内容来源：https://news.microsoft.com/signalmagazine/issue/issue-02/#a-new-perspective-on-ai

内容总结：

微软高层与专家分享多元洞见：从危机公关到AI未来，从网络安全到创新设计

近期，微软多位高层及合作专家通过《信号》杂志分享了他们在通信、人工智能、网络安全及产品设计等领域的深度思考与实践经验，为读者揭示了在数字时代应对挑战、把握机遇的多元视角。

通信的艺术：何时回应，何时沉默
微软首席传播官弗兰克·X·肖以北欧神话中牺牲一只眼睛换取智慧的奥丁为例，阐述了现代企业传播面临的困境：在信息爆炸的时代，试图关注并回应每一条数字信息，可能适得其反。他援引“史翠珊效应”（试图掩盖信息反而使其广泛传播）指出，回应的计算从来都不简单。有时纠错反而放大错误，有时沉默却能让谣言自然消亡。关键在于辨别力——没有通用算法，需评估信息与核心受众的关联度、时效性，并确保回应能一锤定音。真正的智慧并非全知全能，而是知道何时行动、何时克制，通过长期建立信任，让话语更有分量。

AI赋能创造力：一位VR先驱的亲身体验
虚拟现实先驱、计算机科学家杰伦·拉尼尔分享了他如何通过AI加速学习珠宝制作的经历。一次误诊失明的经历，激发了他对珠宝的痴迷。他从简单的串珠开始，进而使用金属黏土、激光切割机等工具。他将串珠比作AI：组合现有元素，却能通过故事和语境创造独特价值。拉尼尔反对将AI视为具有自主意识的实体，更愿将其视作“人类协作的最高效形式”，是训练数据背后所有人的集体智慧。他建议以具体、务实的方式使用AI（例如询问“其他珠宝匠如何…”），而非将其当作“知道答案”的伙伴，这样可以减少“幻觉”，获得更可靠的帮助，同时增强使用者的自主性与控制感。

打击网络犯罪：一次针对“破解”安全工具的全球行动
文章详细回顾了微软数字犯罪部门（DCU）与网络安全公司Fortra及全球健康安全组织Health-ISAC合作，打击被滥用的合法安全工具“Cobalt Strike”破解版的行动。2021年，此类破解工具被用于攻击爱尔兰公共卫生系统，造成严重混乱。DCU没有追捕单个黑客，而是通过民事诉讼，获取法院命令，查封用于传播恶意软件的域名和IP地址。该行动将破解工具与全球68起医疗相关勒索软件攻击联系起来，最终使非法服务器数量下降72%，其平均存活时间从49天大幅缩短至16天。此举展示了通过法律创新、数据共享与跨国合作主动打击网络犯罪生态的有效模式。

CTO展望“智能体网络”：AI将如何重塑互联网
微软首席技术官凯文·斯科特将当前AI的发展比作早期互联网的“无许可创新”阶段，充满兴奋与创造性能量。他展望了“智能体网络”的未来：AI智能体将能代表用户执行复杂任务、进行购买、跨网站与服务协作。这需要像早期HTTP协议那样的开放标准，如模型上下文协议（MCP）和微软开发的NLWeb框架，让网站能以自然语言交互。斯科特强调，开放至关重要，应避免过早的商业压力扼杀创新。AI应成为人类创造力的加速器，如同他利用AI反向工程日本古法陶瓷工艺一样，但创造的核心仍应掌握在人类手中。

设计大师的三十年：从IntelliMouse到自适应控制器
微软合伙设计总监卡尔·莱德贝特回顾了其30年设计生涯中的五个标志性产品：开创鼠标滚轮先河的IntelliMouse；超前时代的交互玩具ActiMates Barney；不断迭代、以人为中心的Xbox系列；虽未商业成功但理念超前的音乐生态系统Zune；以及他最自豪的作品——为残障玩家设计的Xbox自适应控制器。他总结其设计哲学始终是理解用户，并与用户共同创造（尤其是为特定群体设计时）。面对AI带来的行业变革，他感到身处一个“非常酷的位置”。

前CEO的新赛场：用科技重塑体育场馆体验
前微软CEO史蒂夫·鲍尔默分享了他作为洛杉矶快船队老板，打造全新科技场馆Intuit Dome的历程。场馆集成了人脸识别无感支付入场购物、每个座位的独立充电与温控系统、监测观众噪音水平的“声音摄像头”，以及专门干扰客队、能降低对手罚球命中率的“巨墙”看台。鲍尔默将产品开发思维带入体育，旨在打造世界顶级的篮球现场娱乐体验，让科技服务于提升观赛沉浸感与主场优势，并以此吸引球员和球迷。对他而言，这虽不及微软增长的规模与复杂性，却是纯粹的乐趣所在。

这些多元的叙述共同指向一个核心：在技术飞速演进的时代，深刻的洞察、审慎的抉择、开放的协作以及对人的关注，始终是应对复杂挑战、释放创新潜力的关键。

中文翻译：

有时，全知全能并非如传说中那般美好。
北欧神话中牺牲一只眼睛换取智慧的奥丁深知视野的代价：洞悉一切意味着承担知晓过多的重负，而有时知晓过多本身便是一种桎梏。

在现代传播领域，尤其是在微软这样的企业，我们仿佛化身为奥丁，注视着每一条新闻、每一则推文、每一篇博客、数字世界里的每一丝风吹草动。当目睹一切时，我们极易陷入回应一切的冲动——纠正每一个误解，扑灭每一簇可能燎原的火星。但正如迈克·马斯尼克在"史翠珊效应"中精辟阐释的：有时回应行为本身反而会放大我们期望消弭的事物。

回应的权衡从来不易。我曾亲见介入有瑕疵的报道反而适得其反，吸引更多关注并赋予其不应有的可信度。我也曾因未对失实报道采取更强硬行动而后悔，目睹它被客户和意见领袖当作真相传播。同样，我也见证过沉默的力量——在某些情况下，不加评论地任其自然消逝，反而能让报道悄然沉寂。真正的挑战在于辨别何时该行动、何时该静默。这没有万能算法，也没有确保决策正确的清单。

史翠珊效应是我们所有传播工作者的警世寓言。2005年，歌手芭芭拉·史翠珊因一张其住宅的照片起诉摄影师，该照片本是数千张海岸侵蚀记录中的普通一张。诉讼时照片仅被下载六次，其中两次来自她的律师。诉讼公开后呢？下载量逼近五十万次。当企业和个人拥有日益强大的数字社交影响力时，我们很容易不慎将本不为人知的事物推向万众瞩目。

如何决策？首先关注最核心的受众，审视内容与受众的关联度。若关联微弱，或许无需回应。其次考量时效。信息传播迅捷，若错过第一轮传播周期，回应只会引发第二轮关注。最后，任何回应必须能彻底驳斥或扭转议题方向。我们或许未能抢占先机，但理应掌握最终话语权。

奥丁领悟的智慧并非全知，而是明辨。是知晓何时行动、何时克制。是经年累月建立信任与关系，使我们的发言具有分量。在这个每家企业都被置于显微镜下、每个决策都被审视、每个失误都被放大的时代，真正的挑战不是看见一切，而是懂得如何应对所见。

我们的目标不是追逐每个热点，而是帮助读者在喧嚣中辨明方向。《信号》杂志存在的意义在于提供反思、对话与背景解读的空间，而非仅是即时反应。我们邀请您加入对话，共同塑造重要议题，以您的智慧应对我们面临的挑战。在无限信号的世界里，真正的艺术在于选择放大哪些声音，又让哪些悄然流过。

弗兰克·X·肖
微软首席传播官

人工智能新视角
杰伦·拉尼尔从濒临失明的经历与对珠宝的狂热中领悟的AI真谛

虚拟现实先驱杰伦·拉尼尔数十年来一直在探索他参与创造的数字世界的承诺与陷阱。这位计算机科学家、音乐家兼艺术家联合创立了首家VR公司，推动了这项突破性技术的普及。作为《时代》周刊"全球百大影响力人物"，他还著有畅销书《你不是个 gadget》与《未来属于谁？》。在为本刊撰写的独家文章中，拉尼尔分享了如何释放人工智能潜能的见解。

2025年初，我被误诊为可能在春季失明。在等待修正诊断的一个月里，我意外发展出珍贵的创作热情——而AI正是这种热情的赋能者。我分享这段经历既希望探讨如何最大化利用AI，也旨在澄清常见的误解：我并非AI怀疑论者或反对者，而是一个认为多数人对AI认知有误的AI enthusiast。

当被告知仅剩数月光明时，我竭尽所能凝视世界：观察动植物，漫步峡谷欣赏日落，久久注视人们的眼睛与面容。但我也不得不参加那些只有幻灯片方程式的会议。

生长于新墨西哥州的我自幼喜爱本土银饰，确诊后我开始购买绿松石戒指，在漫长矩阵运算讨论中欣赏指间光彩。戒指越买越多，数量近乎荒诞。

当月末得知首位视网膜专家误诊时，我欣喜若狂。原因令我稍感尴尬：1980年代初，我在斯坦福医学院与外科医生乔·罗森、初创公司VPL Research工程师安·拉斯科合作开发了可能是首个手术模拟系统。世纪之交时，我因小问题接受视网膜激光手术。主刀医生恰巧熟悉我早年工作，竟允许我短暂操作激光在视网膜上打点（显然我不会透露医生姓名）。

我忍不住做了点艺术发挥——沿激光点环增添了微小波动。于是我的视网膜上有了轻微"纹身"，这尚未在年轻人中流行，但说不定随时会兴起。正是这个未曾向首诊专家提及的非常规操作引起了他的警觉。

重获光明后，我不仅对视觉，对珠宝的鉴赏力也突飞猛进。某种意义上，误诊成了祝福。购买过量珠宝让我自觉荒诞，于是进阶为珠宝匠人。从简易串珠起步，逐步涉足金属黏土、正式焊接切割、无数次捶打磨砂，再到铸造、激光切割与数控铣削。我甚至在斋浦尔和苏门答腊建立了稀有宝石采购渠道，彻底沉溺其中。

