Ed Ludlow

With OpenAI in particular, what we did see last night is that $250 billion contract that was announced about three months ago now, you're now starting to see that in the backlog, and that will roll on over time.

The other positive catalyst to look for

is the fair water data centers.

They're coming online over the course of a multi-year time frame, but we'll start to get more visibility into that as we go through the next two quarters.

We've had a bit of visibility about the silicon strategy, we've had visibility about sort of the hardware side, but ultimately this company is getting caught up with software negativity.

What about Anthropic coming out?

And yes, we see relationships, partnerships, but a co-work offering that could just not co-pilot out the water.

How are you thinking about competition right now?

Yeah, the burden of proof will be on Microsoft being able to show that the quality of outputs in a knowledge worker desktop and a knowledge worker environment are better than what the competitors can provide.

One of the key reasons they may be able to do that is because they're already entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem.

We already use Microsoft Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, there's a whole suite of apps.

And so if the intelligence that's embedded in those apps can be married with the intelligence of the LLMs, you get to a better point from a productivity standpoint than if you bring in a third party.

Exactly.

I'm so pleased we're going to this conversation.

This has been so focused on earnings and classic Bloomberg stuff.

I grew up in the generation of people that learned computers using Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint, etc., etc.,

Irrespective of what I use today, I don't use that.

I use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude.

The totality and functionality of those platforms makes that kind of suite of software obsolete, and I'm certainly not paying for it.

How big a sort of existential question is that for Microsoft?