11 Years at Microsoft

Unlike last year, I feel little need to mark the occasion. I could repeat most of last year’s reflections, with a few nuances. Actually, let me do just that and save you the trouble: AI has finally become a core consideration in business (pretty much all the customers I’ve worked with now understand the need for governance, foundational designs, standardised patterns, etc.), so we’re well past the experimentation phase. Unsurprisingly, corporations have very different expectations from startups, so the Cambrian explosion I see outside work is much more muted and nuanced among customers, who are much more interested in getting actual value than in doing science experiments. The entire situation reminds me of the Big Data & ML hype cycle, only faster. I am constantly reminded of this line from William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”…