串珠作为珠宝制作的入门技艺看似简单——只需将现成的带孔饰物穿入金属线，却蕴含哲学深意。这恰似AI！试问：一串珠链是否具有创造性？你不过是在组合他人制作的物件，但珠链却能传递情感，超越原材料本身。其价值难以捉摸，存乎观者眼中。你需要故事与语境才能真正欣赏珠链。数万年来，每件珠宝艺术品都是当时的故事，至今仍向我们诉说着演变历程。

若不知我濒临失明的背景，便无法完全理解我的串珠作品。故事必须融入珠链，才能使其焕发完整光芒。抽象的珠串根本不成其为珠串。

我被视为AI怀疑论者，源于常与同行进行哲学辩论。主流AI论述总将其描绘为某种新实体的创造，其缺陷（如幻觉）被视为需在该实体中修复的问题。人们期待AI最终成为通用价值源泉，而非具有特定用途的工具。这些观念如此普遍，以至我们忽视了它们是可选择的——而我并不认同。

我更愿将AI视为人类协作的最高效形式。AI中没有独立意识实体，只有所有训练数据贡献者的智慧聚合。这种框架让我更易想象文明的光明前景，而非人类在经济上被淘汰的图景。但这是宏观动机，在此我想聚焦个人层面。

珠宝制作技艺精妙。少年时在新墨西哥州请教纳瓦霍匠人，他们虽乐意示范，却告诫需数年方能掌握。但今非昔比，数字世界并未湮灭实体珠宝，反而拉近了距离。

在线视频成为实体技能的新晋 universal teacher（关注我工作的人知道我同样担忧网络平台可能造成的社会心理伤害，但其积极作用确实存在）。可惜视频难以及时解答细节问题：你可观看戒指制作教程获得启发，但若遇具体难题，可能浏览数十个相关视频仍无解。例如：哪种建模黏土在烧结金属包边中填充时不会收缩？答案存在却难寻觅。论坛求助又往往回复迟缓，聊天流还常偏离主题。

AI是人类数据的融合体。构建大型AI模型本质是通过统计分析检测文字、声音、像素等可数字化内容的模式，再调用这些模式生成回应。AI核心原理就是如此简单：识别模式并外推。

主流观点建议用户将AI程序视为合作伙伴，但我认为这并非最有效的思维方式。若以提问方式提示，模型自然会构建类似人类互动的回应，这容易导致答案略微超越数据支撑——因为训练数据中的人类对话本就如此。当AI看似超越已知事实时（通常称为幻觉），正是此机制在作用。

如果我换种提问："是否有珠宝匠成功在不换刀情况下，通过单次CNC铣削同时加工玉石及其镶嵌银饰？"模型便会讲述他人的成功经验，答案更具体。若直接询问模型（仿佛它无所不知），实则是在诱导其虚构。这类通用问题本无唯一答案，因为每件珠宝、每个工坊都独一无二。通用框架的提问可靠性较低，也低估了珠宝匠群体的奇妙多样性。通过询问他人成功经验，我将提示锚定在AI模型的创建逻辑上，隐性地要求一组现实答案，而非构建不存在的折中单一答案。

以 grounded mindset 使用AI既能提升个人自主性，又能增强生产力。当我精准引导探究而非在聊天群或视频中摸索时，掌控感更强。询问AI如何在庞杂3D设计程序中寻找冷门界面选项，可立即投入工作；而以往翻阅文档可能耗时数日。目标越明确，获得价值越多，也越不易陷入被AI取代的焦虑。

将AI模型视为合作伙伴的用户，需额外承担模拟关系带来的 overhead。观察这类使用方式时，我发现他们似乎用一种新型延迟替代了AI本应消除的延迟。模拟关系在后台确实消耗可观算力（即能源），因此用户和计算机都需为这种"伙伴关系"付出额外代价。当然人各有异，无意评判——我只能分享对我有效的方法。

另一项对我有效的原则是：牢记技术始终具有特定性。有人或许期待AI最终成为能解决任何可解问题的通用存在。我拒绝卷入关于AI发展程度的争论，重点在于：若具体思考AI的实际本质（即当下形态与运作方式），你便能更好利用它。这使AI成为特定工具，即便它是非常出色的特定工具。纵使AI未来可能演变，你能使用的唯有现存工具。

AI能运用训练数据中的模式进行外推。即使没有关于特定冷门珠宝技法的专著，模型利用语言模式外推也无可厚非。若以确信理想解决方案近在咫尺的姿态提问，模型可能产生幻觉答案。反之，若询问听起来他人已实践过的技术推测——他们是谁？是否有人探讨过我想尝试的方法？模型能否提供思路或分析成败原因？——这类 grounded prompts 即使略微超越已知范畴，也能避免幻觉。

我认为所谓"幻觉"本质是用户期望错位。更具体实际使用的模型可能出错，但不会产生幻觉，因为它未被赋予幻觉的 theater。不妨尝试这种方法，看是否适合你。

最后请留意：纠结"究竟是你在创作还是AI代劳"毫无意义。任何创作都只在你自己创造的语境中才有意义与价值。串珠或许不难，算法也能轻松通过串珠图灵测试，但这是一种误导性的理解。珠链讲述故事，故事与珠链的结合才是价值所在。我的串珠创作是对即将失明恐惧的回应，AI未曾经历那个故事，经历者是我。持久价值永远根植于现实。

AI助我以近乎荒谬的速度掌握珠宝制作，带来自由与自主感。自开始以来我每日至少创作一件，许多作品相当出色。我享受佩戴它们，也喜欢看到他人佩戴我的创作。重点不在AI本身，而这正是AI的价值所在。

你必须不断创新，因为网络罪犯永远在创新
微软数字犯罪调查组、网络安全公司与全球卫生组织如何联手应对新型黑客

2021年5月14日黎明前，爱尔兰数家医院的医护发现无法访问病历，这是破坏行动的首批征兆。午夜时分，勒索软件攻击在该国公共卫生网络中悄然发动，此前黑客已在IT系统中潜伏数周。当日上午员工到岗时，数万台设备已被加密，工作人员被迫切断网络以遏制灾难。

爱尔兰卫生服务执行局（HSE）遭遇的网络攻击使其庞大的医院、诊所和服务网络陷入混乱，患者因治疗延迟和预约取消面临危险。本已应对新冠疫情的医护人员，在失去电子病历、网络电话和电子邮件后，被迫回归纸笔办公。

多数勒索软件攻击会锁定设备与数据直至支付赎金。但此次攻击者数日后意外提供了免费解密密钥。HSE仍耗时四个月修复IT系统，18个月才开始联系因数据泄露受影响的9万人。事件与恢复过程记录于HSE委托的公开报告中。

"这场网络攻击造成的损害难以估量，"时任HSE首席执行官保罗·里德在攻击后一月的议会卫生委员会上作证，"经济损失固然存在，但不幸的是，还有人力成本。"

攻击者使用了网络罪犯的常用工具——合法安全工具Cobalt Strike的"破解版"（即通过窃取、盗版等手段绕过许可控制）。一年后，该工具破解版又用于勒索哥斯达黎加政府，触发国家紧急状态。

合法使用时，Cobalt Strike是"红队"（在受控环境中模拟攻击以识别漏洞的安全测试员）的强大工具，可部署恶意软件渗透网络、窃取凭证、远程控制系统及进行其他测试性破坏活动。

HSE遭袭时，破解版Cobalt Strike已成为微软数字犯罪调查组（DCU）雷达上的重大威胁。这支由调查员、律师等专家组成的多元化团队，以开创性打击网络犯罪而闻名。

2008年团队成立应对恶意软件与网络威胁时，多数企业网络安全团队专注于修补漏洞、改进杀毒软件等被动防御。微软打击恶意软件有双重考量：保护常被黑客利用攻击Windows设备的品牌与代码，以及主动守护全球计算机用户。

多年来，DCU通过法律行动与全球合作领导了30多次打击恶意软件系统、犯罪集团及政府关联黑客的行动，包括2010年瓦解 prolific botnet Waledac、2016年打击干预美国大选的俄罗斯黑客组织Forest Blizzard、2025年遏制常用于凭证窃取的快速进化恶意软件Lumma Stealer，使全球数百万受感染设备脱离犯罪控制。

这些行动产生的威胁情报与微软客户、合作伙伴及内部团队共享，强化公司服务安全并提升全球行业网络安全。团队还分析情报数据为执法调查提供证据，促成近800次逮捕。

"网络犯罪的动态本质要求持续警惕与创新，"微软助理总法律顾问兼DCU负责人史蒂文·雅各达表示，"各部门洞察网络犯罪生态的不同侧面，分享见解能让我们更有效调整策略应对新兴威胁。"

针对破解版Cobalt Strike，DCU部署了开创性的新策略：不针对个体黑客，而是摧毁其传播恶意软件的系统——特别是精密的域名与IP地址网络。这需要通过起诉攻击者获取法庭命令。尽管团队经验丰富，取缔之路仍非坦途。

与以往直接打击恶意软件不同，此次DCU要追查其他公司旗下流行工具的未授权副本，且同时针对多个恶意软件组织（而非单一组织或僵尸网络）以最大化影响。

这项雄心勃勃的案件需要两年细致的技术与法律工作，由曾参与瓦解TrickBot、Necurs等 notorious botnets 的微软调查员杰森·莱昂斯牵头。

这位前美国陆军反情报特工兼网络安全事件响应专家，曾在得州家中追踪全球网络攻击余波。过去他常昼夜不休应对危机，如今他希望对犯罪产生更大影响："与其像消防员般被动响应，我更想破坏他们的生意与网络。"

疫情期间，他怀疑黑客正更多利用破解版Cobalt Strike攻击因远程办公转型而分心脆弱的企业。他需要证实这一点。

数月间，他与同事梳理微软数据寻找线索：从Defender防病毒产品中所有Cobalt Strike使用警报入手，研究公司事件响应团队的取证分析，建立涉及该工具的已知攻击数据库，图景逐渐清晰："当时勒索软件勒索甚嚣尘上……破解版Cobalt Strike遍布互联网。"

关于黑客使用该工具的全貌，需来自工具所有者Fortra。微软单独行动风险极高——需要Fortra加入案件提供证据与公开支持，这需要数月时间与关键伙伴建立信任、共享信息。

"如果我们说'有个大问题，你们牵涉其中'，无法预知Fortra的立场，"莱昂斯坦言，"他们会协助还是拒绝？我们不得而知。"

