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- 🤖 Microsoft's pivot and the invasion of the bots
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
In today’s edition we’re going to profile one of the greatest tech turnarounds in modern history, and we’ll top it off with a story from the world of publishing.
Enjoy!
The great Microsoft comeback
In the not-too-distant past, many in Silicon Valley had started to look at Microsoft as a has-been.
But in 2023 Microsoft is front-running the A.I. revolution, partnering with Open A.I. and besting Google with its Bing ChatGPT integration.
So how did Microsoft go from the sleepy giant, resting comfortably on its Windows monopoly, into an A.I. leader that was able to out-innovate Google?
This is the exact riddle that Behnam Tabrizi (a researcher of Leadership & Org. Transformation at Stanford) was looking to solve when he undertook a multi-year research project to better understand how companies innovate.
“My team and I wanted to know what makes companies continue to innovate even after their initial success,” Tabrizi said in a recent Harvard Business Review piece.
“We came up with several companies that seemed to have cracked the code of perpetual innovation. Some were expected: Apple, Amazon, and Tesla. But the list included some surprises: Namely, that Microsoft had made the list, but Google did not.”
And after months of research and dozens of interviews with global businesses with a proven track record of innovation, Tabrizi and his team believes that they have found the secret behind innovative companies: A cultural shift from playing defense to playing offense.
In Microsoft’s case, Tabrizi stated “instead of protecting its assets in a defensive posture, Microsoft went on offense, ceding big investments in existing tech and looking to jump into emerging opportunities.”
Switching back on the offense was a significant cultural shift for Microsoft that didn’t take place until Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, announcing upon his arrival that it was time for employees to “rediscover the soul of Microsoft, our reason for being.”
Tabrizi had 3 key takeaways from Microsoft’s transformation:
Nadella had everyone in the company adopt a startup mindset, freeing engineers from restrictive hierarchies and developing a product focused, customer first mentality
The company began sponsoring giant internal hackathons, allowing engineers to make connections across various silos of the business leading to product innovation and increased collaboration
Microsoft began investing in a series of smaller firms at the forefront of tech, infusing their business with new technology and talent
One such acquisition proved to be pivotal to the future of the business, as Kevin Scott, SVP of engineering and operations at Linkedin, became Microsoft’s chief technology officer post-acquisition and went on to develop the original partnership with OpenAI back in 2019.
“Microsoft’s revival is an extreme case,” said Tabrizi, “but any company can carry out a similar shift to offense. Doing so depends on several steps, but the most important are to rally people around an existential vision, promote the openness and market focus of startups, and then move boldly to create organizational momentum.”
You can read Tabrizi’s deep dive into Microsoft here.
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Kindle flooded with “bot books”
It didn’t take long for people to begin flooding the Kindle e-book marketplace with ChatGPT generated books and stories.
Dreaming of passive income, hundreds of ambitious early ChatGPT adopters have already submitted “bot books” to the kindle platform…
And those are just the ones we know about.
ChatGPT is currently listed as co-author of over 200 books on the Kindle platform, but because Amazon does not require authors to disclose the use of A.I., the number of bot written books is likely significantly higher.
An entire book created over a weekend thanks to help from ChatGPT
Brett Schickler was quick to jump on the trend, creating a children’s financial literacy book over a single weekend that featured A.I. generated illustrations, but sales of the book have been lackluster.
While Schickler only spent a few hours creating the book, he’s earned less than $100 since its release last month, a reminder that marketing is the real challenge in the publishing space.
Amazon isn’t the only platform receiving a tidal wave of bot-generated submissions, however.
Clarkesworld, a renowned science fiction and fantasy magazine, has seen submissions skyrocket since ChatGPT’s release.
Story submissions at Clarkesworld
“It’s easy with these tools to churn out hundreds of thousands of works in the time that a human author would produce maybe one or two,” Clarke said recently.
And while Clarke and his team are doing their best to filter out the bot-created submissions, the work has proven challenging.
“Yes, there are tools out there for detecting plagiarized and machine-written text,” Clarke said in a recent blog post.
“But they are prone to false negatives and positives. One of the companies selling these services is even playing both sides, offering a tool to help authors prevent detection.”
With the barriers to entry for publishing lower than ever, it will certainly be interesting to see what the future holds for the industry.
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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