Ask Paul: September 13 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I'm still reeling from the trip to Berlin, but I'm home and sort of rested, and ready for an early start to the weekend.

Let's dive in.
AI gotta be me
spacecamel asks:

Why do I feel that Apple is going to integrate AI into MacOS better than Microsoft into Windows? Both companies are really good at software but it seems that you know Apple is going to get it right and Microsoft is going to produce something and never update it.

We're going to look back on this several year period or whatever it turns out to be and laugh. Microsoft under Satya Nadella had been the slowest moving, most conservative tech giant imaginable--almost IBM-like, dare I say--which made its sudden pivot on AI so confusing. And then the sheer speed at which it moved to make it happen was both alarming and chaotic. It seems like a completely different company now.

But for all the handwringing from its fan base, Apple has simply done what Apple has long done in taking a slow, measured approach. Whether it is as successful as it was entering markets for MP3 players, phones, tablets, wearables, and headphones/earbuds (or whatever) remains to be seen. But its established a clear positioning for itself, and if it can do with AI what it's done for its cross-device ecosystem integration generally, it could emerge as a real leader. Then again, this is the company that sat on Siri for a decade. It's difficult to say. But my money is on Apple maybe not nailing it per se, but getting it right in the broad strokes.

Microsoft? I don't know. I've expressed my worries for its AI business model when it comes to first-party services a few times, but the short version is that I don't see a future in charging customers specifically for AI. The model there is somewhat established, however: Individuals and companies today license Microsoft 365 for their own reasons--the OneDrive storage, perhaps, the desktop Office apps, or whatever--and then they just get the rest of it for "free" and use it or don't. This can work with AI features, I guess. It can work for Google. It may even work someday for Apple (there are rumors of a coming AI subscription of some kind). But the silver lining for Microsoft is that it can always play that (IBM-like) role of providing the infrastructure for those services that consumers/businesses do pay for. And be the electricity of the AI age in a way (as will Amazon and, to some degree, Google will as well). So they'll be OK.

But what you're really expressing is the thing I care about as well. I couldn't care less about Azure if I tried. But I do care about Windows and what I think of as the entire client stack, from Office and Outlook to whatever else. And you can see the impact of the chaotic nature of Microsoft's approach to AI everywhere in these products. Just looking at Copilot in Windows, Microsoft spaz-launched it ahead of 23H2 to force it on the user base and then changed the UI and moved the location of its Taskbar icon...