行动初期，莱昂斯团队试图购买Cobalt Strike副本以解析其运作。总部位于明尼苏达州伊甸草原、拥有3000名员工的Fortra拒绝了请求。"我们不会随意出售，"Fortra研发副总裁鲍勃·厄尔德曼表示，"合法获取需严格背景审核，需了解使用场景：是否真实企业？使用方式是否符合许可标准？"

Fortra已知晓问题——每日发现约千起破解版Cobalt Strike活动，已为软件增加安全控制，并从黑客论坛和文件共享网站移除未授权副本。

但微软的方案更宏观，促使Fortra于2023年初作为共同原告加入。该公司提供的未授权使用水印列表成为关键证据——每个授权副本独有的水印值，让DCU团队及合作伙伴能精准识别需禁用的未授权或受损副本。

"与微软合作让我们能在更广范围开展工作，"厄尔德曼说，"他们带来大量新数据，我们则能解析工具，辨别是真实客户副本还是不应运行的未授权副本。"

在构建法律论证时，DCU助理总法律顾问理查德·博斯科维奇深知不能仅提知识产权诉讼。这位曾主导微软几乎所有恶意软件打击行动、擅长创新运用民事法律的律师，指控破解版Cobalt Strike被告违反通常保护音乐家作品的版权法，以及常用于打击假冒商品商标法。

被告从未出庭——诉讼只是获取取缔其恶意软件运营法庭命令的机制。博斯科维奇首次在恶意软件案件中动用民事反敲诈法，指控开发者、销售者、黑客、勒索者和洗钱者在 lucrative ransomware-as-a-service 企业中合谋。"我们运用所有可用工具，包括本非针对网络犯罪的工具，"他说，"你必须不断创新，因为网络罪犯永远在创新。"

曾担任17年联邦检察官的他明白，仅指控黑客滥用Fortra软件和微软代码在Windows设备运行恶意软件并不足够。要让法庭允许企业取缔他人数字资产，必须展示恶意软件的公共危害。"法官不太关心微软这家跨国公司的损失，他们会问'你们为何来我的法庭？'"博斯科维奇说，"因此案件重点从保护微软或Fortra的知识产权，转向保护生态系统和客户。"

全球卫生安全组织Health-ISAC的加入成为转折点。这个代表超千家机构的佛罗里达组织作为共同原告，展示了医疗机构的脆弱性与勒索软件的人力代价。

疫情与多年IT安全资金不足使许多医疗机构易受勒索软件攻击。而维持患者护理与电子病历等关键系统的需求，迫使部分医院支付赎金，使其成为 profitable targets。根据美国国家情报总监办公室数据，HSE遭袭同年，美国医疗机构遭遇超400次勒索软件攻击。

"现代医院如此依赖IT系统，当系统瘫痪时破坏力惊人，"Health-ISAC首席安全官埃罗尔·韦斯说，"无法接收患者，救护车改道，纸质流程使服务放缓。若正在手术需知患者血型，只能依赖纸质备份并祈祷其可用可靠。"

韦斯列举了成为头条的连锁后果：伊利诺伊州一家乡村医院因攻击与疫情陷入财务螺旋后关闭；宾州医疗网络患者记录被窃并公开，包括癌症患者治疗裸照，引发集体诉讼和6500万美元和解；芬兰心理治疗中心机密记录遭窃，黑客勒索未果后曝光记录并敲诈患者，导致一名患者自杀。

