Steven Sinofsky on Apple at 50, Microsoft, and the Future of Computing
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Having lived through, like, a half dozen component shortage things, you just sort of wait them out, and you don't let some local max or local min determine the future. This will all correct itself in short order. This world where you're all gated on dollars per token is a thing that's gonna move to your own device, which is exactly what happened with all of computing. Anytime there's a resource constraint that you have to pay for, it moves to your device and becomes free. AI introduces yet another opportunity to change that dynamic for the PC to have it be forward looking, not backward looking
Few people have had a front row seat to the personal computing revolution quite like Steven Sinofsky. Over nearly three decades at Microsoft, he helped shape products that defined the PC era, including Windows, Office, and Surface. Along the way, he also witnessed one of the technology industry's longest running rivalries, Microsoft and Apple. As Apple celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, questions about product design, platforms, hardware, software, and the future of computing remain as relevant as ever. Theo Jaffe speaks with Steven Sunofsky about Apple, Microsoft, and the evolution of perso
I'm in the situation room with Steven Sunofsky, who might have been, like, the first ever guest on MTS back when we were still doing test streams, I think. He He he was the first person I interviewed on a test stream. He was the president of the Windows division at Microsoft. He created the Surface program at Microsoft, which we have some very interesting news about today. We're thrilled to have you on. Steven, welcome to MDS. Welcome back.
Well, thanks so much. Good to see you. Hi, everyone.
Yeah. Hi. First question would be, NVIDIA and Microsoft and ARM and a few other companies just announced something very interesting at Computex. What exactly did they announce, and what does it matter?
Sure. Well, just so folks know, because it doesn't get in the news much, but Computex is this big giant trade show in Taiwan. And it's the weirdest show because it's like this total inside baseball silicon supply chain show. And normally you never hear about it. In fact, I never went to it even. I wanted to, but it actually turns out it was always right around the same time as a big Microsoft sales meeting. So I never went. But you could think of it as the ecosystem show for everything it takes to build a computing device of any kind. Totally well, but Jensen in his keynote last night did this
Yeah. Jensen's like Taylor Swift of the tech industry.
So true. Yeah. It's an incredible level of it just speaks to the awareness of tech and then the awareness of AI and what NVIDIA has done. Because, I mean, like, I you know, it was bigger than like, CES Xbox was like a sideshow compared to this. Wow.
Yeah. And he's huge in China too.
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