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Microsoft exec Jim Allchin emails Bill Gates
From: Jim Allchin
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2004 8:38 AM
To: Bill Gates; Steve Ballmer
Subject: losing our way...
This is a rant. I’m sorry.
I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems are customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate into great products.
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. If you run the equivalent of VPC on a MAC you get access to basically all Windows application software (although not the hardware). Apple did not lose their way. You must watch this new video below. I know this doesn’t show anything for businesses, but my point is about the philosophy that Apple uses. They think scenario. They think simple. They think fast. I know there is nothing hugely deep in this.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/video/ilife04_320.html
I must tell you everything in my soul tells me that we should do what I called plan (b) yesterday. We need a simple fast storage system. LH is a pig and I don’t see any solution to this problem. If we are to rise to the challenge of Linux and Apple, we need to start taking the lessons of “scenario, simple, fast” to heart.
jim
[This document is from Comes v. Microsoft (2007).]
Further reading: Jim Allchin’s followup blog post in 2006: “Setting The Record Straight” (December 12, 2006)
Previously: Jim Allchin on Apple’s music store: “We were smoked” (April 30, 2003)
Previously: Bill Gates on the iPod: "Warren Buffett just loves the thing" (November 2, 2003)
Previously: Jim Allchin on the iPod: “Apple is just so far ahead” (November 13, 2003)
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Mark Zuckerberg messages Facebook employee
April 9, 2012
Facebook employee
Wow, awesome news. I like that you’re not killing the independent product. I love instagram.
Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them. I think this is a good outcome for everyone.
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: “It’s a really big deal that we ship this photos app”(September 11, 2011)
Previously: Instagram cofounder on Mark Zuckerberg: “will he go into destroy mode if I say no” (February 13, 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg tries to buy Instagram (Circa March 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: Should we buy Instagram, Foursquare, or Pinterest?(April 5, 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: “Do you think [Instagram’s] way too much?” (April 5, 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: “last night we reached an agreement to acquire Instagram” (April 9, 2012)
Elon Musk emails OpenAI cofounders
From: Elon Musk
Date: 7/21/17 3:34 AM
To: Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever
Subject: Beijing Wants A.I. to Be Made in China by 2030 - NYTimes.com
They will do whatever it takes to obtain what we develop. Maybe another reason to change course.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/business/china-artificial-intelligence.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&referer=
On Jul 22, 2017, at 4:32 AM, Greg Brockman wrote:
100% agreed. We think the path must be:
1. Al research non-profit (through end of 2017)
2. Al research + hardware for-profit (starting 2018)
3. Government project (when: ??)
Government project is helpful for financial resources, but crucial for security — don’t know how to defend against Putin or North Korea otherwise. When ready, we must proactively form the project around us, rather than being slurped in against our will.
- gdb
On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 1:25 PM Elon Musk wrote:
By the way, in appreciation for what you’ve done to get OpenAI to where it is today, I would like to give you each a Founder Series Model 3. These are the earliest cars produced and are not available to the public.
If there are a few others at OpenAI who you think also really deserve one (maybe Wojciech?), I am happy to do the same for them.
Hope you like it!
Elon
On Jul 22, 2017, at 6:48 AM, Ilya Sutskever wrote:
Wow, thank you! This is a very kind gesture that we greatly appreciate. Yes, Wojciech definitely deserves it as much as we do, as does +John Schulman.
From: Elon Musk
Sent: 7/21/2017 8:53:24 PM
Consider it done!
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2025).]
Previously: Ilya Sutskever emails Elon Musk: “You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship” (September 20, 2017)
Previously: Elon Musk emails OpenAI cofounders: “OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google” (January 31, 2018)
Thanks for reading!
-Internal Tech Emails
Sent from my iPad
It's absolutely wild that he said this to Gates and Ballmer.