Health-ISAC、Fortra和微软整合数据与专业知识，将破解版Cobalt Strike

英文来源：

Sometimes, being all-seeing is not everything it’s cracked up to be
Odin, the Norse god who traded an eye for wisdom, understood the price of vision: to see everything is to carry the burden of knowing too much, and sometimes, knowing too much is its own kind of trap.
In the world of modern communications, especially at a company like Microsoft, it can feel as if we’re channeling Odin, watching every headline, every tweet, every blog post, every whisper in the digital wind. And having seen everything, the temptation is strong to respond to everything, to correct every misconception, to stamp out every spark before it becomes a wildfire. But as Mike Masnick so memorably described in the Streisand effect, sometimes the very act of responding can amplify what we wish would fade away.
The calculus of response is never simple. I’ve seen firsthand how engaging with a flawed story can sometimes make it worse, drawing more attention and lending it legitimacy it never deserved. I’ve regretted not taking stronger action in the face of an inaccurate story, seeing it shared and accepted as truth by customers and influencers. I’ve also seen the power of silence, how, in some cases, letting a story pass without comment allows it to die a natural death. The challenge is knowing which is which. There’s no algorithm for this, no checklist that guarantees the right call.
The Streisand effect is a cautionary tale for all of us in communications. For context, in 2005 the singer sued a photographer about a photo of her house, collected as one of thousands documenting coastal erosion. At the time of the suit, the photo had been downloaded six times, two of those being by Streisand’s lawyers. After the suit and publicity? Nearly half a million downloads. And as companies and individuals increasingly have strong digital and social signals, it can be easy to accidentally take something we’ve seen but others have not and ensure everyone looks at it.
How to decide? Start with the audience we care most about and look at the intersection between the post or video or article and that audience. If it is a weak connection, then a response might not be needed. Next, consider timing. News and information move fast. If we can’t respond within that first cycle, our response will cause a second cycle. And finally, any response has to conclusively rebut or redirect the thesis. We might not have gotten the first word, but we should for sure have the last.
Wisdom, as Odin learned, is not omniscience, it’s discernment. It’s knowing when to act and when to hold back. It’s building trust and relationships over time, so that when we do speak, our words carry weight. In a world where every company is under a microscope, where every decision is scrutinized and every misstep magnified, the real challenge is not to see everything, but to know what to do with what we see.
Our goal is not to chase every story, but to help our readers make sense of the noise
Signal Magazine exists as a space for reflection, dialogue, and context, not just reaction. Our goal is not to chase every story, but to help our readers make sense of the noise. We invite you to join in the conversation, to help shape what matters, to bring your own wisdom to bear on the challenges we face. In a world of infinite signals, the real art is choosing which ones to amplify and which ones to let pass.
Frank X. Shaw
Chief Communications Officer, Microsoft
A new perspective on AI
What Jaron Lanier learned about AI from a brush with blindness – and a turbo-charged obsession with jewelery
Jaron Lanier, the visionary behind virtual reality, has spent decades exploring the promises and pitfalls of the digital world he helped create. A computer scientist, musician and artist, Lanier co-founded the first VR company and popularized the ground-breaking technology. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, he’s also the author of bestsellers You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future? In this exclusive piece for Signal, Lanier offers his tips for how to unlock the power of artificial intelligence.
In early 2025 I received a false diagnosis that I was likely to go blind by spring. I then had to endure a precipitous month until the corrective second opinion finally arrived. As it happens, during that month I developed a new creative obsession that has become precious to me. And that obsession was enabled by AI. One reason I am telling you about all this is that I hope to share some thoughts on how to get the most out of AI, but this confession might also help to undo a common misunderstanding that I am an AI skeptic or opponent. Instead, I am an AI enthusiast who thinks that many of us are thinking about AI wrong.
When I was told I had only a few months left to see, I did all I could to see well. I stared at plants and animals. Went on walks to ogle ravines and sunsets. I lingered on eyes and faces. But I was also obliged to go to the kind of meeting where there isn’t a lot to look at other than equations on a slide.
I grew up in New Mexico and adored native silverwork as a boy, so after my diagnosis I started to buy turquoise rings to adore on my fingers during long discussions about matrix operations. Lots of rings, an absurd number.
What a joy it was to learn at the end of that long month that the first retina guy had gotten it wrong. The reason was a little embarrassing for me. In the early 1980s I had collaborated on what was probably the first surgical simulation, at Stanford Med, with Joe Rosen, a surgeon, and Ann Lasko, an engineer from our startup VPL Research, which was also the first VR company. Then, around the end of the century, I had retinal laser surgery for a minor issue. It turned out that the retina surgeon was familiar with my earlier work and offered to let me briefly operate the laser to put a few of the dots on my retina. (I will not reveal this doctor’s name, obviously.)
I couldn’t help myself, I had to add a little variation, a little art, a wiggle along a circle of laser dots. So there’s a slight tattoo on my retina, which is something all the kids are not doing yet, but any minute. It was this deviation from the norm – which I had neglected to mention to the first retina specialist – that alarmed him.
By the time I got the good news, my appreciation of not only vision, but of jewelry, was supercharged. In a way, the false diagnosis had been a blessing. I was feeling ridiculous buying excessive amounts of jewelry, so I graduated to jewelry maker. Initially this meant simple beading, but then I went on to working with metal clays, then to proper soldering, cutting, and so much hammering and sanding – and then to casting, a laser cutter and a CNC (computerized machining) mill. I developed contacts in Jaipur and Sumatra to source rare gems to set. I got it bad.
Beading, the gateway drug of jewelry making, is as easy as could be, just arranging preexisting, pretty items with holes in them on a wire, but it is philosophically provocative. It is similar to AI! Consider: Is a string of beads creative? All you are doing is combining things other people have made. And yet a string of beads can be expressive. It can be more than the sources. But the value is elusive, in the eye of the beholder. You need a story, a context, to fully appreciate a string of beads. There have been beads for tens of thousands of years, and each work of jewelry art was a story in its time, and an evolving story to us now.
You can’t fully see my bead work without knowing that I thought I was going blind. The story has to be part of the beads for them to radiate light fully. Beads in the abstract are not beads at all.
The way I got my reputation for being an AI skeptic is that I do argue philosophy with my colleagues in our field quite a lot. The usual way of talking about AI is to say it’s the creation of some sort of new entity, and that anything wrong with it, like hallucinations, is a flaw to be fixed in that entity. The entity will eventually become a fully general source of value rather than a specific thing with specific uses. These are common ideas, so common we do not even notice that they are choices, but I do not embrace them.
I prefer to think of AI as the most productive form of human collaboration yet. There isn’t anyone home in an AI, no entity there, just all the people who made data that the AI was trained on. I like this framing better because it makes happy future paths for civilization clearer to imagine than if one thinks of people becoming economically obsolete, but that’s a big picture motivation. Here I want to focus on the personal, intimate level.
Jewelry making is tricky. When I was a boy in New Mexico I asked some Navajo makers if they would show me a little of how to do it, and they were happy to, but warned me it would take years to learn. But that was then. The digital world has not eclipsed physical jewelry but brought it nearer.
Online video is the new universal teacher of physical skills, and was helpful. (Those who follow my work know that I also worry about societal and psychological damage that can be wrought by online platforms, but the positive uses are also real.) Unfortunately, videos are poor at helping you learn details on demand. You can watch someone’s tutorial on how they made a ring, which can be revelatory, but if you are trying to figure out how to solve a specific problem, you might watch dozens of related videos and still not find the answer. Which modeling clays won’t contract if you use them to hold a space in a bezel within a sintering metal clay? The answer is out there, but hard to find. So you ask on forums. Unfortunately, these can also be slow to provide answers, and are prone to annoyances, as chat streams frequently go off path.
AI is an amalgam of people’s data. What we do when we make a large AI model is bring a lot of data under statistical analysis, in which patterns of words, sounds, pixels – really anything that can be digitized – are detected. These patterns are then called on to create responses. AI is that simple in its core. We detect patterns and extrapolate them.
While the usual way of thinking about AI suggests that a user should treat the program as a partner, as another entity, I don’t find that to be the most useful mindset. If I prompt with a question, the model naturally constructs a response that sounds like the way other people have answered each other. This increases the likelihood that the answer will reach a little beyond what the data justifies, because that is how all those people talked to each other in the time before their data was used for training. This is what is happening when AI seems to get ahead of known facts, usually called a hallucination.
If I instead prompt with something like, “Have other jewelers had success CNC milling jade and the silver it is set in in a single job without tool changes?”, then the model tells me stories of what has worked for other people. It is more concrete. If I ask the model directly, as if it knows anything, I am practically begging it to confabulate. There is no single answer to the general form of the question, since each piece of jewelry is unique, as is each jewelry workshop. The answer to a prompt with general framing becomes less reliable, and underplays the wondrous variety found among jewelers. By asking what has worked for others, I have grounded the prompt in how the AI model was created, and asked implicitly for a cluster of real-world answers instead of a constructed middle, single answer that does not exist.
Using AI with a grounded mindset brings personal benefits as well as more focused productivity. As you use AI, your personal autonomy – your degree of self-directedness – should both feel like it is increasing, and it should actually be increasing. When I direct my investigation tightly instead of wading through chat groups or videos, then I am in more control. When I ask an AI model where to find an obscure user interface option in a sprawling 3D design program, then I can work right away, while when I had to dragnet through documentation, it could take hours or days. The more directed I am, the more value I get, and the less I am vulnerable to feeling like the AI is replacing me.
Those who treat an AI model as a partner have to add the overhead of whatever that simulated relationship entails. When I watch people use AI in that way, it seems to me that they are substituting a new kind of delay that AI should have done away with. It is also true that simulating a relationship costs a nontrivial amount of computation, meaning energy, in the backend. So there is a tax on both the user and the computer for simulating a partner instead of just being a tool. But I understand people are different. No judgment! I can really only report what works for me.
Another principle that works for me is to remember that technology is always specific. Some might want to think of AI as eventually being fully general, able to solve any solvable problem. I refuse to be drawn into arguments about whether I am skeptical about how good AI will become. That is not the point. The point is that if you think concretely about what AI actually is – meaning what it is today, how it works today – then you can use it better. That makes AI into a specific thing instead of a general thing, even if it is a very good specific thing. And while AI might be something else in the future, the only tool you can use is the one that already exists.
One thing AI can do is use patterns in training data to extrapolate. Even if there is no treatise out there about a particular esoteric jewelry making method, there’s nothing wrong with the model extrapolating using language patterns. If you prompt the model to solve a problem as if you are confident an ideal solution is already within reach, then it might hallucinate to form an answer. On the other hand, if you prompt for a speculation about a technique that sounds like things that have already worked for specific people – and who are they, and has anyone speculated about this thing I want to try, so that the model can suggest ideas about it, or even why it might or might not work – then these types of grounded prompts eschew hallucinations even while moving a little beyond what is already known.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as a hallucination, really, just a misaligned expectation from a user. A model that is used more concretely and practically can be wrong, but can’t hallucinate, because it wasn’t given a theater for hallucinations. Try this approach, see if it works for you.
