causal

Cloud transition expanded the market rather than shrinking margins

Microsoft feared that moving Office customers from on-premise servers to the cloud would shrink margins due to COGS, but instead the cloud massively expanded the market by letting customers worldwide fractionally afford IT, eliminating costs like SharePoint storage servers (working capital outflows), and the same market expansion will happen with AI.

causalpending

Speaker

Satya Nadella

Evidence Quote

the biggest thing I had not realized, for example, was the amount of money people were spending buying storage underneath SharePoint. In fact, EMC's biggest segment may have been storage servers for SharePoint. All that sort of dropped in the cloud

Source

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGIDwarkesh Patel Podcast
Created: 6/13/2026, 3:35:54 AM

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