This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI, including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was OpenAI’s original partner. We tell the story behind the story, explaining how it all came to light.

Plus, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella debuts a new AI catchphrase at Davos, startup CEO Dave Clark stirs controversy with his “wildly productive weekend,” Elon Musk talks aliens, and the latest on Seattle-area physical AI startups, including Overland AI and AIM Intelligent Machines.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop; edited by Curt Milton.

Aspire, Microsoft’s open source, cloud native development platform, now supports JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Java as first-class citizens.

“With Aspire 13, JavaScript and TypeScript developers get to join the party — and I’m not talking about some half-baked afterthought integration,” wrote Microsoft Senior Software Engineer David Pine on Microsoft’s developer blog. “This is first-class, full-featured support for orchestrating your JavaScript apps in distributed systems.”

The tool was previously called .Net Aspire, but .Net has been dropped since Aspire is a polyglot.

The code-first orchestration platform is used to build, debug, and deploy distributed applications, such as cloud native apps or microservices.

Aspire provides a set of curated components and tooling, including a developer dashboard. Its goal is to simplify starting, building, and running cloud native applications.

Pine explains how to run JavaScript code in three different scenarios, including Node and Vite.

Rust 1.93.0 upgrades musl C library

Rust released version 1.93.0 this week. The big news here is that it upgrades the version of the musl C library used when building certain Linux apps.

This ”should make portable Linux binaries that do networking more reliable, particularly in the face of large DNS records and recursive nameservers,” according to the Rust blog about version 1.93.0.

That translates into apps that will be more stable when running in Kubernetes, Docker, or complex cloud environments where DNS records are large and complex.

If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, you can update to 1.93.0 with:

$ rustup update stable

A hackathon for useful applications

Are you working on a side project that’s especially useful and an actual application — not just a demo?

If so, you might want to submit it to the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon, which runs each month until June 5. It’s “a global developer competition that rewards one thing and one thing only: Real-world usefulness,” according to HackerNoon.

What’s interesting about this hackathon is that it will offer monthly rewards and recognition for more than 40 winners over the next six months. Every two months, there will be major software prize cycles for top startups. There’s also $1,500 worth of inventory for each participant.

The hackathon is open to individual developers and budding startups. It provides access to free tools that help you build and promote something meaningful.

While any technology is welcome, the bigger prizes will go to AI and machine learning (ML) projects that use the sponsor technologies. This week, the site explained how to enter the event, which is a bit of a process.

The event is sponsored by HackerNoon, Bright Data, Neo4j, Storyblok, and Algolia.

Benchmark AI models your way

Kaggle, a Google-owned online AI developer community, recently launched a new feature that lets you create custom benchmarks for evaluating AI models.
The feature is called Community Benchmarks for its Benchmarks platform. It can be used to design, run, and share the custom AI model benchmarks.

Here’s why it matters: AI is evolving so rapidly that it’s become difficult to evaluate model performances, according to a blog post by Michael Aaron, a Kaggle software engineer, and Megan Risdal, a product lead for Kaggle.

“Not long ago, a single accuracy score on a static dataset was enough to determine model quality,” Aaron and Risdal write. “But today, as LLMs evolve into reasoning agents that collaborate, write code, and use tools, those static metrics and simple evaluations are no longer sufficient.”

Among the features of Community Benchmarks:

• Custom task construction lets developers define tasks for code execution, tool use, and multiturn conversations using the new kaggle-benchmarks SDK.
• State-of-the-art model access to run custom benchmarks against models from Google, Anthropic, and DeepSeek for free, within a quota.
• Audit-ready reproducibility means the framework captures full inputs, outputs, and model interactions, replacing anecdotal testing with verifiable data.
• Dynamic leaderboards so developers can group multiple tasks into a single benchmark to generate comparative rankings across a suite of leading models.

The Kaggle Benchmarks repo has examples of prebuilt tasks.

The post Distributed apps platform Aspire supports JavaScript, Python appeared first on The New Stack.

Download full source code.

I was recently talking with a friend about the factory and strategy patterns, how they could be used together. He was familiar with the factory, but not the strategy.

The factory lets you create the kind of object you want on the fly without explicitly calling new on a concrete class. The strategy pattern lets you execute some method defined in an interface without knowing which implementation is actually going to be used. These two patterns complement each other very well.

I gave the example of a messaging client that can send messages. Each message has some text content and a destination. All three need to be handled differently, especially voice, which would require some text to speech processing. The messaging client uses a factory to create the correct type of messaging service to send the message with. The factory looks at the message type to return the appropriate service - SMS, email, or voice, but only returns an interface (the strategy).

The messaging client is completely decoupled from the messaging services; it only knows about the messaging service interface, allowing new services to be added without needing to alter the client application.

The code is pretty simple to understand, so I won’t go through it here. Have a look at the full source code, which is attached.

Download full source code.

“The most powerful leadership doesn’t tell people what to think.
It changes how they think.”
— JD Meier

The phrase thought leadership didn’t come from academia or philosophy.