Finally, notice that it doesn’t make sense to worry about whether you really did anything, or if the AI did the work for you. Whatever you are doing, it is only meaningful and valuable in the context you created. Combining beads might not be hard, and would be a relatively easy thing for an algorithm to do well enough to pass a bead Turing Test, but that’s a deceptive way to understand the situation. Beads tell a story, and the story in combination with the beads is where the value is. The point of my beading was that it was a response to my fear of imminent blindness. The AI did not live that story, I did. Enduring value is always grounded in reality.
Using AI helped me learn jewelry making with an almost preposterous speed. It was a feeling of freedom and autonomy. I have made at least one piece a day since I started and many of them are pretty good. I like wearing the stuff. I like seeing other people wearing pieces I made. It’s not about the AI, and that is what makes the AI good.
You have to innovate because the cybercriminal is always innovating
How Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, a cybersecurity company and a global health organization came together to take on a new breed of hacker
One of the first signs of sabotage emerged before dawn on May 14, 2021, when doctors and nurses at several hospitals in Ireland found that they couldn’t access patient records. A ransomware attack had been silently unleashed across the country’s public health network in the middle of the night, after someone had prowled inside the IT system for weeks. By the time many employees arrived at work that morning, tens of thousands of devices had been encrypted, prompting staff to cut off internet access altogether to contain the devastation.
The cyberattack on the Ireland Health Service Executive (HSE) threw its large network of hospitals, clinics and services into chaos, endangering patients who faced delayed treatments and canceled appointments. Care providers, already dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, reverted to pen and paper as they coped with no electronic patient records, networked phone lines or email.
Many ransomware attacks lock people out of their devices and data until a payment is made. This time, the attackers unexpectedly shared a free decryption key a few days after the strike. But it would still take the HSE four months to fully repair its IT system and 18 months to start contacting the 90,000 people affected by a data breach stemming from the attack. The incident and recovery were documented in a public report commissioned by the HSE.
“There is no underestimating the damage that this cyberattack has caused,” Paul Reid, then chief executive officer at the HSE, testified at a parliamentary health committee a month after the attack. “There are financial costs, certainly, but there will, unfortunately, also be human costs.”
Attackers had hijacked the HSE with a favorite tool of cybercriminals, a version of the legitimate security tool Cobalt Strike that had been “cracked” – i.e., stolen, pirated or otherwise manipulated to bypass licensing controls. A cracked version of the tool would also be used to extort the Costa Rican government a year later, triggering a state of emergency.
When used legitimately, Cobalt Strike is a powerful tool for “red teams,” or security testers who simulate cyberattacks in a safe, controlled environment to identify vulnerabilities. The tool can deploy malware (malicious software) to prowl a network, steal credentials, remotely control systems and carry out other harmful activities for testing purposes.
Around the time of the HSE attack, cracked Cobalt Strike was already emerging as a major threat on the radar of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), a diverse team of investigators, lawyers and other experts known for tackling cybercrime in groundbreaking ways.
When the team formed in 2008 to confront the growing problem of malware and other online threats, most cybersecurity groups at other companies were focused on more reactive efforts like patching vulnerabilities and improving antivirus software. Microsoft had a twofold interest in fighting malware: It wanted to safeguard its brand and software code – which hackers often exploit to attack Windows devices – and to proactively protect computer users worldwide.
Over the years, the DCU has developed an aggressive strategy of legal actions and global partnerships to lead more than 30 operations against malware systems, criminal groups, crime enablers and government-affiliated hackers. The operations have included disruptions of Waledac, a prolific botnet, in 2010; Forest Blizzard, a Russian-sponsored hacking group that targeted U.S. elections, in 2016; and Lumma Stealer, a fast evolving malware often used in credential theft, in 2025. The work has severed criminal control of millions of infected devices worldwide.
The operations generate valuable threat intelligence that the DCU shares with customers, partners and teams across Microsoft to help strengthen the security of the company’s services and enhance cybersecurity across global industries. The team also analyzes the intelligence and other data to identify evidence for law enforcement investigations, which has resulted in nearly 800 arrests.
“The dynamic nature of cybercrime demands constant vigilance and innovation,” says Steven Masada, Microsoft assistant general counsel and head of the DCU. “Each sector sees different aspects of the cybercrime ecosystem, and when we share our insights, we evolve our strategies to counter emerging threats more effectively.”
For cracked Cobalt Strike, the DCU deployed a novel playbook it has pioneered. Instead of targeting individual hackers, the strategy aimed to shut down hackers’ systems for spreading malware, specifically their elaborate web of internet domains and IP addresses. To do that, the DCU would need to file a lawsuit against alleged attackers and get a court order. But despite the team’s considerable expertise, the path to taking down cracked Cobalt Strike would be far from easy.
Unlike previous operations that had targeted malware directly, the DCU wanted to pursue unauthorized copies of a popular tool owned by another company. And it wanted to focus on many malware groups at once, instead of a single group or botnet (a network of infected computers). This would help drive maximum impact.
The complexities of this ambitious case meant that it would take two years of detailed technical and legal work to build, starting with Microsoft investigator Jason Lyons, who had worked on the DCU disruptions of TrickBot, Necurs and other notorious botnets.
From his home office in Texas, Lyons had been tracking the fallout from cyberattacks around the world, including those in Ireland and Costa Rica, as well as an attack on an essential U.S. fuel pipeline. A former U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent and cybersecurity incident responder, he had spent years working nights and weekends responding to crises in previous roles. Now he wanted to make a bigger impact on crime.
“Instead of me responding to the bad guys and being on call like a firefighter, I wanted to make their lives a little worse and disrupt their business, their networks,” says Lyons.
During the pandemic, he began to suspect that hackers were increasingly using cracked Cobalt Strike to attack businesses that had become distracted and vulnerable in the sudden shift to remote work. He just had to prove it.
For months, he and a coworker sifted through Microsoft data for clues, starting with alerts for all instances of Cobalt Strike use from the company’s antivirus product Defender. They studied forensic analyses from a company team that responds to customers’ cyberthreat incidents. They developed a database of known attacks involving the tool, with the picture becoming clearer. “The ransomware extortion angle was blowing up at the time, and… cracked Cobalt Strike was all over the internet,” says Lyons.
A full picture of how much hackers were using the tool would have to come from the tool’s owner, Fortra. The risk of failure was high for Microsoft to proceed alone – it needed Fortra to join the case and provide evidence and public support, prompting months of trust-building and information-sharing with an essential partner.
“We didn’t know where Fortra was going to land if we said, ‘Oh hey, we’ve got a huge problem, and you’re part of it,’” Lyons says. “Were they going to help? Were they just going to tell us to suck eggs? We just didn’t know.”
Early in the operation, Lyons and his team tried to buy a copy of Cobalt Strike to open it up and understand how it works. Fortra, a 3,000-employee company headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, said no. “We don’t just sell it to anybody,” says Bob Erdman, associate vice president for Research & Development at Fortra.
“There is a lot of background vetting before somebody can legitimately obtain a copy. We need to know their use case. Are they a real company? Are they going to use it in a manner that we’re OK with and meets the license criteria we have?”
Fortra already knew about the problem – it was seeing around a thousand instances of cracked Cobalt Strike activity every day. It had added more security controls to the software and was already removing unauthorized copies from hacker forums and file-sharing sites.
But Microsoft’s approach was much broader, prompting Fortra to join the case as a co-plaintiff in early 2023. The company shared a list of watermarks linked to unauthorized Cobalt Strike use that turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence. The watermarks are a unique value assigned to every licensed copy of the tool, giving the DCU team and its partners a thorough, precise way to identify unauthorized or compromised copies that needed to be disabled.
“Working with Microsoft allowed us to do what we were doing on a much larger footprint,” Erdman says. “They brought a lot of new data to the table, and we could bring the ability to tear apart the tool and know if it’s a real customer’s copy, or an unauthorized copy that shouldn’t be running.”
When it came to laying out the legal arguments for the case, Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel for the DCU, knew he would have to present more than a simple intellectual property (IP) case. He had led almost every malware disruption for Microsoft and shaped the company’s legal approach with a knack for using civil laws creatively.
As in previous cases, he accused cracked Cobalt Strike defendants of breaking a copyright law more usually associated with protecting the work of musicians and artists, not the software code of tech companies. He said that defendants had violated a trademark law that’s often used to fight counterfeits like fake designer bags and stolen logos.
The defendants were never expected to show up in court – the lawsuit was just a mechanism to secure a court order for taking down their malware operation.
For the first time in his malware cases, Boscovich leveraged a civil racketeering law, arguing that developers, sellers, hackers, extortionists and money launderers colluded in a lucrative ransomware-as-a-service enterprise. “We look at all the tools that are available, including tools that weren’t meant to address cybercrime,” he says. “You have to innovate because the cybercriminal is always innovating.”
A former federal prosecutor for 17 years, he understood that it wasn’t enough to argue that hackers are simply misusing Fortra’s software and Microsoft’s code to run malware on Windows devices. For a court to allow the companies to take down other people’s digital assets, Boscovich had to show the public devastation of malware. “Judges don’t really care too much about Microsoft as a multinational corporation that’s suffering. They’re like, ‘Why are you in my courtroom?’” he says. “So the case became less about protecting Microsoft’s IP or Fortra’s IP, and more about protecting the ecosystem and our customers.”
Enter Health-ISAC, a global health security organization representing more than 1,000 member institutions. The Florida-headquartered group joined the case as a co-plaintiff to show the vulnerability of healthcare organizations and the human toll of ransomware.
The pandemic and years of underfunded IT security had left many healthcare organizations susceptible to ransomware. Meanwhile, the need to continue patient care and maintain critical systems like electronic medical records and diagnostic equipment forced some hospitals to pay attackers off, making them profitable targets. In the same year as the HSE attack, U.S. healthcare organizations were hit by a staggering wave of more than 400 ransomware assaults, according to the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the country’s intelligence agencies.
“The modern-day hospital is so reliant on IT that when these systems go down, it’s incredibly devastating,” says Errol Weiss, chief security officer for Health-ISAC. “They can’t do patient intake, and ambulances are diverted. Services slow down because they’re relying on paper and manual processes. If you’re with a patient trying to do surgery and need to know their blood type, you’ve got to go to paper backup and hope it’s available and reliable.”
Ransomware often has severe downstream consequences, and Weiss ticks off a few that made headlines. A rural hospital in Illinois closed after spiraling financially from an attack and the pandemic. Hackers stole patient records from a health network in Pennsylvania and published them, including naked photos of cancer patients receiving treatment. The attack led to a class-action lawsuit against the network and a $65 million settlement. In Finland, a patient died by suicide after a hacker stole confidential records from a psychotherapy center, failed to get a ransom, exposed the records and blackmailed patients.
Health-ISAC, Fortra and Microsoft were able to merge their considerable data and expertise to link cracked Cobalt Strike to 68 health-related ransomware attacks in 19 countries. Their investigation connected cracked copies to eight malware families, including LockBit, a fast encryption and denial-of-service attacker, and Conti, the malware used in the HSE and Costa Rican attacks.
“I’m a big advocate for the work that’s being done,” Weiss says. “There’s an ecosystem that criminals can use to their heart’s content, and unless we do something about that, this problem will not go away.”
Anatomy of a takedown
How Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit team break up networks that use “cracked” copies of legitimate software to spread malware

