Bill Gates

Fascinating. There's so many things about his history that are not a part of the common narrative. Like he, I think, worked in Dynamics, their Salesforce competitor, their CRM for a while.

Fascinating. There's so many things about his history that are not a part of the common narrative. Like he, I think, worked in Dynamics, their Salesforce competitor, their CRM for a while.

Wow. And then they plucked him out of Bing to go run Azure, right?

Wow. And then they plucked him out of Bing to go run Azure, right?

Okay, all right. Pause, pause. Okay, some of the other fun tidbits of this Yahoo deal. So Bing powers Yahoo search. Microsoft does the ad sales for both sides. So while Microsoft doesn't get the user, you know, they don't have the direct relationship with the users, they do get to build up their marketplace liquidity on the advertiser side, right?

Okay, all right. Pause, pause. Okay, some of the other fun tidbits of this Yahoo deal. So Bing powers Yahoo search. Microsoft does the ad sales for both sides. So while Microsoft doesn't get the user, you know, they don't have the direct relationship with the users, they do get to build up their marketplace liquidity on the advertiser side, right?

And as you mentioned, there's a huge data advantage of actually powering the search.

And as you mentioned, there's a huge data advantage of actually powering the search.

While Yahoo gets 88% of the revenue in the deal for the first five years, arguably the value from this basically all accrued to Microsoft because they ended up building out not only a proper advertising business, which now is used on a number of different sites, I think even in partnership with Netflix for their ad-supported tier,

While Yahoo gets 88% of the revenue in the deal for the first five years, arguably the value from this basically all accrued to Microsoft because they ended up building out not only a proper advertising business, which now is used on a number of different sites, I think even in partnership with Netflix for their ad-supported tier,

Bing, once it had all the Yahoo traffic, needed to be a scaled web service. Yes. Like a distributed computing system that operated at 24-7 uptime with super low latency, fast response time, and huge scale. God, that sure sounds like the cloud. It sure sounds like the cloud. So you've got Xbox Live, where they have 40 million users.

Bing, once it had all the Yahoo traffic, needed to be a scaled web service. Yes. Like a distributed computing system that operated at 24-7 uptime with super low latency, fast response time, and huge scale. God, that sure sounds like the cloud. It sure sounds like the cloud. So you've got Xbox Live, where they have 40 million users.

You have a scale search engine, which is like the number one most difficult distributed computing problem that if you get good at that, you can get good at lots of other stuff. The ingredients are really starting to come together for the right talent and DNA at the company to do well in building out the cloud. Yeah.

You have a scale search engine, which is like the number one most difficult distributed computing problem that if you get good at that, you can get good at lots of other stuff. The ingredients are really starting to come together for the right talent and DNA at the company to do well in building out the cloud. Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Yep.

Yep.

These things are hard because how long would Microsoft have held that?

These things are hard because how long would Microsoft have held that?