Full Transcript for Exit interview: Microsoft’s comms chief on CEOs, reporters, what he got wrong, and stories that stuck

How do you decide, or you and your team decide, when to push back against executives? Like, use the Tweet Choir as an example. That was my idea. Somebody should have pushed back on you. It was your idea? No! I don't remember this. What was this? It wasn't necessarily my idea, but I approved it. Once you say yes to something, it's your idea whether it was good or bad.

Especially if it's a bad one, yes. That's right. Was it a group on stage singing the text of tweets? Yes, it was. Where was this? It was at CES. I don't remember this. Good.

The name Frank X. Shaw isn't as well known outside the company as those of Microsoft's other senior leaders, and that's the nature of the job. Behind the scenes, the company's longtime communications chief has shaped its public image for nearly three decades now, working for all three of Microsoft's CEOs and handling its biggest stories along the way, from antitrust to AI.

Shaw announced in September that he's leaving Microsoft at the end of the year. I'm GeekWire co -founder Todd Bishop, and on this special episode, Frank Shaw joins journalist Mary Jo Foley and me for what amounts to an exit interview. Mary Jo, who has covered Microsoft since 1984, is currently editor -in -chief of Directions on Microsoft and a GeekWire contributing writer.

Well, Frank and Mary Jo, it's great to have you both here. It's great to be here and see you. It is. I'm here virtually, but I can see you both, and it's great. So let me explain what we're doing here. Frank, you and I were chatting on the phone a few weeks ago, as we have, gosh. For a long time now. For decades now. And with your upcoming departure from the company, we were kind of reflecting on how much has changed at Microsoft and in technology, media, communications in the world.

And I can't remember which one of us said it, but it was one of those, this should be a podcast. We should talk about this. Moments. And of course, it wouldn't be complete without Mary Jo involved, given her history with all these things, with the company and with media and all the fights that you two have had over the years, right? I haven't had too many big fights.

Not that many. Just a lot of little disagreements about things. I agree. I'm glad you can say that now. Okay. I'm kidding. So we're going to talk about Microsoft's evolution under three CEOs, where the company is today, what it says about the way technology and business are changing, how communications went from chasing a business week cover story to telling your own engineers just, hey, go post on X.

And what AI is doing to all of this. That's right. Plus some of the inside baseball about how this works between companies and reporters, including some fun and possibly painful behind the scenes stories. And I think in all of this, it's not just about Microsoft. It's not just about your career, Frank. But I hope that there will be some universal themes that come out about where we get information now, who we trust, and what it takes to connect with other humans nowadays.

I think that's great. And I think, I mean, it's just kind of fascinating to get this chance as I'm getting ready to leave to sort of look back. And sometimes I look back and I'm like, I can't believe that really happened. Okay. Well, we'll have to get some of those stories. It's like, wow. Like what? I mean, there's just so many different things where, you know, you're at an event and something weird happens.

And, you know, you have to deal with it. You're five minutes before a presentation. And the surface stops working. PowerPoint eats it. Like you're doing a CES and there's a power surge and all your demos crash and die. I was there. Sure. You know, you have this idea for a tweet choir. Do you remember that one at CES? Yes. I don't think that went over very well.

But, I mean, it was certainly one of those things that felt like a good idea at the time. And then you're trying to explain it to somebody later and they're like, well, why did you think that was a good idea? It's like, well, at the time. And I'm sure there were other things that probably seemed risky that turned out really well. When you get a decision right, it always looks easy afterwards.

Is there one decision that you, that falls into that category? Oh, well, I mean, I would say the board's decision to pick Satya as a CEO. Everybody says that now is like, wow, well, like that was clearly a no brainer. I mean, he was so clearly the right person. But, you know, the people that lived through it knew that that was not a foregone conclusion, that there was a lot of debate and discussion and other candidates in there.

And it wasn't as straightforward and easy decision as it feels like it was now. You were this close, the company was, to hiring Alan Mulally as CEO. I think Alan really, really wanted to be CEO. And he lobbied hard for it, as did a bunch of other people. And, you know, the board made a different choice. But I do know that a bunch of people at Microsoft bought the book, myself included, just to get a sense of what it was going to be like to work with Alan in the midst of all this, because he was he was pushing hard.

It's funny. So that was that book that was written by the journalist out of Detroit about the Ford turnaround. Yeah. And I think it was like it. And it talked about how we worked and what whatnot. I can't remember the name of it. But when we didn't pick him, I sort of wanted my money back. The American icon. American icon. Right. That was it.

It's a great book. It's a very it's a very interesting book. It's funny because I got my copy at the Redmond Goodwill. It might have been yours.

I think I read it on Kindle. It is funny to talk about this now. Right. Because I remember when they picked Satya the day that was announced. I was so surprised. I was genuinely stunned. I was because I thought it was going to be Malali. I did. I was like, yeah, I already know who this is going to be. And then it was like, no, it's Satya.

And I'm like, what? Yes. Yeah. But that's a great example of a decision that was super hard and complicated at the moment. And then people go like, well, that was an easy decision now. I know. Right. So this is where time sort of sands the edges off some of these things. So when you get it right, it looks like an easy decision. If you get it wrong, you're just an idiot all along.

Yeah. All right, Frank. So I know that part of your job is to help people like Satya Nadella go into a podcast with an idea for the line that will travel, the thing that will resonate on social media and generate additional coverage outside the show. So what's yours today? Have you come up with one? Do you know? Well, I mean, I was thinking about this while not sleeping last night.

And the thing that I was sort of reflecting on a little bit was that for the last 30, almost 30 years, I have had a ringside seat at one of the greatest technology shows on earth through three amazing CEOs who were completely different and were obviously incredibly successful. And there's not been a day that has gone by, but I've not felt incredibly lucky about that.

I mean, what a privilege. Really? Not a day? Well, I mean, look, nothing's ever easy, right? Sometimes you're in the thick of it. But if you pause and just give yourself a little space, I mean, like, what a privilege. I mean, it's just been incredible. You know, you talk about, you know, getting the chance to be involved in some big decisions and how to talk about these super complicated topics that people, you know, really care about.

And, you know, sometimes there are things like the security work where it's almost if you do your job, nobody knows, you know, think about the Y2K, all the work that went into that, that then, then everybody's like, well, clearly it was overblown. Uh -huh. But it wasn't.

And so it's just been a blast. Who is your favorite CEO, can we ask? You know, I don't know that that's a fair question.

Great. Five minutes in, we've already gotten the claim that you're not asking fair questions. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I think that they're all so totally different with different characteristics and sort of different ways of expressing themselves. The common element across all of them has been intensity. They express it differently, but all of them are incredibly bright, obviously, like knowledgeable and intense in just very different ways.

