Microsoft Opens A Huge Gap In Big Tech Race

I do not know the add-on on Outlook which Johns Hopkins baked in; they provide that to all alumni, for life. What I like about that add-on is that it has the capacity to “parse” emails and come up with briefings and summaries for the day. People, Microsoft Viva which sends those notes with “Your daily briefing” is pretty cool – it has never missed any important issue from my emails.

Now, the news that Microsoft is baking OpenAI in Teams, its collaboration ecosystem, will take this to the next level. In other words, people can have discussions, meetings, etc and AI will send summaries with Action Plans:

“Microsoft has announced the incorporation of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 into its Teams Premium, expanding the office tool’s features with AI-powered capabilities. The incorporation of the GPT-3.5 AI language model means the premium tier of Microsoft Teams now has an ‘intelligent recap’ feature that automatically generates notes, tasks, and highlights of meetings.

[..] “Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaborative experience of Microsoft Teams, Teams Premium brings the latest technologies, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected—whether it’s one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars,” the company said.”

Google, as Microsoft expands the powers of OpenAI across its products, if you do not reposition, what you did to Yahoo may suddenly happen to you. This is now an asymmetric attack on your core products, from search to collab systems.

Category-king companies create a new basis of competition, by providing orthogonal competitive paths, different from what any other firm does. In the world of search, Google unleashed one many years ago, taking Yahoo down in the process. For years, no other company has come to challenge the brilliance and absolute dominance of Google search.

But there is a redesign on the way – and Microsoft is part of it. When it provided truckloads of money to the guys in the OpenAI, I noted that Microsoft would possibly have the rights to first commercialize inventions out of the organization. Yes, it is called OpenAI but when it comes to money, not everything is “open”.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT has unveiled a subscription plan as it deepens it competitive and revenue playbooks: “ChatGPT is launching a paid subscription service, in which subscribers will get access to the AI at peak times. Parent company OpenAI announced that for $20 a month, subscribers will get an upgrade from the limited, free service provided during busy periods. The plan will initially roll out across the U.S., later expanding to other countries, with the company mulling business and lower-cost subscription options. The bot is already being used by many companies, including digital publisher Buzzfeed, which recently announced it would use ChatGPT to help generate content. However, there are also concerns around its safe use in business and education.”

As Microsoft rises, Google is having stress in its core advertising business: “Slowing YouTube advertising revenue and sluggish sales growth in other ad businesses led Google’s parent company Alphabet to log its first ad sales decline of the pandemic era. Alphabet reported a 1% dip from the year before, to $59 billion. ”

 The company’s latest quarterly results were also denoted by just its second decline in ad sales since 2004 and its fourth consecutive drop in quarterly profit. Alphabet has sought to rein in costs to mitigate an ad spending slowdown driven by rising interest rates and inflation. Net income plunged by 34% to $13.6 billion, well short of Wall Street expectations.  Alphabet is now planning “significant” work to improve its spending and growth, Alphabet and Google chief financial officer Ruth Porat told investors, just weeks after laying off 12,000 employees due to economic uncertainty.

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