Tech Company. Windows was a game changer and the PC industry was synonymous with Microsoft. Then along came Apple, Google, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Microsoft lost the ‘cool’ tag. apple with iphone Google Meta became the face of cool in Silicon Valley, along with Facebook, along with search and many other services. Microsoft was still huge, but had the notion of a fudgy-duddy company. Things changed as the company made a strong pivot to cloud and satya nadella Steeped the ship and increased revenue. A Wall Street analyst described Microsoft’s quarterly results as “boringly excellent,” propelling the Satya Nadella-led tech giant into the $1 trillion club in 2020.
cut by 2023. Microsoft has stolen the march on rivals like Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, courtesy of artificial intelligence. In 2019, Microsoft invested close to a billion dollars in a startup called OpenAI. That one billion may have been the wisest investment the company has made in many years. And it became clear at the Build conference. Microsoft showed off at the developer conference how it’s integrating AI into nearly every one of its products and services. “AI is the defining technology of our time, and developers are at the forefront of this change,” said Panos Panay, Chief Product Officer, Microsoft.
AI Everywhere: From Windows to Bing
Microsoft really isn’t taking it easy with its AI push as it’s aggressively integrating it into all of its services. Google, on the other hand, has been a bit ‘slow’ and probably cautious. google ceo Sundar Pichai Google has on several occasions pointed out the need to be right, not first. Microsoft seems to be doing it before and doing it right too.
The integration of AI began with the Bing search engine. It would not be wrong to say that the ChatGPT integration put Bing back on the map. Bing has seen exponential growth since ChatGPT was created co pilot,
Talk about Co-Pilot, which is the name of Microsoft’s AI personal assistant and it will soon be making its way to Windows. “The Windows Copilot side bar is persistent across your apps, programs and windows, always available to serve as your personal assistant,” Panay said in a blog post. Users can ask Co-Pilot a wide variety of questions, just as they can with Bing Chat or ChatGPT.
In March this year, Microsoft announced Copilot for Microsoft 365. Copilot works with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. For example, in Word Co-Pilot writes, edits, summarizes and builds right next to you. With just a brief prompt, Copilot will generate a first draft for you in Word. At Build 2023, Microsoft announced the extensibility of Microsoft 365 Copilot with plug-ins, empowering every developer to integrate their apps and services into Microsoft 365 Copilot. This will give other leading developers access to integrate their apps within Microsoft 365 Copilot.
And then there’s the Edge browser, which is also getting CoPilot. Using the ChatGPT 4 AI model, Microsoft is making Edge intelligent and bringing AI experiences.
It’s still early days in the AI race and Google has barely flexed its muscles. Bard is still in an early stage and it will be really interesting to see how Microsoft responds when Google gets into the generative AI domain. So far, Microsoft has shown that it is disaffected and wants to be the leader and not play catchup as it has done in the past.