I mean, Steve was outwardly intense, Satya is quietly intense, and Bill is cuttingly intense.

There's his line. There's his takeaway line. So which CEO was the hardest to explain to the outside world of the three? I think, you know, Bill was probably the easiest because by the time I started doing work in 1997, he was very well established. Like there was a very clear persona that existed around him and how he worked and what he cared about and what he communicated.

So, you know, that one is pretty straightforward. I think Steve was probably the most complicated because the external impression of Steve is not at all the real impression. It's not how he is behind the scenes. It's a different version of that intensity. It's still intense. It's a different version. Yes. That's right. And so, you know, if you have a superficial understanding of Steve, you see him as like a loud, boisterous sales person.

The caricature. And he's not. He's super thoughtful. He's very well informed. He deeply cares about people and the details. And that doesn't necessarily come through in sort of the way he showed up in the world. And, you know, what he would say is, well, like that's I showed up in the world because that's the way Microsoft needed me to show up in the world.

I was a salesperson. Like this is what the sales team needed. And so I delivered against that. And then with Satya, you know, he had the opportunity coming in as a relatively little known software engineer to be very thoughtful about what he stood for and what he wanted to focus on and how he wanted to do that. So he wasn't necessarily a clean slate, but he was new enough that he could show up in the way he really is.

And I'll just say the one who is the most fun to cover as a journalist from my perspective was Steve. Because he was so unpredictable. And I think he really understood the idea of throwing reporters a bone. Really? In what way? Like whenever he would be in an interview or I'd be part of an interview with him, he kind of knew like if I say this, this is going to be big.

And I think that's why I got banned from talking to him for 17 years. Because you would draw that out in him? Yeah. Yeah. Is that true? I don't think we banned you from talking to Steve for 17 years. But, you know what? A different Steve, maybe. Yeah. I got the last interview with him thanks to you, Frank. That's right. So I will always say thanks for that.

Yep. Maybe it was a good one. Okay. So, Frank, when you started in 1997, Windows 95 was on the desk. Windows NT 4 .0 in business, IE4, MSN, Encarta. I looked all this stuff up. Age of Empires, Hotmail, Web TV, getting flashbacks. Web TV, baby. Today we're talking about Azure surpassing $100 billion a year in revenue, co -pilot, homegrown AI models, a super intelligence team, SI, and data centers measured in gigawatts.

So, like, is the job the same today? How do you define your job? Like, what do you do here exactly? Yeah, it's the same job, but it's completely different. I mean, completely different. And it's completely different both in terms of the topic areas as well as the way it works. So, like, in 1997, when I started, I mean, my first, I was at an agency, and my first clients were the Organizational Customer Unit.

I don't even know what that is. Mary Jo remembers well. I do. OCU, it was the channel group at Microsoft. The partners. The partners group. And then there was the ADCU, which was the developer group. And so those were the people that I was working with at Microsoft. So you were working with customers and partners, and they were doing NT deployments.

Like, we were in the middle of Novell Network Compete on that stuff. We were trying to sell NT4, and NT5 was coming. And so, you know, you're very focused in the channel. And then we got into the small business and small business server. How do you reach this audience? And then, of course, you know, the technology continues to change. And the audiences that, you know, we're focusing on gets bigger and bigger.

And then media changes. Yeah. In a really big way. You know, so, you know, you go from having a relatively small set of established media and specialist media that covers specific things to having everybody care about what you're doing and everybody becoming a publisher. And you remember, at that time, this is when blogs took off. Yes. And, you know, we hired Robert Scoble to come and work for Microsoft.

And we did Channel 9, which was, you know, a direct -to way of explaining ourselves to the world. And so then, all of a sudden, you have to start thinking about authority and influence in different ways. You still, of course, have to talk to the established media. But then you have these opportunities to talk to these new media that are coming online.

And I remember, it must have been in the early 2000s, we had Bill do an interview with Gizmodo, I think. Huh. Yeah. And it was at CES or Comdex, one of the two. And it was kind of a maverick move at the time. It was a wildly maverick move. And everybody was really nervous about it. And they were nervous about it on multiple levels. Like, oh, my God, you know, they run on Linux.

You know? And it's like, do we really care about that? You know, they've got a sister site that does, you know, some other things. They're like, you know, man, do you care about that? I mean, but everybody was just really nervous about it. And then when we did the interview, and it was an interesting interview, and it reached an audience that we cared about.

And then everybody else looked at it and says, well, what does this mean for the future of the media? Because Bill talked to an online -only publication. And we did that because we're always, a big part of the job is you're always thinking about where do people get information today? Who do they consider to be authoritative in a topic that they care about? And then how do we make sure that we are talking to those people as well, that we have something to say to them in a way that is authentic and will be well -received by the people that we're talking to? And every time this happens, you go through this learning period because people want different things.

If you're used to dealing with the New York Times and then you're dealing with Gizmodo, you have a different experience. And they want different things. They want different kinds of questions, different timing. And they're going to put that out in the world in different ways. And you really have to make sure you're starting to think about what does that look like? And then what do we have to do differently as a communications function? And as we prepare our spokespeople and executives to have them be in the right mindset for that, just in the same way that you wouldn't prepare somebody for a 60 -minute interview in the same way you would for a parade magazine, right? You

know, like two very different modalities, even though they're established media, you have to extend that broadly and think about, you know, the audiences you're reaching, the avenue that you're reaching them with, and then what is that audience looking for? Coming up, how today's shifts in media compare to the past, and the reporter who told Frank he was bad at his job, and why Frank today agrees, at least with part of that reporter's assessment at the time.

Deciding where to grow or move your business can be full of unexpected delays. Or you could go to Ohio. With billions invested in growth -ready sites, a dedicated team whose only job is to tackle red tape, and 0% corporate income tax, Ohio makes it easier for businesses to scale faster. In fact, Ohio is ranked the number one state for business in America.

Your move. Learn more at JobsOhio .com. Bring that forward to today because it feels like we're going through another one of those moments almost on fast forward right now. You see it in a variety of different ways. One of them is the rise of these really long form in -depth podcasts. Another is, of course, AI. What are you seeing today, you know, as you, you know, make your exit from Microsoft, that is different and new about media? And is it just a repeat of what happened with blogs and social media? Or is this a different beast? Well, I think it's that saying, your history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Yeah. And so I don't think it's an exact repetition, but there are certain patterns that you continue to look at. You know, the first is that we're seeing an ongoing fragmentation of media and influence because in a world where anybody can publish, then people will choose where they get their information in different ways. And so our job is to really be thoughtful about who are these emerging influencers and creators and how do we effectively work with them in ways that make sense for us, for them, and for their audience.

