This observation from @JordiRib1 about how @bing has transformed over the years reminds me of a prescient WPC 2009 quote from @Steven_Ballmer about Microsoft’s tenacity and long-term approach. It’s stuck with me throughout my career. #Microsoft50 Source:

When I joined Bing in 2008, our now CEO Satya Nadella was running the team. It was still known as Live Search and had very low market share, in the low single digits on PCs. June 2009 brought the launch of Bing and years of consistent growth e.g. nearly 30% share in US PCs. Thanks to the tireless tenacity of our incredible team, Bing has transformed into a profitable multi-billion-dollar business and a leader in search innovation. Just in the last couple of years, Bing was the first large-scale search engine to include chat, and the first product at Microsoft to integrate GPT-4 and DALL-E, becoming the original Copilot. Bing search tech is used by many products at Microsoft including Azure, Office, and Windows, and it’s also integrated into many partner products including Amazon Kindle, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Meta AIs, Yahoo and more. In the era of LLMs, web search tech is more important than ever for RAG, and it’ll continue to evolve with Gen AI while becoming more natural, visual and intuitive. And we’ve got more innovation coming… Stay tuned, as I believe 2025 could be our best year yet.

It's a joy when films break out of what they are supposed to be as star vehicles. Vidamuyarchi begins with an extremely sensitive topic, and treats it with such gentleness and without judgment. Arjun (Ajith) is, at heart, a vulnerable softie, incapable of prejudice and hatred. He can't trust the cops, and yet, he cannot stand by to see them die. His enemies subject him to such humiliation and cruelty, and yet, he gets no pleasure out of hurting them. His wife, well—she wants to move on from him, and yet, he seeks no retribution. Arjun isn't a hero; he's a vulnerable man forced into a fight he does not enjoy. We see this quality many times in the film. In the petrol bunk scene, we see clear evidence that Arjun is an emotionally mature man who isn't looking to escalate things. "They're young and are looking for trouble," he says. Ordinarily, in our cinema, we are trained to expect him to turn into a vengeful demon figure, who makes enemies run for life. Vidamuyarchi, despite having the structure for it, refuses to turn Arjun into a Vedalam-like fearsome presence. It's such a brave choice. Towards the end, when someone asks, "Nee enna hero-va?", Ajith responds with an outraged no, almost begging them to understand. It feels almost like a plea to the world. It isn't coincidental that he kills nobody. This isn't that kind of film. His superpower isn't his ability to kill a dozen people at once; what sets Arjun apart is his ability to trust and hold faith in people. Regina Cassandra's character (she's excellent, by the way) doesn't get this. "Ippo kooda avala nambaraan ivan!" Heroism isn't violence in this film; it's the ability to trust, to persist in faith, even when an evil world (personified literally as a woman in the film) tempts and gives you enough reason to turn against your own. I thoroughly enjoyed the setup of the film (a lovely first half, if you ignore the unconvincing romantic beginnings)—the silences, the wonderful ways in which the Azerbaijan land isn't just a backdrop, but an inherent part of the film's storytelling. This isn't geography used for beauty alone; it's geography that dictates events (I liked how the foreign actors are used as well). In an Ajith film, you expect empty roads and vehicles in storytelling, but here, it all happens organically, even as everyone and everything toys with Arjun's mind. Yes, the great setup probably doesn't result in the kind of deep joys you expect. Once the film turns into a desperate search for a person, you see all the standard action blocks (I thought the fight with Arav-and-gang inside a car was done particularly well). But it remains a beautifully crafted film, with many standout shots (especially from the top angle). Perhaps the origins story for two characters needed to be more powerful; perhaps the film feels more enjoyable when you don't yet know the answers than when you do. But Vidamuyarchi has a big, honest heart, much like its protagonist. It could have been shaped differently, into something grander, something more easily gratifying, in keeping with our commercial cinema rules, but I like that it doesn't go that route. Because it doesn't, we get the rare pleasure of seeing a truly unique protagonist—not a hero, but a man who refuses to give up on even those even when they have given up on themselves (one character even confesses to hating himself). In this film, Vidamuyarchi isn't about perseverance in work, as it's generally used. Here, it's about the spirit, about the doggedness required to keep human bonds alive. It's a film that may not have grand heroism as we have come to expect; but it has more than one grand idea for sure.

Microsoft reported earlier this week that our search and news business grew 21% YoY. Bing search grew even faster with a record performance. Since we launched Bing Chat in Feb 2023, we’ve seen significant growth in users, engagement and even market share on PC, as you case see in the latest numbers publicly reported by Comscore (US) and StatCounter (Worldwide) for several known search engines. People often ask me whether LLMs will replace Bing and other web search engines, especially after seeing low-cost models like the ones released by DeepSeek and others earlier this week. But LLMs are in fact making web search more strategic and important than ever. Lots of companies will leverage open-source LLMs to build advanced chatbots, but only the LLMs grounded with a web search engine will be up-to-date and highly competitive.