One year ago, I made the commitment to myself and the readers of this newsletter to write a new issue every week. That’s what I have been doing now. In the past year, I’ve written 140,000+ words worth of articles for Perspectives on Power Platform.

That means a lot of time sitting here at Niiranen Advisory offices in Herttoniemi, Helsinki, Finland. That Dell KB740 keyboard in the picture below happened to arrive in November last year and it has served me well through all those words (the space bar has become a bit flaky, though). The screen setup got expanded during the summer, and I’ve got an on/off project to do some home automation stuff with that Galaxy tablet there in the corner. But anyway, this is where the magic happens:

In total, all the 77 issues published on Perspectives.plus might take the reader well over 10 hours to just go through. You could easily spend a couple of working days, just reviewing my Perspectives. If you have really gone through each issue, then what can I say — other than “sorry”😅 and “thank you!”❤️

What about me? I don’t track the hours for this, because it’s a highly non-linear, non-structured process of how the newsletter content gets put together. When I poured all the issues into a big Markdown file and asked Claude to analyze it for me, the AI estimate was 900-1,000 hours of investigation + writing. Which sounds crazy, yet believable. It’s a guess as good as mine.

I did experiment with the LLMs’ ability to crunch the 140k words into something exciting and new. “Create me a Perspectives Wrapped type of a fun summary in Spotify style.” And all other kinds of creative prompts. There were definitely some benefits from being able to reflect on your words with the help of a language model — yet none of the outputs felt like they came from me. It wasn’t my perspective on things.

That’s not a failure. That’s a journey of growth. (See what I did there?😜) Gaining experience on what our tools can help with vs. what we should focus our time and mental energy on is exactly what we all should be doing. Today, I’ll once again sit down and write down these thoughts that have been formulated inside my brain. As a result of reading, using AI, and every other imaginable ingredient that is used in the process.

The common framing that Claude assumed I was looking for, based on what I had written in the weekly newsletter issues in the past year, was vindication. “See, I told you this would happen!” Which is understandable, given how often I talk about my expectations of how things will play out in the Microsoft ecosystem. I’ve always loved to analyze what the different announcements and pieces of data mean for the future — instead of merely describing new features that have been released.

The goal is not to be right, though. I mean, sure, as any human being would, I tend to defend my position quite vigorously in online debates. Strong opinions combined with the desire to express them in various digital channels is pretty much the reason why any of you are here reading this. It’s what I do.