Brodie Ferguson

Some things I learned working at Microsoft: 1/ large numbers everywhere. $100M ARR service isn't even a footnote on executive slide decks. Leadership time is too valuable, come back when you're $1B+. Msft ecosystem is so rich that $1B+ sales are common (it's ludicrous how much work goes into closing these). Azure has ~250 services, some are a few mil and stagnant, others in hypergrowth, some are cash cows, you see every quadrant of the growth-share matrix. Imagine the imperial navy with ships of vastly different sizes as far the eye can see 2/ more on immense scale-- the smallest of Azure services run on 10K+ VMs. Large services run on 1M+ (some maybe 10M+ VMs, idk). Msft is stamping one new datacenter into the ground every four days (!!!!), a bewildering rate. Demand is so high, even with all this buildout we're forever capacity constrained. Azure brings in $100B in revenue and is growing 40%+ annually (at this size!!) There are ~225K msft employees. You almost have to think in scientific notation, 10^4 is a tiny number here 3/ msft is totalitarian re serving the customer. It's counterintuitive to outsiders, but the warts in msft products fall out of this culture. For example, it would be easy to improve the Azure Portal. But in all my time working with customers and partners here, I haven't heard even one person complain about the portal UI. Msft invests $0.00 dollars in anything that doesn't serve the customer and is completely unapologetic about downstream implications of this mindset 4/ msft can reshape itself overnight (when it has the will). People argued whether we waited too long to adapt after Storm-0558/Midnight Blizzard hacks (with the benefit of hindsight, we definitely did). But once the leadership team privileged security, everyone's job changed in two weeks. LT tied every engineer's comp to security, centralized reporting of embedded security teams, every org reshuffled its roadmap. Within days everyone was pushing PRs with security fixes. I would have thought it inconceivable to mobilize 200K+ employees this fast 5/ Azure is complicated. Postgres depends on compute, networking, AKS (or EKS for you aws people), secrets, etc. AKS depends on compute, networking, some datastore (probably Cosmos but idk), a dozen other things. Cosmos depends on... you get the idea. When anything breaks, everything above can break too. Some construction crew accidentally cuts a fiber cable in Brazil South, or a dedicated hardware compression chip browns out in storage, or compute failure rate in west eu spikes for some reason, or a million other failure modes. Msft is relentless about improving this, idk exactly but fully loaded probably 50% of engineer time goes into resilience 6/ re lifers who work 20+ years here, SV sneers at this but I now see it differently. I was once on the bridge debugging some IO issue, we call storage, the guy diagnoses it in about a minute, we chitchat, turns out he built NT asyncio support. Or same story but with networking, the guy built NT tcp/ip stack. I used to have a boss here, we were bumping into some problem, she casually goes oh yeah, we hit that when I was working on .NET bytecode. The ex-DEC VAX/VMS database engineers built SQL Server, some are still here. I love bumping into these people 7/ I never *really* understood distribution until I got here. As an example, our team had a customer in Seoul w/ a deep performance problem. We had to fix it to unlock one of these giant contracts. We don't speak Korean, they don't speak English. Of course msft has specialists in Seoul who get to the customer site before you could even get on a plane. There is an office in every major city, a relationship with every major entity, legal experts in every jurisdiction. You can reach these ppl instantly. Claude tells me msft has ~180 offices in ~100 countries (!!) U.S. government has ~270 consulates in ~170 countries. So msft outposts aren't quite as vast as U.S. diplomatic network, but pretty vast 8/ in the 90s everyone was afraid of msft. The lore is that BillG was ruthless. He'd clone you, beat you via ecosystem/distribution strength, and moreover make the ecosystem stronger with the new product. I wasn't there to compare, but msft of today is ruthless about winning, has the will to adapt, and has the wherewithal to undertake colossal projects. Ppl see Teams bugs or whatever and completely misread the signals. Teams is less polished than Slack because msft doesn't care one iota about polish. It cares about winning, and is frighteningly good at it. Underestimate at your own risk