It came from consulting firms trying to differentiate expertise in a crowded market.

And somewhere along the way, its meaning drifted.

Key Takeaways

• Thought leadership is a modern term, not a modern idea

• The phrase emerged from management consulting, not personal branding

• Real thought leadership shapes how people think, not just what they do

• Many true thought leaders existed before the label existed

• Earl Nightingale qualifies by the original standard — even if history didn’t name him that way

Overview Summary

The term thought leadership originated in the late 20th century as a way for consulting firms to signal intellectual authority beyond credentials and case studies.

While the label is modern, the concept is ancient — rooted in people who changed how others understood the world.

Over time, the meaning diluted into visibility and content volume.

This article traces the true origin of the term, explains why it was invented, how it drifted, and why figures like Earl Nightingale represent its purest form.

Where the Term Thought Leadership Actually Comes From

The phrase “thought leadership” emerged in the late 1980s–early 1990s, primarily inside management consulting and business publishing.

It’s most often traced to Joel Kurtzman, then editor-in-chief of Strategy+Business, which was launched by Booz Allen Hamilton in 1995.

Kurtzman used thought leadership to describe a specific kind of influence:

Ideas that shape how leaders think, not just what they do.

The goal wasn’t visibility.
It was authority through original insight.

Why the Term Thought Leadership was Invented

Consulting firms had a problem:

• Everyone claimed expertise

• Credentials sounded the same

• Case studies blended together

So they needed a new differentiator.

Thought leadership became that differentiator — a way to say:

“We don’t just solve problems.
We define how problems should be understood.”

In other words:

• Not marketing

• Not opinion

• Not content volume

But intellectual leadership of a category

The Idea is Old — the Label is New

While the term is modern, the concept is ancient.

Examples before the phrase existed:

• Plato shaping how people think about truth and justice

• Peter Drucker redefining management itself

• Deming reframing quality as a system, not a department

They weren’t called thought leaders.
They were simply the people others used to think with.

How the Meaning Drifted (Important)

Originally, thought leadership implied:

• Original frameworks

• Clear point of view

• Intellectual risk

• Category-shaping ideas

Over time, especially post-2010, it got diluted into:

• Personal branding

• Hot takes

• High-volume posting

• “I have thoughts” content

Today, most “thought leadership” is really visibility leadership.

A Clean, Modern Definition of Thought Leadership

If you strip away the fluff, thought leadership means:

Consistently helping others see problems, opportunities, or futures differently — in ways that change their decisions.

That’s it.

Was Earl Nightingale a Thought Leader?

Earl Nightingale absolutely was a thought leader.

Earl Nightingale is a textbook example of actual thought leadership — before the term existed.

And Lead the Field is not just motivational content. It’s a category-shaping framework.

What Nightingale did that qualifies as true thought leadership:

• Defined a mental model: “We become what we think about.”

• Shifted the frame from circumstance → mindset → results

• Translated abstract philosophy into applied life strategy

• Influenced how millions thought, not just how they felt

That’s the original bar.

Why He isn’t Labeled “Thought Leadership” Historically

Three very practical reasons:

1. The term didn’t exist yet

“Thought leadership” as a phrase came decades later (late 80s / 90s).

Nightingale was active in:

• 1950s–1970s (radio, records, early audio programs)

So historians didn’t back-apply the label.

2. He was categorized as personal development, not business authority

This matters more than it should.

• Business schools canonized Drucker

• Consulting firms canonized strategy thinkers

• Nightingale got filed under:

  • Motivation

  • Self-help

  • Personal success

Same depth of thinking, different institutional shelf.

3. He spoke directly to individuals, not organizations

Early “thought leadership” was:

• Firm-driven

• Executive-focused

• Strategy-oriented

Nightingale spoke to:

• Individuals

• Identity

• Inner operating systems

Ironically, that’s where the leverage actually is — but it took decades for leadership theory to catch up.

The Deeper Truth (This is the Important Part)

Nightingale didn’t comment on the world.

He reprogrammed how people interpret the world.

That’s the highest form of thought leadership.

If we use a clean test:

If people borrow your ideas to think with — even when you’re not present — you’re a thought leader.

By that standard:

• Nightingale qualifies

• Many modern “thought leaders” don’t

Reframing Earl Nightingale Accurately (If We Were Precise)

If the term had existed, Nightingale would have been described as:

• Founder of the Inner Game of Leadership

• Architect of personal operating systems

• Originator of mindset-driven performance

Which, candidly, maps very closely to what I’ve been building at Microsoft and beyond.

One Sharp Distinction Worth Naming

Nightingale wasn’t trying to:

• Build a category

• Signal authority

• Compete for attention

He was trying to:

• Change how people think

• Elevate agency

• Create internal leverage

That’s why his work lasts.

Final Thoughts

Thought leadership was never meant to be loud.

It was meant to be lasting.

Not about being seen —
but about changing how people see.

The term may be modern.
The responsibility it points to is not.

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The post The Origin of the Term Thought Leadership appeared first on JD Meier.