Microsoft uses shared protocols to avoid shipping its org chart

Transcript

From the transcript AI & I publishes with the episode.

1. 6:49

   Well, look, I think there are two, maybe three things that are super important. So one is like we make agents and in order for our agents that we're building for folks to be useful, like we need to solve these problems inside of these agents. And like even if you sort of scope it down narrowly to enterprise agents, like one of the things CTO that I've been pushing for at Microsoft is like I want all of our agents.

2. 7:12

   systems internally to speak a standard protocol to all of the agents that we're writing inside of Microsoft so that we're not exposing the entire world to like Conway's law, which is, you know, organization. So Conway's law is a really funky thing in compilers where. And, you know, this guy Conway said that the number of stages or passes in your compiler is going to be dictated by the number of teams you have working on the compiler.

3. 7:41

   You ship your org chart. Correct. You ship your org chart. And so, you know, you certainly inside of the confines of a company like Microsoft, like you don't want to be shipping your org chart when you are building your agents. And like it's just... kind of a horror show to watch, like as an engineer, like all of this inefficient building, like when you don't have like those standard protocols and services that everybody's using.

4. 8:06

   But I think, you know, if you sort of imagine... If you really imagine like what agents could do and like what you, you know, what users, like not me, but like, you know, just people who are hoping these things can be more useful than they are right now. Like you need things to start happening the same way that they were happening with the web. And like I kind of see it right now. Yeah. MCP is like a really great example.

5. 8:32

   So it is a really simple protocol that solves a really important problem, not just for people who are making agents and building platform infrastructure, but for, you know, users of these systems who want them to be more useful. you know, they're sort of sitting here using these agents, like how do I get my stuff wired up into this? And like, how does it make sense for me? Like even from a business model perspective to do that.

6. 9:10

   And so like, that's the two things. It's like make our own agents more useful. And then like, we're a platform company, like, Even more important than the agents that we're going to write ourselves, like that platform layer that Microsoft has been building in technology for 50 years, like we just want to make sure that we are helping solve the problems that are emerging as this agentic web is happening.