And, like, this is where, you know, you can learn some lessons from the past because, you know, we've seen this before. We saw it with bloggers and we saw it with the early creators that are coming in. If you force fit something, if you jam something into an avenue where it doesn't fit, everybody suffers for it. The creator doesn't get what they want from it because the audience rejects it.

You know, the company doesn't get what they want because it's not worth the effort. So you really have to spend time thinking about what does that fit? Like, and can you show up and be authentic in the right ways? Like, that's number one. The second piece is that there is this ongoing thing that continues to happen as people show up and they're like almost individual entrepreneurs.

I've got a podcast. And then over a period of time, what happens is they start to build infrastructure around themselves. Yeah, Dworkesh. Dworkesh is a great example of that. But there's a whole bunch of others where they build infrastructure around themselves. They become more professional. And then all of a sudden they start to feel very much like you're dealing with somebody that is in the, quote, established media.

Do they kind of lose the magic in the process? I don't think they, I don't think so. Some of them, some of them do, but some of them, as they're scaling, they just, they need a different set of characteristics and they build those characteristics and then they start to understand. And it's like, oh yes, there's a reason that you have an embargo.

Okay, great. Now I understand that better. Oh, I should think about conflicts of interest in a way that I didn't have to think about them before. Because like, hey, we've just booked an interview with your CEO and then I have this great new sponsor who's a competitor. And it's like, I'm going to start the podcast and be like, this is brought to you by Amazon.

And now let me, let me talk to you, Mr. Microsoft person. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not okay. And they're like, really? It's like, yeah, no, you don't, you don't do that. And they're like, oh, I got it. And so there is just this evolution that takes place. It doesn't take place at the same speed or with the same characteristics, but you can look at it and you can recognize how this is happening.

I think of it in terms of hierarchy as well, because if you're going to a Wall Street Journal reporter and you're having a conversation, it's very easy. And I've been there before at a newspaper to say, oh, my editor made me do that. My editor made me do that, but if you're on your own, there is no, you're the buck literally stops with you.

And like, that is your decision. You can't tell me you didn't write the headline. If I don't write the headline and I call you about that, I'm like, oh, I don't write the headlines. Like, I know you write the headlines, Todd. A hundred percent. You wrote that headline. I want you to change it. Todd, it isn't 2005 anymore. That's right. There was a day.

Oh, that was the worst part of working at a newspaper. I swear that was the worst. Well, that wasn't the worst part. It was one of the worst parts was slaving all day for, you know, eight hours on a story and then waking up, going out to your doorstep, picking it up and just having your heart fall. That's right. Because somebody crapped all over it with their five second bad decision.

Anyway, I'm going down a rabbit hole here. No, I was going to say, you know, it was different for me, like being kind of coming in as a traditionally trained journalist. And then all of the people who are my colleagues and compatriots were bloggers, right? They taught me so much about how to go get a story because they didn't think like we did about getting a story.

Like they had a whole different way about going about it, doing complex searches through Google or whatever that I didn't even know how to do. Right. And I was teaching them things like, do you know, like what off the record means? They're like, no, there is no such thing. I'm like, yeah, there is actually. And yeah. And it's to your, it's to your benefit as a reporter to hear things off the record.

That was a big evolution for me too. Coming out of journalism school, the instances in which you would go off the record were rare. Right. I mean, it was almost a religion of the world being in your notebook. And to your point, Mary Jo, it's a, it's a different world today. And to your point on the norms, Frank, I mean, I can imagine that dealing with some of these folks who are more flying by the seat of their pants might be a little bit disconcerting.

The thing that I think has always driven me as, as I think about the influencer engagement in particular is that if you think about it from a transactional standpoint, you are just really going to be unhappy a lot of the time. And if you think about it over a period of time, you're going to be working with these people over time. Then you invest in making sure you understand what they are looking for, how they work and what the relationship is.

And then you, you don't necessarily always get better outcomes, but you have a better process that maybe will get you to a better place. So that was number one. And the second one was this aha, that, um, it can be easy in a role like, like mine to want to seek out positive coverage. And I remember I had this absolute knockdown drag out fight with a wall street journal reporter about a story.

I don't even remember what it was at the time, but I remember exactly where I was. It was Rob Guth. Uh, literally I saw Rob at the PCC in Fremont. Of course he's now ghostwriting for Bill Gates. That's right. And, and Rob is a great, great reporter. Yes. My, uh, my daughter at the time was five years old and, uh, she thought his name was Rob Guthback because he would call me all the time and I would say, Oh my God, I have to call Rob Guthback.

And so she thought his name was Rob Guthback. Yeah. Uh, but anyway, I mean, I was driving through Madison Park and I had to pull over because we were yelling at each other about this story. Were your kids in the back? No, they were not in the back. This was just me solo, but I figured I really needed to pull over for this one. And what he said is he said, like, you're bad at your job because you think your job was getting positive stories and you should be thinking about your job as having interesting stories that showcase something about the company.

And sometimes those are going to be less positive, but they're going to be more memorable. And I was like, you're so wrong. And then I went off and I thought about it and I realized he was exactly right. And so if you're doing a really good job working with anybody who is reporting about the company in the broadest possible sense of the world, what you hope for is you hope that they're going to create something that illuminates part of the company in a memorable way.

And that always comes with tension. 100% of the time comes with tension and you have to embrace that because the idea that somebody came up with a product, we built it perfectly and everybody loves it is just boring. There is no story there. And sometimes that's what we're asked to tell a story of just an unimpeded march to greatness. It's like, that's dull.

That's like the plane landed safely. Nobody cares, right? Except for the people on the plane. So if, if you stop and you think about that a little bit, it's like, what, what are you doing to illuminate a piece of the company in a memorable way? It opens you up to much more interesting conversations. Give us an example.

Like what's a story that you feel like it was risky, but we did it. And we feel like it, even though it wasn't completely positive, it did do a good job reflecting the company. There's just so many of them. You know, I think about the, the New Yorker story that broke about open AI with Kevin Scott, uh, just after the, the blip happened, the blip meaning Sam Altman's ouster, the blip meaning Sam Altman's ouster.

That's a great story where we went into that and we said, wow, it's a New Yorker story. Yeah. It's going to be long. We're going to have them talk to a bunch of people. You really don't know what's going to come out of it because good reporters don't say, well, I'm going to interview a bunch of people. And then here's the story I'm going to write.

