On 12 July, a Sunday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s viral post, *The Reverse Information Paradox*, argued that “in the AI age, the buyer risks giving away knowledge, just in order to use what they bought.” Nadella concluded that companies should be able to harness AI models “without giving up the knowledge that makes them unique.” The strategic battleground shifts away from the model itself and towards the platform that orchestrates it. Last month, Nadella said the global economy’s priority must centre on building a frontier ecosystem rather than a frontier model. The first three years of Generative AI were defined by a race to build the smartest large language model; the next decade may be defined by who owns the ecosystem in which every model operates. Under Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s strategy revolved around Windows. Then, cloud computing rewrote those rules. Instead of resisting that shift, Nadella embraced it, joining the Linux Foundation, open-sourcing .NET, acquiring GitHub and transforming Azure into a cloud capable of hosting virtually any workload.