Updated: April 6, 2026 (April 6, 2026)
BlogIs Microsoft Lost in the Frontier?
By Barry Briggs
It wasn’t that long ago that everybody, including your correspondent, was hailing Satya Nadella as the “philosopher-king” of technology: Microsoft had seemingly beaten all the others to the punch as the first mover in enterprise AI. FOMO-driven companies signed huge contracts for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure’s AI features. The stock price soared.
Now, Microsoft’s stock is down 25%; Copilot is roundly accused (unfairly, to some extent: we’ll get into that in a moment) of being overhyped; and Anthropic and Google and others have produced remarkable, useful, and addictive innovations like Claude Code, Gemini, and NotebookLM. “AI is killing Microsoft,” shouts a somewhat hysterical article in Futurism. And Microsoft’s latest marketing push to brand their customers and partners as “frontier” firms (meaning, as I understand it, they’ve bought lots ‘o Copilot and AI from the Redmond giant) feels, well, desperate.
What’s the truth in all this?
If you listened to my latest podcast with George Gilbert and Peter O’Kelly, then you know we have at least a suspicion that Microsoft, and in particular Office, is approaching an existential moment. Here’s the proposition:
The modalities behind which people create content and make decisions is changing – for the first time in forty years. For decades, it was Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Axiomatic. Paradigmatic. The way it always was.
But remember: they’re separate applications – ultimately – because of the 640k limit of the original IBM PC; relics of the days when they competed with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. There’s nothing intrinsic about the distinction: you can write text in PowerPoint, create a graphic in Excel, add a table in Word. Functionally, they (now) overlap.
Now there are no limits.
You can use Gemini or Claude (or Copilot) to do all your research. Then tell them to create whatever output you need: a PowerPoint or PDF for the CEO, a spreadsheet for the CFO, a Word doc for marketing. The format is the end result, not the tool.
Or, as Peter said, it’s model-view-controller for the human. (Good one: I wish I’d thought of that.)
Therefore: is Microsoft 365 Copilot just a bolt-on? A desperate attempt to keep the old modality alive?
Credit: Blaine Shinckle via Flickr
Hey, I’m writing this in Word. I wrote my latest novel in Word (how’s that for sneaking in a plug?) Office is the single most entrenched application suite in history and it will stay so for a good while to come. And look, Microsoft 365 Copilot has come a long way since its way, way overhyped introduction – it’s quite useful now after multiple releases. (No, I’m not using it for this post.)
But one cannot help but wonder if the writing (yes, a pun) is on the wall, if still somewhat faint, for the Office applications. Will the well-scrubbed kids in school today start with PowerPoint to write their presentations – or converse with ChatGPT and have it output some amalgam of different kinds, the most effective kinds, of human communication there are, whatever we or they determine those to be?
Conclusion: archetypal models of content will change: a new model will emerge. To what, yet, we don’t know: we only have early hints, anecdotal tales of new things that hold promise. A thousand flowers are blooming.
This is a time of reinvention, an extraordinary moment of discovering the most efficient and effective ways of information synthesis, of content creation, of presentation, of decision-making. Perhaps soon – and, I predict, sooner than you think – all information on the internet, all the trained data in LLMs, all the graph and relational and unstructured databases in your enterprise, managed, safe, and secure, will surface before you in…what? Some sort of blank canvas? A friendly human-looking face waiting to converse with you?
Anyway, I don’t know. But whatever the UI, odds are, it will know what you want to create, and how, before you do.
Don’t believe me? Listen: paradigm shifts happen. There was a time before PCs, before the internet. Microsoft has, somewhat amazingly in my opinion, been able to cross chasms again and again; but the potential obsolescence of Office – there, I said it – is a big one. Will Copilot Pages, or Loop, or some derivative, become the “front end” for Office, with the traditional apps relegated to, in effect, DLLs?
Or do the Microsoft execs have their collective heads in the sand?
Or are Word and PowerPoint and Excel immortal?
Where will they be in five years?
What will you use to create content?
I know: it’s been a while since my last blog post; sorry about that. I’ve been working on a really cool, awesome, and hush-hush new project for Directions which we hope to introduce to you in the next few months. I can’t wait to show you: stay tuned!
And of course, you can always reach me at bbriggs@directionsonmicrosoft.com.