They have a thesis. They're going to test the thesis. They'll modify it along the way. And then in this case, you know, like there was this like cataclysmic news event right before it went to, to, to press, but that was a risky story, but it captured the company at a moment, you know, at a moment in time that was just really interesting. And it said something, uh, about the company.

So that's, that's an example that the, uh, story Steve Lord did in the New York times in the two thousands, I guess it was big Sunday business story profile of Steve Ballmer. One of the first really big profiles of Steve Ballmer, super risky. You've mentioned this. I think it was Steve who asked one of the best questions you've ever heard.

That's right. I mean, I remember it exactly. And so this was like Steve Lord, not Steve, Steve Lord. And this was the, then, then this, I think about that. And I think about that. Then that's part of my job because if the reporter is going to ask the same question that the CEO has been asked multiple times, they're not going to get great responses because at some point it becomes rote.

If you've been interviewed a bunch of times and you get the same questions, you're going to get the same answers. It's just like you pull the, pull the string and blah, blah, blah, blah. Mental boilerplate. And so, uh, what, what Steve did is, is Steve Lord, he asked this question to Ballmer. His question was like, Hey, you know, you were a math guy and you were a math guy coming to Harvard, uh, at a time when all these other math people became computer science people.

Like, why not you? Why not you? Why didn't you study computer science?

Why didn't you it was a question Steve had never gotten before. And it, it caused him to pause and talk about why he got into mathematics. Like, how did he become a math guy? And so he talked about this high school math teacher who, uh, believed in him, who said, wow, you're super talented. And like, you should do these things and you should invest in these things in different ways.

And you should go to this math competition. I didn't know there were math competitions, but there are, uh, and that was what set him off on the math journey. And he just loved it. And then Steve Lord went and found this guy who is now an insurance salesman, somebody in Ohio. And he talked to him about Steve Ballmer and it wasn't a huge part of the story, but it was a part of the story that had never been told before.

And so like, that's where you really start to see, uh, when people do research and, you know, they think deeply about the questions, not because I want to ask the same question, because I want a different answer. Ted Coos was the name of that math teacher, by the way, I got to talk to him. We did a podcast series with Steve Ballmer later.

Uh, and of course, since it was about numbers, I talked to his, his math teacher, but, but as you're talking about this, Frank, it strikes me that Microsoft evolved and also the media landscape evolved. And it's hard sometimes to pull apart those threads and understand what's happening in the industry. versus what was happening at the company.

But one thing I noticed, I don't know when it was, but at some point I stopped getting calls on small things, asking for corrections. And I don't know, I don't know if it was me too.

Okay. And it would just be minor stuff in the past, right? But you could tell that every little thing was getting noticed. And at some point that stopped, why did that stop? And what did it say about the company and the industry and the media landscape? It still happens, obviously. Uh, but it has to be a pretty big deal. Well, or, or you have an executive who cares deeply, like, so like there are people who would say, Oh my God, somebody said something wrong on the internet, go fix it.

Right. And like this, this would be true. I mean, there's a bunch of executives who were like that. They're like, Oh, some, you know, uh, somebody said something wrong on Facebook since somebody said something wrong on Twitter. Uh, somebody said something wrong in an article that nobody read. Now go fix it. And the reason that you stop doing that is because it's a, it's inherently non -scale because you just can't correct everything.

There's just too many incorrect things out there. You'd spend a hundred percent of your time running around whack -a -mole -ing stuff. And a lot of times, even when you do that, you make it worse because, you know, people will publish correction or they won't, uh, or they will say the company's trying to silence me. And then you get this other news cycle around that.

So you have to be very thoughtful about, is this irritating or is it damaging?

And if it's damaging, you actually have to go and get a correction on it. If it's factually wrong, if it's factually wrong in ways that are, that matter, you have to, you have to go after that because you can't let that, uh, persist. But then there are other things where, you know, you might not like something

that doesn't mean it's wrong. You know, Dina Bass and I had this, uh, you know, big argument years and years ago, Bloomberg reporter, where one of our spokespeople hated the word, a word that, that was in the story. And, and, and. Oh, Frank, do you remember the word? I remember the word. What was it? What was it? The word was woo, as in this executive wooed customers.

Oh, man. And, you know, this person was incensed about it. He's like, you know, he hated that word. He wooed his wife. He did not woo customers. Oh, my God. It was Kevin Turner. It was Kevin Turner. Had to be. I'm not saying who it was. Just give us the initials. All right.

And so, you know, I remember talking to Dina. Former Sam's Club executive, longtime Microsoft COO. Keep going. I remember talking to Dina about it and saying like, you know, hey, he never said this. You know, he didn't say that. And I didn't quote him as saying that. She paraphrased it. It was her word. Like, I'm just describing this. I'm like, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You make the run up the hill. She's like, Frank, you're insane. I'm like, I just need you to go and ask your editors. Just like, help me out here. She's like, OK. And then she can my editors are not going to change it. I'm like, OK, well, we've made the. But that was an example of like, you didn't like it. It's not wrong. Does not require a correction.

Mary Jo, would you have died on that hill? The woo hill? I would have. Yeah. You know, you know why? It sets a precedent. It sets a precedent. That's what I was going to say. Once you give in on something like that, every they're going to keep coming to you and asking for more. So yeah, slippery slope. You're right. You're absolutely right.

Right. So that was an example where you have to look at it. You cannot like something and it's not wrong. If you're going to ask for a fix or a correction, it has to be meaningful. And my experience has been that, you know, reporters do not want to be wrong. Well, most people don't want to be wrong. They don't want to be wrong. And if they've gotten something wrong and you don't attack them about it, then you can find ways of getting things fixed.

You know, going and telling people, like, you're an idiot. You can't, you got this wrong. You know, like, what's wrong with you? It does not engender a conversation. But if you say, like, hey, sometimes, like, we did not do our job well enough. And so we left ambiguity in a conversation. And then you clarified it. And the way you clarified it was not accurate.

And now we're going to try and help on this. It's a much better way of trying to tackle it. I'm kind of interested in the idea of how do you decide or you and your team decide when to push back against executives at the company? Oh, so the other direction. Right. Like, when you see them about to do something and you're like, this is going to be a disaster, should you push them or hold back and let it be a disaster? Yeah, I think.

Like, use the tweet choir as an example. Well, that was my idea. Somebody should have pushed back on you. It was your idea? I don't remember this. What was this? It wasn't necessarily my idea, but I approved it. So once you say yes to something, you know, it's your idea. Especially if it's a bad one. Yes. That's right. So it was entertaining.