1. With the help of the software’s creators, identify online distributors of unauthorized or compromised copies of software that are being used to mount malware attacks.
2. Bring a civil lawsuit against these distributors based on alleged violations of trademark law. The defendants won’t show up in court, but that doesn’t matter.
3. In court, link the use of cracked software to malware attacks, show the public devastation it causes, and demonstrate the necessity of protecting the digital ecosystem.
4. Gain a court order allowing for the seizure of domains hosting cracked software copies and directing hosting providers to remove them.
5. Systematize the takedowns by crawling the web for instances of cracked software and automatically sending out removal notices to hosting providers.
   6.Result: a huge drop in the number of servers hosting unauthorized copies of the cracked software and a reduction in how long unauthorized servers stay active.
   Nearly two years after the HSE attack, a U.S. federal judge issued a court order in 2023 allowing Microsoft to seize domains and direct hosting providers to remove instances of cracked Cobalt Strike. The immediate impact was swift, with all malicious .com and .net domains seized within 24 hours of the order.
   The disruption has since evolved into a collaborative, automated takedown process, with the DCU crawling the internet for instances of cracked Cobalt Strike, Fortra providing a list of unauthorized watermarks and the DCU sending notices to hosting providers and government cybersecurity authorities to remove illegal IP addresses.
   The work has contributed to a 72% drop in the number of servers hosting unauthorized Cobalt Strike and a sharp decline in the lifespan of those servers, which are used to control infected computers. Before the operation, unauthorized servers stayed active for an average of 49 days. By the summer of 2025, the lifespan was a mere 16 days.
   “This is the impact of persistent notifications and the automated framework,” says Zoe Krumm, director of data analytics for the DCU. “It’s not just that unauthorized C2s (command-and-control servers) go down. When they go up, they’re not up as long. That gives me chills.”
   The operation has had a particularly significant impact in the U.S., thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a federal law that imposes steep fines on hosting providers who fail to quickly remove IP addresses hosting infringing content. “The DMCA is a very big hammer,” Boscovich says. “The order goes out. The sites go down.”
   In response, hackers have moved many cracked Cobalt Strike servers out of the U.S. and into countries with less regulation like China and Russia. Some security experts compare the maneuvering to a game of Whac-A-Mole, with the DCU chasing hackers globally with rapid takedowns customized for different countries, local laws and international IP treaties.
   The DCU is also continuing to seize domains and “sinkhole” them, redirecting malicious traffic to Microsoft servers for threat intelligence analysis. It has shared evidence from the case with law enforcement agencies to support criminal investigations. Fortra has worked with European law enforcement agencies to remove nearly 600 malicious IP addresses. And both companies have shared their expertise in the case at security conferences to help others battle ransomware.
   “This case is a powerful example of our team’s mission in action,” says DCU head Masada, a former federal prosecutor who led cases against major cybercrime groups in that role. “It highlights our commitment to strong partnerships and continual innovation to disrupt cybercriminal operations and protect not just our customers but the broader digital ecosystem.”
   For DCU investigator Lyons, the operation was another opportunity to make the digital world a little safer for large numbers of customers through teamwork with his colleagues, an eclectic group of lawyers, analysts, former law enforcement and government workers, and other experts dedicated to fighting cybercrime. “I’ve been able to do a lot of cool things in my life, protecting national security with the military and counterintelligence and things like that,” Lyons says. “But if I had to look back on my career, the greatest impact I’ve ever had is this job. We are helping millions of people.”
   “I haven’t felt this sort of excitement in a while”
   Microsoft’s chief technology officer and amateur potter Kevin Scott on how the web will be transformed by AI in coming years
   Back in 1993, Kevin Scott saw a demo of the Mosaic browser, the first widely used graphical interface for the nascent World Wide Web. As a technologist more interested in back-end workings than user experiences, he wasn’t impressed.
   “I was like, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” recalls Scott, then an intern at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where Mosaic was developed. “I didn’t understand it at all. Like, why would anyone care about that?”
   But a few years later, Scott’s thinking shifted.
   He built his own HTTP server from scratch, stood it up on a public IP address and realized anyone in the world could access it. Scott saw how easy it was to create and share on the internet – an open platform that offered people the power of permissionless innovation, a place where anyone with imagination could go experiment and try out their ideas. Using a simple set of protocols, people could build what they wanted, how they wanted, no approval needed.
   Now Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer, Scott sees a similar spirit of openness and innovation around the agentic web, an emerging vision of an internet powered by artificial intelligence (AI). “I haven’t felt this sort of excitement and this amount of creative energy about building brand new things in a while,” he says.
   As Scott explains, the agentic web is an open ecosystem of AI agents that can act on behalf of users. These agents won’t just answer questions. They’ll perform complex tasks, make purchases and interact with services. They can navigate websites and APIs. They will understand users’ goals and preferences, learning from interactions to improve over time.
   “You want to be able to tell an agent to go do arbitrarily complicated things,” he says. “And it should be able to get access to all the resources it needs to do those things relatively autonomously, inside of the parameters you’ve defined for how much you want to be involved in the process.”
   From scroll to solve
   The agentic web represents a radical shift in how we use the internet and what we have come to expect from it. In the 1990s, websites were mostly read-only, static pages of content that users couldn’t interact with. There was no AI involved, and any “intelligence” came from basic algorithms and humans creating and linking content.
   Over the following decades, the web became a more dynamic and engaging experience. Social media platforms allowed people to connect online, and websites evolved from static information hubs to virtual communities. Users became participants and content creators, not just consumers of information.
   As the web evolved through the 2000s, artificial intelligence was advancing in ways that would soon converge with internet services. AI researchers leveraged the massive datasets the web produced to train powerful models. That laid the groundwork for large language models, which began to emerge in the 2010s and transformed how we interact with digital content, enabling machines to understand and respond to human language with unprecedented fluency.
   Large language models, Scott says, shifted web search from typing keywords into a box – “that was revolutionary technology 20 years ago that kind of looks barbaric now by comparison” – to a more interactive, natural way of getting information.
   “You don’t have to think about things in terms of keywords,” he says. “You just say exactly what you want, and to the extent that the system has to guess at all about what it is you’re looking for, it can even ask you to clarify.”
   Microsoft’s launch of Copilot in 2023 further redefined how people use and interact with the internet. Not simply a standalone chatbot, Copilot was designed to enhance productivity and creativity in work and daily life. Integrated across Microsoft applications, the conversational assistant quickly became a valuable tool capable of helping with everything from summarizing meetings and managing inboxes to helping plan vacations and suggesting what to make for dinner.
   In late 2024, Microsoft introduced Copilot Agents, task-specific assistants that can act autonomously, orchestrate workflows and respond to triggers from external systems. While Copilot began as a productivity assistant, it has become a foundational layer for Microsoft’s vision of the agentic web, where AI agents collaborate across systems and websites to handle complex tasks for people.
   Achieving that vision, Scott says, requires a new set of protocols, standards and conventions that allow agents to interact with the web in meaningful ways. And crucially, he says, the agentic web must remain as open as possible to encourage broad participation and not stifle innovation.
   “The thing that worries me most about AI, more than anything else, is that we lose that environment of participation too soon because of commercial pressures,” Scott says. “In the early stages of something like AI, you have no idea whether you’ve discovered the best possible idea yet. So you don’t want anything to get in the way of that discovery of the best possible.” Everyone working in AI right now, Scott says, should strive for more openness, not less.
   “We should want things to evolve more in the direction of how the internet evolved, where it really is simple and permissionless and encourages lots of people being able to do the most creative thing that they can imagine doing – rather than things being more vertically integrated and closed off to people being able to freely participate.”
   Microsoft’s role, Scott believes, is to provide platforms that empower others. Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI is key to advancing the agentic web, he says, but there is a need for broader collaboration – with AI infrastructure companies, developers and regulators.
   “As a platform company, we’re only as good as our partners are,” he says. “We have to create the conditions for lots of people to have a lot of success.”
   ‘A super simple protocol’
   As an example of that openness, Scott points to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a new standard introduced by AI company Anthropic that standardizes how AI systems connect to external data sources and tools. Like early internet protocols, MCP is composable – designed to be modular and interoperable – and can be combined with other components or systems to build more complex functionality. Scott likens it to HTTP, the system that lets browsers communicate with websites.
   “It’s a super, super simple protocol – it’s open source, and it’s not that much work to wire a thing you’re already doing or build something from scratch and give it an MCP interface,” he says with enthusiasm. “Anything that can speak to an MCP endpoint can then access the thing you just put out there. It has all of the things that I thought were really interesting about the early web protocols.”
   Another key innovation is NLWeb, an open-source framework developed by Microsoft to bring conversational interfaces to websites. The system lets any site become an AI app by enabling users and AI agents to interact with web content using natural language. Instead of having to rely on site menus or keyword searches, users can just ask questions – for example, “Can you tell me which recipes on this site are gluten-free?” – and the NLWeb-equipped site responds intelligently.
   NLWeb was developed and conceived by R.V. Guha, a technical fellow at Microsoft and the creator of widely used web standards including RSS, RDF and Schema.org. Built on those standards, NLWeb makes it easy to make content and services discoverable by AI agents, Scott says.
   “It’s a low-effort way to participate in the agentic web,” he says. “There are businesses that don’t exist yet that are going to use NLWeb as the way to build their little slice of the agentic web to help agents serve their users better.”
   Scott gives a practical example from his own life: sourcing specialized and sometimes obscure materials for his pottery projects, like sodium hexametaphosphate (the active ingredient in Calgon), which is used to enhance ceramic glazes. With NLWeb-enabled sites, an agent could find suppliers, compare prices and even make purchases – all without Scott needing to do anything.
   “Instead of having to make a list of things that I want to buy and ordering them, I could have had the agent do all of it,” he says.
   Building agentic memory
   One recurring theme in Scott’s agentic web vision is that of memory – specifically, how AI agents remember and use information. Without memory, agent interactions are transactional and limiting. “If you were delegating a task to an employee or colleague who had no memory, it would be very difficult for them to do anything useful,” he says. “Memory will make agents more efficient and useful.”
   Scott envisions standards for memory like those around documents – created, owned and shared by their users. The approach, he says, would allow people to control how their data is used and prevent fragmentation, with different agents having siloed memories and being unable to collaborate on tasks.
   “You don’t want to have to teach every new agent you’re using what your preferences are,” he says. “It would be way easier if those were part of a set of memory preferences you could share.”
   Recent breakthroughs are already improving those capabilities, Scott says. Copilot and other agentic systems are getting better at remembering information from previous interactions and using it in the appropriate context, similar to how human memory works.
   “If you think about biological memory, it has really good recall. You can recall across a huge number of experiences,” Scott says. “The first thing that you remember about something may not be accurate, but you have a whole bunch of tools at your disposal to refine the precision of the recollections. I think that’s going to be an important quality of the memories that agents have.”
   A tool for creativity
   Scott grew up in the small rural town of Gladys, Virginia. His was a family of makers, the sort of folks who were forever tinkering with cars or restoring furniture and couldn’t let their hands be idle, even for a moment. Working on furniture projects with his dad and grandfathers as a kid, Scott developed a deep curiosity about craftsmanship and a fascination with how things are made.
   As someone who is passionate about making things – from digital tools to books, jewelry and ceramics – Scott views the question of the role of artificial intelligence in creativity as “one of the more interesting challenges of our times.”
   In an interesting experiment, he recently used Copilot and other AI tools to reverse-engineer a 17th-century Japanese ceramic firing process called hikidashi, in which pots are pulled from a hot kiln to quickly cool and develop a distinctive glaze. There is little documented about the technique in English, and AI helped Scott find Japanese sources of information, translate them and adapt the process to modern materials.
