I don't think they missed AI boat. Their culture would not have allowed them to create OpenAI, but they were fast to leverage their moat and push AI into their office and windows suites and azure. Hell, they are even trying to catch up with search using AI and are trying to push Azure for various AI startups and stuff.
MSFT rarely leads on anything - arguably even Windows is something they created being inspired by something else, while not going deep into hardware. Which what became the undoing of IBM. They are much better at being second. Azure - they were behind AWS, but not as late as Google.
I bet with Satya, even with mobile they would have grabbed Nokia much earlier and pushed Windows Mobile before Android took off.
Amazon have a very close relationship with Anthropic, which seems like a good match (Anthropic focus on business use), and win-win. Anthropic gets access to the compute they need, and Amazon get AI to integrate into their AWS offerings.
I don't know the contractual basis of the relationship, but it seems this has to be pretty long term and strategic. A significant part of the competitive advantage of one AI vendor over another comes down to inference cost, which in turm comes down to customizing the model architecture for the hardware it is running on, which in this case either is, or will be, Amazon's home grown Graviton processors.
The problem with Amazon is not their closeness to Anthropic, but more of the fact their moat is not big enough to integrate AI in a way MSFT can. Even their Azure services somehow feels natural with AI support.
I don't know if Satya predicted it or not, but their push into open source and Github acquisition were very helpful for AI.
I don't think they missed AI boat. Their culture would not have allowed them to create OpenAI, but they were fast to leverage their moat and push AI into their office and windows suites and azure. Hell, they are even trying to catch up with search using AI and are trying to push Azure for various AI startups and stuff.
MSFT rarely leads on anything - arguably even Windows is something they created being inspired by something else, while not going deep into hardware. Which what became the undoing of IBM. They are much better at being second. Azure - they were behind AWS, but not as late as Google.
I bet with Satya, even with mobile they would have grabbed Nokia much earlier and pushed Windows Mobile before Android took off.
AWS missed AI boat though.