Right. Let's just say it was entertaining. Was it a group on stage singing the text of tweets? Yes, it was. Where was this? It was at CES. Yeah. Did not go over well, sounds like. No. I don't remember this. Good. Yeah. Good. I mean. Let's move on. But back to Mary Jo's question. Like, how do you deal with somebody? Like, say, I'm sure this has happened a million times.

And you've talked about this recently in some of your blog posts. Like, Amazon has this principle of disagree and commit. It sounded almost like Microsoft and some of your approach could be disagree and politely, constructively, transparently escalate. It really depends. So, again, there's no universal hammer on it. Like, there's always a rich dialogue that is taking place.

Can I give you an example? Yeah. Let me give you an example. The Kin. Let's just go there. The Kin. Yes. Go straight to the Kin. Okay. This was an ill -fated mobile device made inside Microsoft by the team that was originally responsible for the T -Mobile sidekick. Go ahead. So I actually have a Kin in my office. The Kin was cool. It was cool.

And I have it there as a reminder to me. Hmm. Because I was involved. You know, I was new to the company. We had a meeting.

And it was at Mobile World Congress. We were in a hotel. We were in a big conference room at the top of the hotel. There were all the executives that were responsible for this thing sitting around the table. You know, Steve Ballmer was there. Robbie Bach? No, it wasn't Robbie. It was Andy Lee's. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. And I think Terry Meyerson was there because he was doing some of the Windows phone work.

And, you know, there was a whole bunch of people there. And I was there. And I had a point of view on this, right? Which was, I did not think we would be successful with this. And I didn't think we were going to be successful with it because we were later to the market. And it was going to be more expensive than people thought because it required a data plan.

So that, and so I said, like, I don't think we're going to be successful with this. And so everybody went around the table. And Steve said, should we do this? Should we do this? Should we do this? And I did not say anything. And I didn't say anything because I couldn't figure out how it was in my area of expertise to have a opinion. I'm the comms guy.

I'm not the business person. You know, I'm not the technology person. I'm not the partner person dealing with Verizon and others, right? So I just happened to be in the room, so I didn't say anything. And, of course, we launched it 43 days later. We pulled it. You know, it cost us a lot of money and bad will with Verizon. And I think about that, thought about that later.

And I said, what I missed is that this was a potential brand -damaging moment. That's my job. Like, I am responsible partly for the Microsoft brand. And this is going to damage the Microsoft family. If it does not go well and everybody's, like, on the fence on this. But you've got all these costs sunk in it. But if I had said, hey, if this fails, it's going to be more than a billion dollars worth of brand damage and we're going to hurt our relationship with this audience we're trying to reach, this younger audience.

Then I would have plausibly had something to say. And I didn't. And so what I learned from that is that if you think about it, you have to ground it in your expertise. And if you're being asked to have an opinion or a point of view, you should express it. And I don't think me saying anything would have changed the decision. Like, I don't know.

I would have felt better about it. You know, I look back at that and say, that is something. I made a mistake in that. I would have felt better about myself if I'd had something to say. Because I had talked to engineers about it. And the engineers were like, this is not going to do it. What about Nokia? Were you in on those discussions? I'm sure you were.

Yes. How do you feel about that in hindsight? And what did you think about it at the time? Well, I think that it was a good, I actually think it was a good and thoughtful decision at the time. There were other decisions that I think were much more complicated that hurt us badly. And what it was is that we had the belief that the PC and the PC licensing system was going to be the way that software was getting in people's hands for perpetuity.

You were going to sell a license to a manufacturer. They were going to put your operating system on their device and they were going to sell it to customers. That's the way it was going to be. Period. Full stop. That's the best model. That works for PCs. Like, it's worked incredibly well for PCs. And so, of course, it's going to work in the phone space.

And that's what we were doing. You know, we had phones before Nokia. And what I think we missed was this business model shift, which is that the operating system isn't the thing, right? You're not going to pay for that operating system. And so, you know, we came into this and we did the work. But we burdened Nokia with costs as we did that.

Coming up, what AI is doing to the relationship between companies and reporters. And one of the most unusual tactics a journalist ever used to try to get a Microsoft CEO interview.

Job hunting does not work the way it used to. So here is a new playbook. It's a new series called The Great Careers Playbook from the University of Washington Foster School of Business and GeekWire Studios. Host Kay Dawson sits down with Foster's career management team for honest, practical advice on AI resume screening, getting ahead of layoffs, negotiating with confidence, and keeping your head up through a tough search.

All episodes are available now. Download the podcast or watch the full series at geekwire .com slash great careers.

I want to talk a little bit about AI here and how it's shaping it. So I want to ask you just as a starting point, is AI making communications better, worse, or just faster? Can you give a sense for what you're seeing internally and then also out in the world of media and the interaction between the two? Yeah, I think it's a little bit mixed, right? Because it's a tool.

And Brad Smith, when he came out with his book a couple years ago, he talked about tools and weapons, right? And he talked about how every tool can be used for good or can be used as a weapon. And a weapon is a powerful word. The other way to look at it is you can use something to build and you can use something to destroy or hurt. And AI absolutely has that attribute to it.

You can do amazing things with AI that help people do things that they could never do before. And so adding capability to somebody is a wonderful thing. My ability to build a website or build an app is something I could never do before. And now I can. And the only reason I can do that is because some of the new agents and the large language models and the work that has gone into those.

So anytime you're adding capacity to somebody, you have to feel like that's a pretty good thing. And so we've added capacity. And from a communication standpoint, we use AI in a variety of ways. We use it to automate repetitive processes. We use it to get to the higher order things more rapidly than we could before. We use it for things like translation, which has been hard to do previously.

And so reaching international markets, reaching international markets more rapidly with higher fidelity has been like a holy grail. So there's a bunch of things that are really good about that. Then there are some of the things that I think we just really have to look at and say, how do we feel about this? The ability to create misinformation and disinformation was already a problem.

It's a bigger problem today than it was two years ago, because it's easier to do the barrier of entry before those things has gotten lower. And that's a challenge. And so now everybody's chasing after that. It reminds me a little bit of, you know, the spam battles, right? Or the early virus sorts of things, where you're always in a cat and mouse situation where you get better, they get better, you get better, they get better.

It doesn't really add anything to the world. But that's, that's where we are on some of that stuff. How does it change how you work with the media? Does it? Because I would think one way I would think it would change is now instead of keeping dossiers on reporters, you could just ask co -pilot and say to co -pilot. What's Mary Jo Foley going to ask me in this interview? Yeah, I mean, like, that's right.

