Jason Lemkin compares the enterprise software wars of 2021 to today's AI competition between OpenAI and Microsoft. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar recently presented the company's internal stack while leaving out Microsoft's Azure and Copilot, a move Lemkin sees as part of Microsoft's aggressive playbook against its rival.
2021 is like a generation before AI, right? It's almost a different world where it seemed Slack and Zoom probably seemed like these huge— they were going to bring down Microsoft. And it's ridiculous to think about that today. You should support these applications. But in 2021, they seemed like they were taking over the world.
You can see that playbook being used. We saw it on Netscape. We saw it on many things over time. And it's like, and that's good that, that, that playbook should get ripped up and thrown away. Yeah.
Yeah. The, there is an inherent aggressiveness in enterprise software, but there are limits as well.
You can see it, by the way, getting played out right now between OpenAI and Microsoft.
So it's a weird dynamic.
We saw over the weekend, this kind of really interesting presentation that Sarah Friar, who used to work at Salesforce, and she's the CFO at OpenAI, did, and they revealed their stack for the first time, their, their data center, their apps, their APIs, all the different aspects of the future of OpenAI and the word Microsoft and Azure and Copilot weren't on the stack. And that was extremely interesting. And you can see how Microsoft is really starting to run a separate playbook against OpenAI. And it's a fascinating moment, I think, in the, in the history of OpenAI because of that.
Yeah, it's crazy. It has. It's so funny to think about Microsoft taking potshots at Slack because Azure is so rejuvenated, right? And the world's changed 11 times since then. It's keep it as competitive, but as open as you can.
It's amazing, right? Isn't it? And I think that, yeah, that's not how Microsoft thinks. Microsoft is a company that wants to own it all, control it all. If they see a hot company or hot startup, they ask themselves, hey, why is that not in our world? And, and in the case of, they usually, they like to either try to feign an acquisition and then based on that, they execute a playbook, or in the case of OpenAI, a partnership is going to become a competition. Yeah, no, for sure.