   “If I didn’t have AI to help, the problem would probably be so daunting that I would just have to give up on it before I got it solved, because I’d have to move onto something else,” he says. “For me, it’s really about accelerating my own creative productivity.”
   But Scott is clear that AI should support creativity, not replace it. “I don’t want AI designing anything I’m making. I’m perfectly happy to use it to help me solve a technical problem with something that I’m doing, but I want to do the work,” he says. “I think the most important thing for a creative person is that they should be able to choose how they want to use AI tools, if at all.”
   That philosophy extends to Scott’s broader view of AI. Tools are only as important as the people who use them, he says. And the best tools empower people to create for each other.
   “You can have a whole universe where AI is making a bunch of shit for other AIs,” he says. “But we as human beings would be profoundly uninterested in that. We do things for each other.”
   The path forward
   Scott is optimistic about the current moment, seeing it as an inflection point that could rival or even surpass the mobile revolution. “We are on an inevitable course right now,” he says. “The technology exists. It’s good enough. The only thing stopping it is cost and diffusion.”
   His advice? Be ambitious. Try things. AI technology is getting better and cheaper all the time, so don’t wait and risk having to play catch-up later. To Scott, the agentic web offers the same exhilarating, limitless possibility he felt standing up that server decades ago.
   “There are a whole bunch of people who are working feverishly using these AI tools to make brand new things that I haven’t even imagined yet,” he says. “And it could be the most amazing thing in the world. And then I get the chance to experience new things and have my mind changed.”
   “To me, it’s just awesome when the world’s in that state.”
   What’s the agentic web all about?
   Key terms to help you understand this new AI-powered version of the internet
   Agent (A)
   An AI-powered helper that can take actions, make decisions and interact with other agents or humans on your behalf. Think of an agent as a digital assistant that’s proactive, not just reactive – able to handle tasks, answer questions and learn as it goes.
   Agentic web (B)
   An open ecosystem in which AI agents act on behalf of users – from handling complex tasks to making purchases and collaborating with other agents across different sites and services. The next evolution of the internet, the agentic web will make online experiences more personalized and efficient.
   Agentic memory (C)
   An agent’s ability to remember things over time, like your preferences, past conversations and tasks you’ve asked it to do. Instead of starting from scratch every time, agentic memory helps agents build up knowledge and get smarter about helping you.
   Copilot Agents (D)
   Specialized AI agents built into Microsoft Copilot that can help with specific tasks like researching, summarizing or organizing information. Designed to work together and with you, Copilot Agents can be customized for different roles and workflows.
   Model Context Protocol (E)
   A new technical standard introduced by AI company Anthropic that helps AI agents connect to external tools, apps and data sources in a smart and consistent way, even if they’re running on different platforms or models. MCP is like a common language that allows AI agents to “talk to” other systems to get things done.
   NLWeb (F)
   Short for “Natural Language Web”, NLWeb is an open-source framework developed by Microsoft that lets humans and AI agents interact with web content using natural language. Any NLWeb-enabled site can become an AI app – instead of clicking through menus or forms, you just ask for what you want using natural language.
   The designer’s notebook
   Carl Ledbetter has been shaping the world for 30 years. As Microsoft’s Partner Director of Design, he is the visionary behind landmarks in hardware including the IntelliMouse, the Xbox and the game-changing Adaptive Controller. He talks us through five influential creations he helped bring to life
   The IntelliMouse (1996)
   “My first day at Microsoft was 30th January 1995, when I was hired to design a new mouse. At the time, Microsoft was very much a software company, so I expected to pick up a few new skills, meet interesting people and create a product or two and be done. I certainly didn’t expect to still be here 30 years later contributing to a legacy of hardware design.
   I soon realized the most important thing when designing products for Microsoft was to understand the customer. With the mouse, the challenge was coming from the Excel team. They were saying that people were producing enormous spreadsheets that were too big to fit on a screen. The only way to navigate around this environment was through scroll bars at the top and bottom and then trying to zoom in and out. My job was to create a mouse that made that easier.
   I quickly learned a lot about spatial mapping. When someone is navigating on a screen, their mind maps forward, back, left and right in a certain way. It’s abstract and subconscious, but you cannot mess with that as an industrial designer. If a product looks good and brings beauty to what you’re doing, that’s great, but it needs to be intuitive, and it must have a functional value.
   With that in mind, I started thinking about how to put control directly in the user’s hands. I created sketches and built prototypes with all these different ways to zoom in and out, to pan, to scroll… Eventually I determined that a wheel was probably the best way of doing this: it was adaptable and flexible and fit naturally within the mouse’s shape. We refined it, shaped the mouse to fit the hand and made the wheel feel as intuitive as possible. The result was the IntelliMouse – which went on to be Microsoft’s most popular and best-selling mouse for years. I’m proud that it set the bar for ergonomics, and it is great to see the wheel still deployed in a lot of mice today. When people ask what I do, my wife always jokes, ‘Yeah, he invented the wheel.’”
   ActiMates Barney (1997)
   “Six months into my role at Microsoft, the hardware division made a bold move, acquiring a company pushing the boundaries of interactive technology. Together, we launched a new generation of toys – starting in 1997 with none other than the beloved purple dinosaur Barney. The reason I’ve included ActiMates Barney in my selection is because it’s another example of where Microsoft was ahead of its time.
   The industrial design aspect was limited – we created intuitive receivers that fit into both the ActiMates ecosystem and the home – but the experience was incredible. Kids could play with Barney on his own – you could cover his eyes and he would say, “I can’t see you” and then you’d pull your hand away and he would say, “there you are” – but the real differentiator was when you connected him to a PC. There was a game which asked you math problems and, as you were going through them, Barney could help you because of the connection between the game, the PC and the toy. If you plugged a receiver into your TV, you could watch the Barney & Friends show with the toy next to you and it would respond to whatever was happening on screen. It was like having a virtual friend there for these kids. That didn’t exist before.
   ActiMates was an ambitious and forward-thinking entry into consumer entertainment and helped Microsoft build momentum in the PC gaming space. It also proved that Microsoft technology could be more than just functional – it could be magical.
   Like pretty much everything I’ve been involved in, it is part of a quest to try to do things that impact people in new ways. Of course there’s a business behind these things, but that’s never the starting point. The beginning is always ‘How do we do something that can really change the way people engage with the world?’ And that’s not a bad way to spend your career.”
   The Xbox (2001-today)
   “The mission behind these consoles echoes everything I’ve learned over 30 years – to create technology that’s powerful, purposeful and beautifully integrated into people’s lives. How did Xbox come to be? For the first-generation version (released in 2001), we had to be super scrappy: we were leveraging off-the-shelf components to get it out. But what is interesting for me is how we refined it with every new iteration.
   One of the first things I did was to work on the controller. The first controller was way too big. It hurt people’s hands, so we used our human factors expertise for the next iteration – it was designed for comfort. We thought about control layouts and worked with female gamers to see what was needed for their hand sizes.
   This human-centric design was at the heart of everything we did with Xbox from then on. With Xbox 360 (2005), we started to push what could be done with wireless technology and online gaming. Xbox 360 S was an exercise in reduction. Instead of having all these plug-in wireless receiver antennas and the hard drive on top that looked a bit like Frankenstein’s forehead, we were able to make the console significantly smaller and still build in everything.
   We made a misstep with 2013’s Xbox One, we got a few things wrong with that, but it’s like soccer, right? You miss, but it’s all about the recovery. How fast did you bounce back? And Xbox One S and Xbox One X were definitely comebacks. These products are incredible.
   I just love the progression. We design for the everchanging landscape of devices and the way people play. Every time we make a new edition, it’s this exercise of refine, refine, refine. So while on the inside we’re adding more and more technological capabilities, on the outside we’re striving to keep it simple. And we’re not done yet. We recently launched Ally X, which is a collaboration with Asus [to create a new line of handheld gaming devices]. This world just keeps getting bigger.”
   Zune (2006)
   “While it wasn’t the commercial success I thought it deserved to be, Zune was, in many ways, the highlight of my career. There were so many ideas crammed into that music player. It was a physical device but also an entire ecosystem that had a bunch of technological advancements you can see in technology today – it has had a real ripple effect. You could share tracks Zune-to-Zune, Airdrop before Airdrop if you will; it had a PC client so you could listen across devices, Zune marketplace where you could buy tracks and set up playlists and a subscription service, offering unlimited access to millions of songs. Looking back on it, I don’t even know how we did it all in the time we had.
   From an industrial design perspective, we were really pushing what you could do with molded resins. If you look at the design of that first device, you can see what’s called a ‘double shot’ plastic casing on it. The first shot was an opaque color, sort of root beer brown, and then over the top of that, we layered a coating that almost made it look like worn beach glass. What that gives you is a depth to the product, thanks to the ways light would come through and reflect off the surfaces. We really wanted to create something that when you held it in your hand, it felt special, not just like a hunk of plastic. We wanted to feel you’re getting a glimpse into this world of music.
   Zune was one of the most collaborative projects I have worked on. Everybody was shipped into this small building down in Bear Creek, which is off Microsoft campus down in Redmond. You had marketing, designers, program managers and engineers all jammed into this building, and it felt like this small community of purpose. Everything was about celebrating the art of creating music. There’s a whole case study on Zune that would show how if you can mobilize people with a clear goal to go do something, you can change the world.
   While we may not have sold millions, it’s awesome to see the ideas we had in that space play out in different ways, in different businesses and different teams. I love that. There are certainly no sour grapes.”
   The Xbox Adaptive Controller (2018)
   “In my 30-plus years in design, the product I am most proud of is the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which was designed to meet the unique needs of gamers with limited mobility. It was one of those grassroots ideas that seems to take on a life of its own. You can trace the origins back to the Xbox Elite controller, which allowed you to personalize the device by remapping buttons and controls for how you play. When we were doing some research on what people think of it, we discovered that people with disabilities were modding it so they could play games one-handed. This started us thinking about what more we could do. After a Microsoft Hackathon, we came up with a design that we thought would be even more adaptable and inclusive, but when we started meeting with these players, we found that it provided little value because many of them couldn’t hold the controller. We were being told, ‘The idea of it is right, but the solution is wrong.’ That’s when I first heard the phrase: ‘Nothing about us without us.’ We were being told, ‘Don’t pretend you know what we need and what we want on your own: Work with us.’ This became something I applied across my professional life from then on – don’t be so bold as to design for people whose needs you don’t understand. So, we started working with hospitals and wounded veterans. They tried prototypes, gave us feedback and helped create the Adaptive Controller we know.
   It’s not a mass market product, but I don’t think I’ve worked on anything with a bigger impact. We created something that unlocked the ability for people to play games that they could not otherwise, and as a designer, that’s a proud moment. I’ll never forget talking to a wounded veteran who told me that this product changed his life. Before he felt like an outcast, like he no longer fit in, that all the things that he used to like to do, he couldn’t do any more because of his disabilities. But through gaming he found a new sense of purpose and a place where the playing field was even. That was very powerful. Since 2014, Microsoft’s core mission statement has been ‘to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.’ I can’t think of a product I’ve worked on that better embodies this than the Adaptive Controller.
   It’s part of the reason I’m still excited to be at Microsoft 30 years on. There’s always a new challenge. Right now, we are seeing a pivot for the entire industry with AI, and Microsoft is at the heart of that. I, like a lot of people, use AI every day, and it has profoundly changed the way I work. I can get a lot more done. We’re in a constant state of change with technology, and AI is the latest great leap forward. Being in the middle of that, seeing how we work and interact with the world changing, is a pretty cool place to be.”
   “I just thought that there’s a better way to do things”
   What do you do when you’ve run one of the biggest companies in the world? If you’re former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer you set about changing the way people watch live sports…