So that's something that's a good example where you can use it as a sparring partner faster than you could before. Now the danger of that, though, is, and Joanna Stern said, like, you know, hey, I used AI to get ready for this interview, and you used AI to get ready for your interview with me. So the question is, like, did I come up with questions that your AI did not come up with? And that gets to the thing we were talking about earlier, great interviewers are going to think creatively around the edges on these things, because you don't want to ask the question that is the predictable question.

And, you know, again, not universally true. But sometimes, if I if you ask, like, hey, what are the questions Mary Jo is going to ask, you're going to get generic Mary Jo questions, you're not going to get top of top grade Mary Jo questions. And so then you're going to be less prepared, because a human being hasn't actually said, Oh, I've sat through a bunch of interviews with Mary Jo, here's the kinds of things that she's gonna ask.

Or more importantly, here's how she asked questions. So like there are reporters, you know, who have styles. And if you're not ready for that style, you can really get back footed on those things as, as somebody, you know, Stephen Levy can like feel like he's like phoning it in for like 10 minutes. And just when he's lulled you to sleep, all of a sudden, he starts zinging, you're like, bang, bang, bang.

And like, you know, that'll, that'll really, you know, like a rope -a -dope strategy. Yeah, that'll really, you know, rock you. Or there's reporters who, they just always sound negative. But then they write stories that are just like, it's very straightforward. But if you are paying attention as a as a spokesperson to those, the feeling of negativity, then you get knocked off your, your game.

And so the way you ready for that is like, hey, you're going to talk to this person. You're going to think they're rude. But they're not. This is just how they are. You know, they're, that's just how they are. So don't think that this is going to reflect in the in the way that the story is going to get written or broadcast, or whatever. I feel like I'm giving the show notes here.

Stephen Levy, longtime Newsweek, and now Wired, editor at large. Yeah, Newsweek and Wired, yeah. And Joanna Stern, formerly Wall Street Journal, now has her own site called New Things. Yeah, yeah, New Things. She started at Laptop Magazine. That's when I first started working with Joanna. She was at Laptop Magazine, and then she went to The Verge.

That's right. And then The Journal. And then The Journal. Toughest reporter that you have to deal with, present company excluded. And I'm just mostly protecting Mary Jo here.

Toughest reporter on the beat over the years. Toughest reporter. Kara Swisher? Well, yeah. I mean, Kara's, I don't know that tough is the right word. I mean, like, you have, good reporters are tricky to work with, because they're good reporters. It's their job. It is their job to find out things. And come in and surprise you with the thing that they know that you may not think they know.

That's right. And so there's, so good reporters are not the same thing as tough reporters. Um, there are tough topics. You know, there are tough stories where you're working with somebody, uh, on a, on a story where there's real conflict and tension on things. And, and those are, those can be difficult, but it's less around the reporter and more around the topic area.

What do you regret most about the Vanity Fair piece?

Tell us about the Vanity Fair piece. So for people who didn't know, this was the lost decade. This was Kurt Eichenwald, uh, wrote, wrote a story. And, uh,

it was a weird experience because again, this was relatively early in my tenure at Microsoft and Kurt came to us and said, Hey, I'm doing this story for Vanity Fair. And you don't get that many stories in Vanity Fair. So it's not like you get a lot of at bats and, uh, you know, Kurt was to put it mildly, a quirky, uh, individual. He said, well, I really want to talk to Steve and I'm going to write this story and it's going to be a story about how like Microsoft's had this lost decade.

And I'm like, we're, I'm not sure we're going to give you Steve for this. We'll have, we'll happily have you talk to a bunch of other people, but it's not the sort of thing that, and he's like, if you don't give me Steve and Bill, I'm just going to write a hit piece. That's what he said to me.

And, and I'm like, you're writing for Vanity Fair. There is no way that's not the way it works. And that was the way it worked. And so he wrote a hit piece on us and it was a very well done hit piece. And so mistake number one was I should have escalated more rapidly to the Vanity Fair team. And I didn't mistake number two, when it was, when it came out, we underestimated its impact because it didn't appear to get much traction, you know, so there were, uh, you know, a couple of, um, you know, follow on stories on it.

Um, but it wasn't one of those ones that felt like it was in the popular consciousness. You know, we didn't get follow on inquiries, but you know, Vanity Fair at that time was something that every reporter read. And so it became part of the perceived narrative of the company And every interview, every reporter for the next four years would reference the lost decade.

And so I should have seen that as a sticky narrative that needed to be fought. And this is the point I was trying to make in my LinkedIn thing is that facts are easy to dispute. If you're going to dispute something, you can dispute facts. Narratives are sticky. And so you got to work a lot harder and a lot faster if there's a narrative out there that you don't like or you believe is inaccurate.

And so it took us, you know, a new CEO to be able to sort of reset that. It's funny because right around the same time, Amazon had a similar experience with the New York Times and it wasn't exactly the same. And I'm not talking about the reporting tactic. This was the crying at your desk. Yeah. This was the Amazon's quote, bruising workplace.

I still remember the word bruising from the headline. And again, the reporters did not use the tactic that you mentioned, but it had a similar effect where initially it was like, huh, that's probably one New York Times story. And it became an entire narrative. Right. Interesting. I think there's lessons here broadly. And we have a lot of startups that listen to the podcast as well.

And I thought perhaps they might learn more about, you know, Microsoft's approach to embargoes and that kind of thing from you, but it's higher level here. Yeah. The way the thing, one of the things to think about is, it is one of the jobs of communicators on our good days is that we have to make sure that we are thinking about the way the world perceives us and the way we perceive ourselves.

And that those things are in some, they have to be in proximity to each other. Because if you don't keep those things somewhat aligned, you do things that the world rejects. And then the second piece of it is you always have to think about what is the master narrative around a company or an individual. And so I'll give you a Microsoft example of a master narrative.

In the 2000s, every story written about Microsoft, Microsoft, comma, a convicted monopolist, comma, today announced, foo. Right? Right? Every story. It's like, it didn't matter whether it was what it was about. I don't remember that. Oh, yeah. It's true. That was like, so that was the, that's not the narrative you want, but that's the narrative that exists.

So you actually have to make sure you understand that. And then you want to change it. And you have to change it by changing behavior. And importantly, if a narrative like that, or the narrative of the lost decade, or the narrative of people crying at their desks at Amazon is sticky, then anything that looks like that, snaps that narrative back into 100% fidelity.

So if you're Amazon, and you've had like, you know, three great years where you have incredibly, like your, all your employees love you and whatnot. And then you have one person go off and tell a story that is like, it's just like that. Then the response is there they go again. Same old Microsoft, same old Amazon, same old individual up to their old tricks.

