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Against the Open World

The journey of Microsoft as a company can be paraphrased into three leaders and their approach to the industry. When bill gates developed a proprietary OS, he knew he had hit the potluck. Over the next few decades, he ensured that the Microsoft ecosystem kept itself updated and remained a close source. Given the philanthropy that Bill is known for, many expected the then-richest man to let go of the closed head and let the CS community have a look at the masterpiece, but Bill's wrath against open source was second to none. He and his successor Steve Balmer would call the open-source OS like Linux cancer.

However, at the turn of the millennia, they were hit by rivals like Google in terms of the biggest tech company. Unlike Apple, Bill hadn't been able to trap its customers into an ecosystem. Therefore the battle moved away from OS to browsers, where the once reigning internet explorer faced an upward struggle from two emergent, one which its earlier rival had open-sourced to, and the other being google chrome. Microsofts struggle in this battle coloured the whole of Steve Balmer's reign, from his desperate attempts to get a smartphone OS to that of trying to buy all companies they found relevant. After a long stint at the open-source hate, Microsoft turned a new page with Satya Nadella.

Nadella's pet project was Azure; he believed that Microsoft needed to bring their game into the open source or at least seemingly free domain, where revenue was not earned from proprietary licences but from advertising to the large number of users they host on their platforms. Ever since the Microsoft journey has been different. VS Code, TypeScript and GitHub now facilitate massive open-source enthusiasts, something that theGooglee ecosystem boasted of. But the new era has put questions in front of both Giants.

The AI question. Unlike Google, Microsoft found intelligence in investing in OpenAI, while Google wanted to remain at the game's top. In the battle today, Google is losing quite a ground to open AI, but yet again, they aren't focussed on open source players. Although proprietary software seems to work much better, it's open-source, allowing engineers to experiment and develop out-of-the-blue solutions. A ship locked to a target island, that a net 0 probability of figuring out anything better, even if it lay a few kilometres from the ocean. 

Like Netscape went open-source to beat internet explorer at its game, it could be a company like stability.ai, which poses a real threat to the giants in the current AI domain.

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