Five weeks ago, I wrote about the impact OpenClaw was having on the expectations people have about AI agent capabilities. In addition to the Clawpilot newsletter issue, I also assembled an article titled “OpenClaw, open the front door”, using Claude as my co-author for it.
In this industry, information from five weeks ago sometimes feels like ancient history already. In this week’s Perspectives newsletter issue for the Plus subscribers exclusively, I’ll do a Round 2 on recent events around OpenClaw that address the rising tension in what Microsoft claims to do vs. what decisions they are making in practice.
Microsoft’s C-level pitch is all about security
At an event hosted by Morgan Stanley, Satya Nadella appeared on stage and talked about “The Transformative Role of AI”. The session title sounds quite meaningless and dull, yet there are often plenty of great insights shared by Satya whenever he gets to talk about not launching an exciting new Microsoft product but rather sharing his… well, perspectives. It’s a term I cannot copyright for myself exclusively, even though I wish a certain community account would acknowledge who’s the O.G. when it comes to Perspectives on Power Platform.
In any case, what Satya had to share with the audience of an investor conference included his take on the permissions Microsoft has from their customer base, especially in the IT departments. He said Microsoft wants to “love them” because the IT audience cares about security, compliance, and observability. Things that, according to Microsoft’s CEO, the company also deeply cares about.
This led to Satya willingly raise up OpenClaw as a technology that Microsoft could not launch, because of the aforementioned reasons. The most quote-worthy part is how he compared that scenario to Microsoft launching a virus:
For those who have been in this ecosystem before Satya’s term as the CEO, you might recall another famous quote from the previous Microsoft CEO that compared a non-MS technology to a disease:
“Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”
In the first year after Satya replaced Steve, he addressed this tension with a slide that said “Microsoft ❤️ Linux”. Obviously the tides had turned from the early 2000s and open source became a strategy that Microsoft intentionally adopted and embraced where it was seen fit. Some will of course have doubts about this being a part of the “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" (EEE) strategy the company was found to have used internally in the 90s…
Subscribe to Plus to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Perspectives Plus to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
Upgrade