Microsoft has pulled back on data center projects around the world, Bloomberg reports, suggesting that the company is wary of expanding its cloud computing infrastructure too rapidly. Microsoft has halted talks for or delayed development sites of data centers in the U.K., Australia, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, per Bloomberg. A spokesperson told the publication […]

Here’s how NotebookLM can help students prepare for their final exams.

[Editor’s Note: Microsoft @ 50 is a year-long GeekWire project exploring the tech giant’s past, present, and future, recognizing its 50th anniversary in 2025.]

Satya Nadella sees in Microsoft’s history a blueprint for its future.

“That very first product of ours — that BASIC interpreter for the Altair — I think says it all,” the Microsoft CEO said in an interview with GeekWire this week, as the company prepared to mark its 50th anniversary.

By developing a programming tool for one of the first personal computers, Nadella explained, Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen were creating technology to help others create more technology.

“That was true in ’75, and that is true in ’25, and that will be true, I believe, in 2050,” he said. “Technologies will come and go, but the idea that this company can stay relevant by producing technology so that more and more people around the world can create more digital technology … that, I think, is the core thread of Microsoft.”

Nadella is just the third person to serve as Microsoft’s CEO, following Gates and Steve Ballmer — both of whom are expected to join him for a rare joint appearance at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters Friday in recognition of the company’s first half-century in business. 

Now in his 12th year as Microsoft’s CEO, Nadella has led a resurgence of the venerable tech company, helping Microsoft find its footing in the cloud and stake its claim in the new world of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft is one of the world’s most valuable public companies, with a market capitalization hovering around $2.8 trillion as of this week, second only to its longtime rival and partner Apple by that measure. 

Leveraging its partnership with OpenAI, the company jumped out to an early lead with its GitHub Copilot coding companion. It has been aggressively rolling out AI in an effort to update its flagship franchises like Windows and Office, and offering AI tools via its Azure cloud platform.

But as Gates pointed out in an interview with GeekWire, the competitive landscape is fundamentally shifting.

In the past, Gates explained, the major players in tech have carved out different corners of the tech world. He cited Google in search, Microsoft in Office and Windows, and Amazon in cloud computing and retail.

“Although there’s some intense competition and overlap, we each have some areas of very high strength,” Gates said. 

But now, as all of these companies race into AI, the lines are blurring, the pace is accelerating, and the battle is becoming “hyper competitive.”

“The pace of innovation will have to be very, very fast, despite the capital costs involved. And these tools will just improve very rapidly,” said Gates, who continues to advise Nadella and Microsoft’s product teams. 

With a tone of cautious optimism, the famously competitive and paranoid Microsoft co-founder added, “I hope Microsoft can lead the way.”

In addition to intense competition, challenges for Microsoft will include the massive capital expenditures that come with its AI infrastructure buildout — expected to total $80 billion in the current fiscal year alone.  

Microsoft also needs to navigate its complicated partnership and investment in OpenAI, the AI pioneer best known for developing ChatGPT. 

Ballmer, the company’s largest individual shareholder, said in an interview that he understood the pragmatic trade-off at the heart of that relationship, given Microsoft’s decades of investment in its own AI research.

“What Satya did with OpenAI, I think was brilliant — and I think it’s fraught with peril, but I know they know that,” he said. “It’s sort of a juggling act.”

One big question looming over all of this: Can Microsoft deliver the killer app for AI — the defining breakthrough that cements its role in the next era of computing? 

There are more parallels here to the early days of Microsoft and the PC, when applications like spreadsheets and word processors opened the eyes of the industry and the public to the power of new technology. 

In the interview this week, Nadella said he sees signs of that same potential in tools like GitHub Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered coding assistant, which he described as a turning point that opened his eyes to the potential of generative AI. 

“When I started seeing code completions is when I started believing,” Nadella said. 

The features later expanded to include chat functionality, enabling developers to ask questions and get AI-generated answers directly in their coding environment. Then came multi-file editing, followed by AI agents capable of making changes across entire code repositories.

“We are going from a pair programmer to a peer programmer,” Nadella explained. “That’s the type of system we now have.”

Nadella pointed to similar advances across Microsoft 365, where Copilot tools and agents now assist with everything from research to data analysis — tasks that once required teams of humans or hours of manual work.

Just prior to the interview this week, Nadella said, he had three customer meetings. Beforehand, he asked his Microsoft 365 Copilot Researcher agent to get him up to speed.

It created comprehensive briefing documents comparable to what a human analyst would produce, from internal and external sources including Office documents, a CRM database, and the web.

“It’s unbelievable,” Nadella said. “These are products I use all the time with high intensity. I think we’re beginning to see the value, just like Excel and PowerPoint or Outlook did it back in the day.”

