What’s Old is New Again (Premium)

AI is problematic on many levels. It's complex and technical, and confusing to, and misunderstood by, even very technical people. It's riddled with privacy concerns both real and imagined. It's happening fast, really fast—one hopes, unsustainably fast—with new advances arriving on an almost daily basis. And complicating matters for those of us in the Microsoft community, the software giant has bet the future of the company—for real this time—on AI, to a degree that most should find shocking. This is head-spinning, rapid-fire change, and it's happening at a company that was perhaps best known for conservative evolution in the Satya Nadella era.

And now Microsoft is coming for our PCs.

To date, Microsoft's biggest AI advances have been in the cloud, with its Copilot family of services across Microsoft 365 and web, and with its vast array of developer services driving Azure usage ever higher. But what started as a trickle—a bit of background blur here, a lame Copilot sidebar there—is about to snowball into a tsunami that brings AI down to size on the PC desktop. And this is a case where the uniqueness of the PC really comes to bear: Sure, Apple and Google are adding on-device small language models (SLMs) to their respective smartphone platforms, but Microsoft this past week bragged about the over 40 SLMs that will ship inside each Copilot+ PC. That's local AI at scale.

Because of the current climate—basically fear, uncertainty, and doubt—you'd think that Microsoft would tread lightly. But it is instead pushing forward as aggressively on the client as it did previously in the cloud, damn the bad PR and missed climate goals. And to ease our worries and fears, it is constantly referencing a past we all remember, when Microsoft was the sole overlord of personal computing and ruled by fiat. The good old days, if you will.

Frankly, this is smart. The Microsoft community—Microsoft itself, but also its corporate customers and enthusiasts—are still stung badly by the reduced prestige and influence triggered by the web and mobile waves. You could sense the overly-sensitive defensiveness in all the MacBook Air references in the Monday Copilot+ PC launch event, and while I feel like that over-emphasis was a bit much, one might also argue that it's overdue: Microsoft ignored Apple and the Mac for too long in the past—I'm looking at you, Mac v. PC ads—after all. As with AI in general, it's nice to see Microsoft come out firing with Windows and the PC again. It's been a while.

Anyway, Microsoft's constant references to the past fascinate me. Which makes sense, given that I wrote a comprehensive history of Windows as a platform in Windows Everywhere and have worried for years about Microsoft ignoring (or worse, undermining) Windows so often.

Here are some obvious examples.

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to the stage at the start of Monday's Copilot+ PC event, he referenced the Windows 95 launch, in part bec...