And so you have the only way you can get away from that is you have to understand that narrative very carefully, and then be working to change it. And you said change behavior. When you said that it's not change the behavior of the media, it's change your own behavior at the company. That is, that is correct. Interesting. Because like, if you look at, if you look at the vanity fair piece, one of the things that really stuck out for people is the stack ranking.

Yes. We can like feel whether that was fair or unfair. That was a process. It was basically Microsoft's version of grading on a curve when it came to reviews. That's, that's correct. You had to have, you had to like, make sure you fit the bell curve. Now that's true anywhere because at some point, no matter what company you're at, you have a fixed number of rewards.

Like, you know, you're going to promote 10 people, uh, in this year, you have a hundred people. So you're not going to promote a hundred people. You're going to promote 10 of them. That means 90 people are not going to get promoted. You know? Uh, so whether it's implicit or explicit, there is a limited resources and you have to allocate those.

That's the way we were doing it at the time. It became totemic with this sense of like a dog eat dog culture. Then we moved away from that and moving away from that and changing the way we talked about rewards and changed the way we applied those things was a real change. And then that gave us the ability to, to, you know, say like things have, things are different.

It's not the same as it was before. So Frank, what do you hope people will remember about your tenure at Microsoft, your own work there and your team's work there? What would you hope people would look at as the defining characteristics of Microsoft's communications organization under your leadership? I think there's a couple of things I would say.

First is that like, I have a great team. I have, like, I am so proud of the team at, uh, Microsoft got a great set of leaders. We have a great, you know, global set of communicators who get up every morning and are, are thinking about how do they innovate in the art and science of communications? How do they find the best stories to tell about Microsoft? How do they work effectively with everybody, uh, along the way who wants to participate in that, uh, in that storytelling? And so I think the first thing is like just the team, uh, that is in place.

The second piece will be that I think over my time at Microsoft, I did a good job of expressing the voice of the company because a company of our size and scale has all these voices. And, and, you know, and, and I say voices, not just by individual, but you have products and you have customers and you have segments and you have all these different things.

How do you harmonize that so that it makes sense to the world? Because if you don't, it's just cacophonous. And I remember, um, talking to a reporter at the Seattle times. So I, I wasn't prior, it was somebody else. Uh, and they said, I got 26 pitches from Microsoft this week. Wow. What do you think is important? What did you say? You didn't know what the 26 were.

I did not know what the 26 were. And in fact, what we were saying is you decide what's important. And that was, that's a mistake, right? You know, so, you know, the ability to be able to look left to right across the company over a period of time and say, what are the three or four things that are really going to be important for us in the next three months? And then how do we put the right work against those and other things we're going to do? There's, you know, it's like, we're going to have point releases on things and we're going to have customer wins, but like, what are the three or four things that are going to be most important? And then how do we focus on them? It

seems not to put too fine a point on it, but from some of the memos that have come out just recently that Microsoft is actually going in a different direction as you depart where there's going to be more voices saying more things without a common thread among them. How do you feel about that? Uh, I think it's interesting to look at where we are now.

We already have a lot of voices talking about a lot of things to a bunch of different audiences. If you look at LinkedIn, um, if you look at the people on X or people posting to Reddit or, you know, doing, ask me, anything's there, there is a big wide set of people at Microsoft out there talking about their products with a level of expertise.

And that's great. You, want people to do that. You know, if you are in a Reddit Excel thread, you want to hear from somebody from Microsoft. And that person does not need to be babysat by somebody on the comms team. And they're not today. So like, you know, doing more of that and engaging with people in a human and real ways is good. Again, look at Channel 9, you know, look at the, you know, the thousands of blogs we used to have across MSTN, right? You know, those are things that we've done before.

And you have to do it in a way that, you know, you have some awareness of the risks, but you can't ever eliminate all those risks. So I think this is a continuation of things that have been happening. And at the same time, there are things that are more important at any given moment that you have to make sure you're going to break through on.

Could be at a big event. It could be around a new launch of a product, but in a world where people's attention are fractured.

Every once in a while, you want the world to know Microsoft had something to say today. That's what you want. And it's hard to do. And you have to put real effort behind it. And you can't do it every day. You can't do it every week. I mean, you probably can't even do it every month, but you should pick those moments and then you should just, you do them right.

And it's harder to do when you have 150 ,000 employees with the potential to send that message out. Yeah. I actually think that, you know, like we had, uh, one of our social media rules years and years ago was like, don't be stupid. Right. And, you know, we don't hire stupid people. Generally, people always make mistakes, but, but that's fine.

You know, so, you know, what is the balance you find between the sort of the cacophonous and the focused and those things can exist at the same time. What's next for Microsoft?

Look, uh, I think Microsoft has positioned itself quite well for this AI era. You know, Satya and his team, uh, have, uh, you know, done really, really good work. We are in some ways, I think about this moment that we are in as a transitional moment and, uh, and we've seen these transitional moments before and it's almost like we are moving from this focus on the models, AI models, AI models every day, like, Oh no, there's a new model.

You know, there's a Quinn flash. There is, you know, uh, uh, you know, uh, Claude Opus six turbo, uh, you know, I'm just making these up, but probably not. And, and, you know, there's a new manifesto that's come out or a new thing and, and everybody stops and looks at this. And what, what I think that, uh, Microsoft is known for

is making things useful for people at scale. And so if you look at the work that, uh, the teams are doing with Copilot and with GitHub Copilot and, uh, you know, the, uh, Azure Foundry or Microsoft Foundry and, you know, making these models available to people in useful, safe, secure ways, that's what people are looking for. And I think that there'll be less, hopefully there'll be less attention on, flashy and more attention on useful.

And, you know, that's what Microsoft does. It's like, you know, if you want to get something done, we want you to, we want you to get something done with tools that we are making, and we want you to not have to worry about, uh, those things. So I think the company's really super well positioned. And I know your answer would be no different, but you still are on the payroll and I'm sure you own plenty of stock.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I'm, I'm 100% rooting for the company. And, and, and at the same time, I think it's, it's true. The, the example I'll use is that, you know, anybody who grew up driving, learning how to drive a, uh, stick, you learned the value of the clutch. Uh, these model companies oftentimes just want to take this bigger, more powerful engine and just jam it into companies.

And then they're just grinding their gears and, and, you know, we're the clutch. Like we have the infrastructure in place, like so that people can absorb the power and, and actually get things moving with slightly less disruption than just dropping a new engine in and just saying like, how come you're not going 110 miles per hour? This is going to be your departing legacy.

