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Invoking Microsoft in a topic on numeric values may seem incongruous. Forerunner of the sector, the Redmond group seems to live in the indifferent opulence of the income inherited from its stranglehold on global IT and office automation for several decades. But that would be to forget that you need considerable adaptability to keep fierce competition at bay. Moreover, if Microsoft interests us here, it is because the company is at the heart of the shift towards artificial intelligence that humanity seems destined to take.
Microsoft is just over $2 trillion in market capitalization and the equivalent of Slovenia’s GDP in annual net profit. A cash-generating machine, whose economic model is well known but which seeks to diversify. The largest recent investment, if we dismiss the Activision Blizzard saga, the outcome of which is uncertain, was made in OpenAI, the parent company of the now famous ChatGPT.
Microsoft, which had already paid an early ticket of 1 billion dollars, put 10 billion back on the table to “ensure that these benefits are widely shared with the world”, as the group’s communicators recalled. In reality, it is above all a question of securing privileged access to breakthrough technology. Microsoft puts its cash and huge computing capabilities at the service of OpenAI on the basis of an exclusive partnership, in return for which it enjoys the commercial developments generated by the AI.
trial gallops
For the moment, the sector is honing its weapons by giving ordinary mortals small windows on the future: ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney, DALL-E and others allow them to rub shoulders with this new universe… In the background, thousands engineers are working on the aftermath. Tens of thousands of developers are looking for martingales. And hundreds of thousands of users are enthusiastic or despair of what they discover. Microsoft, for its part, is launching trial runs in AI. By coupling its Edge browser to its Bing search engine, which is coming back to the fore after having lived in the shadow of Chrome and Google for a long time. Or by integrating new features into its Office office suite. Tests that do not go unnoticed, to the point of having caused a commotion among the Silicon Valley giants, who suddenly became aware of the advance that the – almost – fifty-year-old seems to have accumulated.
It is too early at this stage to judge the potential financial fallout, but it seems considerable. For investors who are tempted by the adventure of artificial intelligence, Microsoft has three essential advantages. First, it is a company with extremely solid backbones and which can invest heavily. Second, she took the lead by being in the right place at the right time, either through flair or luck, more likely a mixture of both. Third, it has the tools and the distribution network capable of ensuring effective and rapid deployment of solutions based on this technology.
Assets that seem essential to evolve serenely in a universe that is similar to a new far-west. The challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence have never been so concrete as since 2023 because the general public has been able to taste them. Attempts at regulation and questions of intellectual property are already arising. Will they have a say in the face of the steamroller? We’re talking about artificial intelligence here, not Microsoft. Whatever.