Without divulging Microsoft’s product plans, Nadella offered a deeper explanation of something both he and Gates have alluded to in recent months: the need for a new type of inbox for the AI era.

He described a future in which knowledge workers are supported by fleets of AI agents — researchers, analysts, coders — each performing tasks autonomously or in coordination with their human counterpart. 

In this model, users issue instructions, sometimes staying in the loop, sometimes delegating entirely — while still needing a clear way to coordinate and manage the flow of these AI agents. 

That’s where it starts to feel like “a new type of inbox,” he said, “where the coordination of the work agents do, with us in the loop, will require new types of organizing layers.”

Back in 2014, when Nadella became Microsoft CEO, Ballmer encouraged him to be his own person. “In other words, don’t try to please Bill Gates or anyone else,” Nadella wrote in his 2017 book, Hit Refresh.

In that spirit, Nadella has brought his own global perspective and personality to the role — including his longtime love of poetry. 

In an interview in 2017, after his book’s release, I asked Nadella to cite a line of poetry that he thought best described the future at that time. He quoted a line from Vijay Seshadri’s Imaginary Number: “The soul, like the square root of minus one, is an impossibility that has its uses.”

Nadella said at the time that the line captured the force inside us “that seeks out the unimaginable, that gets us up to solve the impossible.” 

These days, the line also conjures up images of quantum technologies, a field in which Microsoft recently claimed a breakthrough that it says will advance the world beyond traditional binary computing, promising to ultimately help solve some of the world’s most difficult problems.

So I asked this week, is there another line of poetry that Nadella would cite in 2025 to reflect his feelings about Microsoft, the industry, or the future?

This time, Nadella referenced one of his all-time favorite lines, from the mystical Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote that “the future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” 

Nadella called this “a beautiful thing” for technology builders — the people for whom Microsoft has been making technology for five decades now. To make the future a reality, first you have to live it. And that, the Microsoft CEO said, “is probably the best ‘builder’ line that I’ve ever heard.”

Watch GeekWire’s interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella above.

---

Sponsor Post

Accenture proudly joins GeekWire in recognizing Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, marking over 35 years as a trusted partner and change driver.

As the 2024 Partner of the Year in Business Transformation for Copilot, our unique alliance with Microsoft and Avanade positions us to reimagine the industry and reinvent the future through the revolutionary impact of AI. Together, we are partners in change.

Want to learn more?

Click for more about underwritten and sponsored content on GeekWire.

---

Microsoft’s business-oriented “Link” mini-desktop PC, which connects directly to the company’s Windows 365 cloud service, is now available to buy for $349.99 in the US and in several other countries. Windows 365 Link, which was announced last November, is a device that is more easily manageable by IT departments than a typical computer while also reducing the needs of hands on support.

If you’ve worked for a company with an internal IT department in the last decade, you’ve probably come across small “thin client” PCs that run a virtual Windows PC off an on-site server. The Windows 365 Link is basically a modern version of the thin client, but it runs over the internet so that you can work from home or anywhere. It’s also designed to boot in seconds, which sounds like a better experience than the thin clients of the past. Microsoft says that Windows 365 Link was tested in a preview program by over 100 organizations and that the company has refined the software experience before going on sale.

Since it is being marketed to businesses, you won’t be able to easily buy it for home use like any consumer PC; instead, you’ll need to contact a Microsoft account team or authorized reseller (and may have to buy more than one). Windows 365 Link is available in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand.

Google has added a new feature to NotebookLM that lets the AI note-taking tool find its own web sources to summarize and narrate. Instead of manually uploading sources like documents or YouTube links, users can now tap the “Discover” button and simply describe the topic they want to get a better understanding of, with the tool then gathering web sources around the subject.

Google says the Discover feature started rolling out on Wednesday, and will take “about a week or so” to be available to all users.

NotebookLM will hunt through “hundreds of potential web sources in seconds” according to Google, analyzing the most relevant options and then presenting a list of up to ten recommendations, each with a summary explaining its relevance. Users can select which of these sources they want NotebookLM to reference, and import them to use in other features, including FAQs, Briefing Docs, and podcast-like Audio Overviews that use AI hosts to discuss a topic.

Sources will be saved within NotebookLM to allow users to read them directly and use them as references for citations, note-taking, and question-answering capabilities. Google says that Discover sources is the first of several Gemini-powered NotebookLM features that are being developed to make it easier for users to find relevant notebook reference materials.

Another capability spun from this is “I’m Feeling Curious” — a button that prompts NotebookLM to generate sources on a completely random topic. It’s a good way to see what the feature is capable of, but also a fun way to learn about new subjects, much like Wikipedia’s random article feature.

This tutorial guides you through setting up PowerShell remoting between non-domain-joined computers.