   Surely Kevin Durant couldn’t miss. It was October 2024 and with moments left of the LA Clippers’ first game in its new home, the Intuit Dome, the visiting Phoenix Suns’ star player looked like he was about to change the course of a tight contest.
   Durant, fresh from winning Olympic gold with the US basketball team, had secured two free throws following a foul. He has some of the best stats in the NBA when it comes to shooting – netting 88.4 percent from the line – and seemed likely to hit both. But he had never come up against The Wall before. The jewel in the crown of Steve Ballmer’s $2bn sports arena, The Wall is an imposing grandstand of 51 rows of seats reserved for the 4,500 loudest Clippers superfans that has been designed to change the game – literally. Away teams face the Wall for the second half of games, the theory being that it will provide a sizable home court advantage by intimidating and distracting those who come up against it – and it certainly had the desired effect on Durant. He missed both shots. “It was crazy,” Durant said after the game, which the Suns won in overtime. “I was just staring at it the whole time. You’re not used to that.”
   The Wall is only one of the things at the Intuit Dome that people are not used to. When we take a tour of the Dome in the off season, it feels like we are coming across something unprecedented around every corner. The club store and food stalls are frictionless, using facial recognition via the Dome’s app to allow you to simply grab what you want and walk straight out, with payment taken automatically from your account. On game days the same system is used to allow people quickly to gain entry to the arena without waiting in line. Not only does every one of the 18,000-plus seats have a built-in USB port for charging your cellphone, but also its own climate control, thanks to a ventilation system that draws air directly from the roof. Noise levels aren’t just monitored as a whole, but for every seat. This is how the Clippers’ management builds up The Wall – if you’re in The Wall section and not making enough noise during a game, you’ll be politely encouraged to up the volume levels or directed to a more sedate spot next time around.
   Above the court hangs a 4K Halo board. Covering the better part of an acre, it is the largest doublesided display in any arena in the world, and when staff flip the switch during our tour to turn on its 233 million LEDs we are left blinking as if the sun has just re-emerged after an eclipse.
   The arena, which is planned to be the first in the NBA to be carbon-neutral, bears the hallmarks of a man known for his obsession with detail. Over his 30 years at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer helped steer the company through its most explosive period of growth. As CEO from 2000 to 2014, he tripled revenue and doubled profits, overseeing the launch of products like Xbox, Office 365 and the Surface tablet. Having left the company, he purchased the Clippers in 2014 and has delivered the same precision and focus he applied to software to the world of sports. Over a wide-ranging conversation he tells us how he brought the noise…
   What was it like, watching an event in the IntuitDome for the first time?
   Steve Ballmer: The first event was a Bruno Mars concert and I was mostly just harried as hell, a bundle of nerves going around the building. Bruno played the next night too and I was calmer: we were getting good feedback, people really liked the building. But the first basketball game was very different because I wasn’t worrying about the logistics of the building. I was worried about two things: Firstly, how the basketball-specific stuff, particularly the scoreboard, would perform and, secondly, how the crowd would sound and feel. I sat with my wife, my son and my oldest friends and it was like, ‘Yeah, this feels good. This feels right’. And then I got sad because we lost the game. We actually lost our first four in a row in the building. I’m glad we won our fifth. I’d told the team I’d have to start building a new arena from scratch if they lost that, because this one clearly isn’t working. Our players got a little chuckle out of that.
   I get the impression that you spent years as a fan going to games and feeling frustrated by the experience. Is that right?
   SB: I just observed things that I thought could be better. The only team I ever had season tickets for, before the Clippers, was the Seattle Supersonics. And yeah, I got frustrated waiting in line for bathrooms and drinks, for sure. I just thought that there’s a better way to do things. And so I mostly came at it thinking ‘How do we do the best job anybody’s ever done?’. I wanted something special for our fans. You can watch our games elsewhere [on TV or streaming services] so a lot of it is about the live entertainment experience. And how do our fans help our team win? What does it mean to have fans engaging in a way that can actually help with winning?
   It’s ironic, because wasn’t one of the reasons you bought the Clippers in the first place was because they didn’t need a new arena building – the team was happily sharing an arena with the Lakers and the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings?
   SB: Yes. Originally, when I bought the team, I said, ‘It’s great, I don’t need to buy a new arena!’ I looked at buying Milwaukee, Sacramento and Seattle. In all three instances, they needed new arenas and I said ‘I never want to do this. It’s not my area of expertise.’ Then a friend of mine said: ‘Hey, this is not our home. This is the Lakers’ home. How do we have a place that our fans can feel is special? How do we break out of the shadows?’ This was in 2015 and we knew we needed to be out in 2024 [when the Clippers’ 25 year lease at the Crypto.com Arena expired]. So that put us on a firm timeline.
   How did you approach the development of Intuit? You’ve obviously developed a lot of products at Microsoft. Was it the same process?
   SB: It’s different. It’s not as if I was closely involved in the development of all the products at Microsoft, but with the Intuit Dome I had a very clear vision of what I wanted the thing to be. I’d never been involved in construction projects, even house remodeling, my wife had done all that, I had no experience with architecture, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted a place that would pulse with energy. I wanted a place where the fans would become part of the experience and part of helping us win. I knew we had to have concerts. I knew I didn’t want hockey. Hockey is a great sport, but a hockey building’s never going to be as intimate because the rink just spreads things out. I wanted people to be in their seats. That’s partly how you bring energy. You have to be there. You can’t say, ‘Oh, I’m caught in a line for the bathroom or to go get food.’ So those were design principles. That’s why we have facial recognition in the stores, admission gates and food stands. We put that in place to get people into their seats faster. [Intuit also has three times the number of toilets of the average NBA arena].
   How do you set about keeping people in their seats?
   SB: Leg room is a big issue. I want to give people leg room because if you don’t give people leg room, you’re losing their attention on the game, you’re driving them to stand up, walk around, whatever, but the more leg room people have, the further back people get pushed. So we had to sort of balance that. Same thing with headroom. I didn’t want people to struggle to see over the people in front of them.
   Did you get involved in the discussions surrounding tech in the stadium?
   SB: I told the guys all along the way, ‘I don’t want technology in here for technology’s sake.’ This is about being the greatest live entertainment experience, particularly for basketball, in the world. We decided to connect power to every seat so people can charge their phones, but that opened up other interesting options – we could also put lights in the seat, we built a mini video game controller into the seat so you can interact with the big board, because people like to do that. We can do a lot of different things and that all came for free once we had power in the seats. I had another design principle: we’re going to treat people who sit up top and pay less for their seats as well as we treat people down below. They have to have a good seat, they have to have legroom, they have to have good access.
   One of the major features of the stadium is The Wall. To what extent have you seen that influencing games?
   SB: If you look objectively at the statistics when it comes to free throw shooting percentages by the opposing team when facing The Wall, it’s the lowest in the NBA by an interesting margin. So that worked.
   And technology plays a role in The Wall too, I believe…
   SB: It does! How do you get people to make noise and be in their seats? We have proximity sensors in the seats. We can tell whether you’re in, out, how much time you’re in your seat during the game. We have something we call sound cameras. So we don’t hear what you’re saying, but we can tell how noisy you are, and can tailor a rewards system in order to try to use the infrastructure to get you to be noisy. We have a thing that we copied from airports where two people standing next to each other are looking at the same screen, but see different things. We have one of those at The Wall entrance and at the moment it says say ‘Hey, Joe, welcome’. Now that we have a reward system, we could say ‘You didn’t make much noise that last game! Get it up this game and you get a free hot dog’. We’re still playing with what the rewards infrastructure looks like, but everything’s about getting people into the experience.
   What about players – how have they reacted to the new building?
   SB: I knew I wanted to have the best player spaces in the NBA as a tool to help boost results, but also recruitment. We want to tell the players on our team – and for the word to get out around the league – that we invest in our players, this is a good place to go play. Obviously if players are getting paid a lot more money someplace else, they’ll go, but for those on the margin, the fact we care more is the message. For example, the guys want to have long coats even though it’s LA. That style drove part of the design of a locker we made. You need room for lots of shoes, because a lot of these guys have lots of them, so every one of our lockers holds 32 pairs.
   Have you seen other teams taking note of what you’re doing and then starting to copy it?
   SB: We certainly have had a lot of NBA owners come through and look at our place, particularly if they’re going to build a new arena. It’s my belief that you’ll see other stadiums built over the next five to 10 years that have “Walls” or that kind of intimacy and steepness in the bleachers.
   You’ve said you want to create an experience of watching a game live that has the best elements of watching at home. What do you mean by that?
   SB: You’ve got to have a great view. You have to have leg room, and the ability to run to the bathroom or grab a drink quickly. You want to be able to see some of the statistics that get overlaid on the broadcast. We don’t want people looking at their phones to get these because if people look at their phones, they’re distracted from the game. So that’s why we built the controller into the seats. That’s why we have a huge scoreboard. The goal is to not drive you away from the live game experience. What is it that people crave when they come? It’s the energy, it’s the excitement. And perhaps increasingly so, given that we spend so much of our time just buried in screens.
   You’ve done some incredible things in your life. How does buying the Clippers and then creating this stadium compare?
   SB: Will anything I ever achieve or do match the kind of importance and complexity of growing Microsoft from 30 people and $2.5 million in revenue to 88,000 people and $88 billion revenue? No, of course not. With that said, this [buying a basketball team and building a stadium] is a great opportunity to make a civic contribution. But it’s also, for me, just the joy of watching basketball. I love it and I love being involved. I don’t try to drive too many decisions about who’s on the team and who should play, that’s on the coaches, but I ask a lot of questions. In a sense, it’s a little bit like me managing engineers. I learned to ask a lot of good questions. For pure fun this blows Microsoft away for me.
   How do the worlds of sport and business compare?
   SB: Business people think they’re highly accountable, but compared to sports people? It’s not even close. Every 24 seconds, you either score or you don’t score. You’re getting your performance reviewed in real time. If the coach doesn’t think you’re doing a good job, he pulls you out of the game. That’s a performance review. So everything is more intense, more accountable.
   Are there any similarities?
   SB: One thing that’s like the software business, at least the software business of old, is we do major version upgrades once a year. Every summer we pivot the roster, change anything we’re going to do differently in the arena. That’s the major upgrade. We do minor upgrades at the trade deadline. That’s the next place where people redesign the product, if you will. And I guess in the world of agile development, the coach is continuously making upgrades and changes in the way we play. So yeah, it’s got that notion of rapid change that was so wonderful in the software business.
   You were famous at Microsoft for being very focused on the numbers. What’s the metric in basketball that you track that might surprise people?
   SB: There’s a lot of data on the basketball side, obviously, but what we’re doing now is what I call a user sum. We’ve got the old revenue sums – where the revenue comes from – but because you essentially log in when you come into our building we can chart that. How many times does that fan come back? Why are they coming back? Were they noisy? Did they bring a guest? What did it all look like? And what do we do to improve not just the fan experience, but the fan involvement? At Microsoft you’d have these Windows fans, and not only were they good customers, but they’d help spread the word to others. They would help Windows succeed. Clippers fans need to help our team succeed. And so we came to this notion of having a complete map of their behavior.
   What has been your most memorable moment in the Intuit Dome so far?
   SB: It’s funny, but on this stuff I have more of an emotional memory than I do specifics, but I’ll give you two. Our first victory, after four straight defeats, that’s a top memory for me, no question. The second is the game we lost in the 2025 playoffs [game four, against the Denver Nuggets]. We were tied with 13 seconds left and the Denver Nuggets’ best player, maybe the best player in the world, Nikola Jokic, goes to take a three-point shot. He air balls it, but one of his teammates catches it midflight, dunks it and with less than one second left and they win the game. There used to be a show in the US called Wide World of Sports and they always talked about the joy of victory and the agony of defeat. And I guess I have one of each of those moments etched in my head. I would say those two things, but also opening night. Just having my closest people with me and being able to say, ‘Yeah! We built this’