that finally cracked Google open.
Eight months later he was in a Washington courtroom testifying in the Google antitrust trial, and the swagger had gone somewhere else entirely. "You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google," he told the court, describing exactly the monopoly he'd promised to break. The dance never happened. Three years on, Gemini is beating Copilot on the metrics that were supposed to be Microsoft's to win, and the man who wanted Google to come out and show it could dance is now the one lecturing other CEOs about what happens when you let somebody else's model do your thinking for you.
Nadella's own answer to the outsourcing problem is Copilot. It has the receipts to make his current sermon awkward. A study covering roughly 150,000 seat-holders found that barely a third of them open the thing on any given week, and when Recon Analytics asked lapsed users why they'd stopped, nearly half pointed to not believing what the tool told them. Ninety percent of the Fortune 500 has it sitting in their license inventory, but a $30-a-seat product that a Fortune 500 company technically owns and its employees avoid isn't outsourced thinking. It's an unused gym membership with an enterprise procurement number attached. Scale that seat count to ten thousand employees and the company is out $3.6 million a year whether or not anyone logs in, and Microsoft's own headline productivity numbers, the minutes saved, the majority who say they feel more productive, only describe the fraction of people who bothered to show up.
If Copilot had turned out to be the outsourcing success story, the one where a company handed its thinking to a vendor and came out ahead, Nadella's new caution about firms surrendering control might land as hard-won wisdom instead of as a man narrating someone else's mistake to cover for his own product's failure to launch. He wants companies to keep their weights close and their gateways proprietary so that no single model can take them hostage. Meanwhile the model he already sold them, running inside the software they already pay for, is sitting there unopened in a third of the seats, waiting for somebody to trust it enough to ask it something.
He was right about one thing back in 2023. Somebody was going to get made to dance. It just wasn't Google.
It brought to mind his 2023 interview with Nadella practically levitating off his chair, calling Google the "800-pound gorilla in search" and promising to be the one who finally made it move. Prometheus was baked into Bing, ChatGPT was six weeks old and already reshaping the internet, and Redmond had the swagger of a twenty-year underdog who'd finally found the loophole. He wasn't talking about outsourcing anybody's thinking then. He was talking about a $13 billion bet that OpenAI's model, running inside Microsoft's own products, was going to be the thing that finally cracked Google open.
Eight months later he was in a Washington courtroom testifying in the Google antitrust trial, and the swagger had gone somewhere else entirely. "You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, and you search on Google," he told the court, describing exactly the monopoly he'd promised to break. The dance never happened. Three years on, Gemini is beating Copilot on the metrics that were supposed to be Microsoft's to win, and the man who wanted Google to come out and show it could dance is now the one lecturing other CEOs about what happens when you let somebody else's model do your thinking for you.
Nadella's own answer to the outsourcing problem is Copilot. It has the receipts to make his current sermon awkward. A study covering roughly 150,000 seat-holders found that barely a third of them open the thing on any given week, and when Recon Analytics asked lapsed users why they'd stopped, nearly half pointed to not believing what the tool told them. Ninety percent of the Fortune 500 has it sitting in their license inventory, but a $30-a-seat product that a Fortune 500 company technically owns and its employees avoid isn't outsourced thinking. It's an unused gym membership with an enterprise procurement number attached. Scale that seat count to ten thousand employees and the company is out $3.6 million a year whether or not anyone logs in, and Microsoft's own headline productivity numbers, the minutes saved, the majority who say they feel more productive, only describe the fraction of people who bothered to show up.
If Copilot had turned out to be the outsourcing success story, the one where a company handed its thinking to a vendor and came out ahead, Nadella's new caution about firms surrendering control might land as hard-won wisdom instead of as a man narrating someone else's mistake to cover for his own product's failure to launch. He wants companies to keep their weights close and their gateways proprietary so that no single model can take them hostage. Meanwhile the model he already sold them, running inside the software they already pay for, is sitting there unopened in a third of the seats, waiting for somebody to trust it enough to ask it something.
He was right about one thing back in 2023. Somebody was going to get made to dance. It just wasn't Google.
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