All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Satya Nadella described Microsoft's AI strategy as rooted in fostering competition and building a rich ecosystem, drawing parallels to past successes with Windows and SQL Server. He emphasized that openness and interoperability are key to broad diffusion and avoiding lock-in.
“So, uh, I think, you know, the fundamental thing that I think we are observing is good old-fashioned competition, right?”
“I mean, for me, if I look back at it, we were, we had, like some real great close-source assets, Windows. What was the check against it? There was of course the Mac. Linux. Uh, we had a great close-source product called SQL server. What was the check against it? There was always substitute called Postgres or MySQL.”
“So I think that's what's happening. A little bit of it is there's real competition, uh, and the open-source check is real. Uh, and that's good, quite frankly. Uh, because without it, I don't think we're going to have a broad frontier ecosystem, broad diffusion, because otherwise we'll just be back to some, you know, mainframe, uh, lock-in.”