The billboard Microsoft, we're the clutch. Yeah, exactly. We're the clutch in the clutch. That's right. Ooh, very good. Mary Jo. It's clutch is all the way down. I want to hear what Frank would say to this. What's the product or strategy at Microsoft that you think is either misunderstood or under appreciated right now? Like, I feel like the, everybody's talking what else, what else, what do you feel like people don't really get this? You can say dynamics 365 if you want.

I mean, no, I think you could just, I think people underestimate, uh, the high quality work that's happening in security. It's probably not getting as much attention, um, as it, as it should, uh, Hayat and her team there are just doing unbelievable, uh, work. I think that, uh, the Windows team, uh, from a, uh, capabilities and performance standpoint have done unbelievable work over the last, uh, set of months and obviously have more to do.

And that's aided by, you know, some of the new models that are out there. They allow faster progress on backlogged, uh, issues. So I think those are two things I look at and say, wow, yeah, I don't, I don't think those are getting as much attention. Maybe. Talk about an area transformed by AI, as you're saying, I mean, how many were, how many, uh, updates or how many patches were in the latest patch Tuesday? Like 300 ,000, I think might've been the count.

Yes. It's, it's insane. It's a lot. And, but the engineers are, you know, again, like there are new tools that there we're talking about internally that, that allow them to do things way faster and more predictably than they have ever in the past. What's next for you? I'm going to take some, uh, time off and sort of reflect a little bit, uh, on, you know, what I've done and then like maybe what I want to do, uh, next, but I'm not making any big decisions.

People have come out and said like, you should do consulting. Uh, you should take another big comms job. Uh, you should be on some boards and all those things sound interesting. Um, but I don't want to sort of run immediately into anything. I have a job I think you should take. Do you want to hear my opinion for you? I'm ready. You should run peer for open AI because man, they need somebody to help.

Yeah. So, so noted. That would be such a, that would be such a low stress job. I know. Right. You're, you would be like, Oh yeah, Microsoft, nothing compared to that. Right. So I think we just did a service here for you and for Microsoft. I think rather than you sitting down for your exit interview with Amy Coleman at the, at the end of the year, just, just, just send this MP3 and have co -pilot transcribe it.

And you know, I had a chance to sit down with Satya and just sort of reflect a little bit, you know, we've worked together, you know, for years and, uh, just sort of reflect a little bit on what's changed and what we've learned together. It was like, it's just a wonderful to think about like the different experiences. The first time I met Satya, uh, was when he was a corporate vice president leading engineering on great planes.

So talk about dynamics 365, right? That's right. And, uh, we had, there was a dinner, it was me. I was at an agency at the time. He was sitting next to me, didn't know him very well. Good conversation at the end of it. He said like, he said, you know, Frank, do you think you're world -class? Do you think you're world class? He asked you that at the end of dinner.

At the end of dinner. That would have thrown me for a loop. It did. It would throw me for a loop, too. Because how do you answer a question like that? Well, because if you say yes. You're a total jackass. And if you say no, you're like, you're going to be fired. What are you doing here? And, you know, I think I said something like, you know, well, I certainly aspire to be world class and I get up every day hoping to be a little bit better than I was yesterday.

Sure. And I think that's a solid answer. And, you know, when I think about such as impact on Microsoft and in particular that sense of being a learner and not a knower, that question of being, are you world class? The answer is never going to be yes. And if he asks anybody on his team that question, they better not answer yes, because like the world is moving fast.

And this, you know, the growth mindset that has been installed really is in a super thoughtful way at Microsoft. The idea that the only way we're going to be successful is if we are willing to learn from the mistakes that we've made, talk about what we're going to do differently and just get a little better. That's why the company will be continued to be successful.

Not because we've got the smartest people or because you've got the best technology all the time, but because people are waking up every day going like, I bet I could be a little bit better today than I was yesterday. Mary Jo, I feel like we weren't tough enough on Frank. I don't know.

Frank's not going to say that, but you know, hey, he's on his way out We've been through it. I mean, we've all been through it, right? We have. We have been through it. I remember standing backstage with Mary Jo at various events, talking about security issues, scalability, and products that weren't shipping on time, and possible vaporware.

Possible. Possible vaporware. Perhaps. Perhaps. You know? I feel like I have been able to have sustained relationships with people that are covering the company through thick and thin. Yep. I mean, like, some days are better than others, and some days are more difficult. But, and that is just super important. And this is the thing that I worry about.

In a world where everything is transactional, that people lose that sense of people at the center of it. There's just real work to do. And in a world where your agent is referring to the other person's agent, there's an even bigger risk of that human connection going away. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, in the world, like, there is a huge role for journalism and journalists, however broadly you describe it, in the world today.

It's more important than ever. It's more important than ever that people trust what they hear. People trust what they hear because they trust the people. This is, you know, like, this is what I've learned. You know, Mary Jo, if you look at your career, the reason people read your articles is because you've been mostly right. You know, put that on your billboard, Mary Jo.

You've been mostly right about Microsoft and, you know, as a place where you really, you know, made your bones, right? You know, you were the ax. You understood Microsoft better than almost anybody else. And as a result, people trust you for things. You know, Todd, you're in the same thing. You know, you were at the PI and then you were at, you know, the business journals and then you were on your own.

And throughout those things, you know, the common element was like Todd understands this company in the industry. Not GeekWire, but Todd. And so the value of that understanding in a transactional world gets higher. We just have to figure out how to make it sustainable, you know, like from a journalism standpoint, because it feels like less and less sustainable, even though it's more and more important.

Well, this has been fun. And I feel like we did accomplish what we set out to do to get a real sense for how things have evolved. And also just to get your reflections on this this career you've had at this company for so long. I mean, you really have been through it and seen it all. So I'm really glad you were here, Frank. And Mary Jo, thank you for joining in on this.

This has been great. Thank you so much for having me. That was fun. It was fun to get to grill Frank one more time. That's right. Well, I'll be around. So, you know, you always know how to get me. Yes. Next, we're going to have to cover open AI, apparently, Mary Jo. Exactly. To be able to interact with Frank. That's right. That's where the rumor is going to start.

And you're going to have to stamp it out because that could be damaging. Yeah. I'm sure I'll hear from somebody. Frank, thanks very much for talking with us. It was great to be here. And it was fun to reflect a little bit in all the things we've been through together. And thanks to both of you. You've been an important part of telling the Microsoft story.

Sometimes I've loved it. And sometimes I haven't. But it's still the same story. Very good. All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Kurt Milton edited this episode. My colleague, John Cook, and I will be back next week with a new episode of the GeekWire podcast. GeekWire podcast. GeekWire podcast. GeekWire podcast. GeekWire podcast. GeekWire podcast.

GeekWire podcast. GeekWire podcast. GeekWire podcast.