Lego is an ingenious system for building and creation.

You can learn to use Lego’s system in seconds:

• Snap bricks together in stacks
• Separate stacks to disassemble

Step-by-step guides walk you through complex models, but you can ignore them and build what you want with any given pile of bricks.

The system depends on a grid of pips. The bottom face of a brick sheathes these pips, gripping them snugly enough to build on, but loose enough for a child to separate.

Lego bricks are sturdy, injection-molded ABS plastic designed to be snapped and un-snapped thousands of times without losing grip. They’re made to exacting standards, and have been for generations. Unearth a pile of bricks from 1987 and you’ll have no problem using them alongside a kit fresh from the store.

Every design comes with tradeoffs. Here are Lego’s:

• Right angles everywhere
• Vertical construction is effortless; horizontal construction requires serious planning and cleverness
• You can build anything to centimeter precision; Lego holds the monopoly on millimeter resolution

It’s in the high-detail pieces where Lego’s design language transitions, from dull geometry to a gift treasured by all ages. Scandinavian minimalism defines it all, from spaceship antennas to medieval castle torches. The minifigs, the helmets, the hairpieces, the the greebles that adorn your incredible machine…

You can detect Lego-ness instantly, no matter the theme or scale.

It’s the classic platform bargain:

The vendor makes specific paths easy, while reserving unique control for themselves. They get to make certain decisions that unify all activity, scalably influencing every single project.

And if you understand Lego, you have everything you need to interpret Microsoft.

In the beginning

Microsoft is a leviathan worth your study.

It has existed for half a century, shaping modern computing from the dawn of the age. Investors value Microsoft at more than three trillion dollars. For a sense of scale, France’s 2023 GDP was about even with this, and it’s 75% of what California produced in 2024.

Microsoft is world-historically big.

To achieve this, Microsoft captured and held an invaluable position: deciding how software would be written.

Early computing was very different from what we know today.

Microprocessors were new and no one knew exactly what to do with them. For a few thousand (inflation-adjusted) dollars, anyone could buy a computer and try to tell it what to do.

This required programming languages: conventions defining what you could say to the computer, and how you would say it.

Bill Gates and his coterie were among the first to understand exactly how you could bridge the world of instruction signals with anything a human could learn in an afternoon. They provided language interpreters for early computers.

As computers increased in complexity, Microsoft kept pace, building the operating systems and APIs that would eventually let developers target the majority of the world’s computing hardware.

Microsoft paved the first roads to the electronic frontier.

A good story about Microsoft

If you want to understand Microsoft, I like this story about the Xbox.

The short version is that Sony totally freaked them out.

It’s one thing to ship a plastic toy that takes plastic cartridges and plays glorified arcade games, as Nintendo had been.

But by 1995, Sony was elevating the living room toward something that looked like computing: optical disks, storage, and eventually: networking.

As leviathans go, Microsoft has a totalizing appetite. For its stratagems to work, it needs to influence as much of the game board as possible. If they didn’t act, the home could fracture: Microsoft handling the bills and correspondence, Sony owning the fun.

And who knows where it goes from there.

For me, this is unusually savvy for a bunch of suits to have figured out, much less taken action upon. Just think about it like this:

How often do you really need to upgrade a computer that only does spreadsheets and emails? Ceding the future of entertainment would slow down the entire metabolism of PC upgrades, which is no good if you’re selling everything from operating systems to productivity tools.

Not to mention the OS where most games are published.

So Microsoft decided to enter the fight with their own console.

They walked in with a 25 year head-start on shaping how developers make software. By the time they were pondering Xbox, this included a deep stack of graphics programming and input technologies. They could pivot the tools and APIs developers were already using to build games for Windows into a new, dedicated platform.

To do it, they had to do something they’d largely avoided: building and shipping hardware.

Non-rivalrous goods

If I’m holding a mug of root beer, I’m the only one who gets to drink it. If I finish that mug without sharing, you don’t get any unless you can find your own.

But if I’m holding a CD-ROM of software, I can install it, then pass it on to you. ¹

Which means that Microsoft can make loads of money: they can come up with something valuable to put on that CD-ROM, and then sell it to as many people as they can convince to buy it.

They created and held the perfect position on the game board. They were essential to building computers, but didn’t have to build any themselves.

Like getting paid to imagine a tire every time someone bought a car.

It’s great work if you can get it. So you can see why Microsoft would be reluctant to ever dirty their hands with anything so risky as putting an object in a box and waiting for the phone to ring.

But to hold the living room, they had to play the role only a manufacturer can: hardware cost control.

The Xbox cost $540 (inflation-adjusted to 2025), which made it competitive with a PlayStation 2. This was a good deal cheaper than all but the crummiest PCs, and unlike those, it could play games pretty well.

They built it fast, using off-the-shelf PC components. They created a thin container of an operating system to host their graphics libraries, handle storage, and process I/O.

And it worked. It was an instantly competitive console, and the existing body of Windows game developers had a much shorter path to the living room than ever before.

Microsoft built this beachhead into a business worth billions annually. More than that, they’ve maintained their prominence as a prime target for game developers.

And it all came down to their existing advantage: building the tools that make software possible.

How does this game play in 2025?

Visual Studio Code is a free tool for building software.

The cost of building and maintaining it is a pittance compared to the returns: Microsoft is a default tool for anyone starting a software journey. It’s used by professionals and hobbyists.

So Microsoft continues to influence how software gets made.

The dream of machine learning models trained on existing software to write more code predates the current age by a lot. People have been waiting for it. I remember a first-week orientation a decade ago where a CEO discussed this vision as both far-off but attainable.

So the moment this approach became viable, Microsoft got to work.

The first version of GitHub CoPilot seems quaint by comparison to the tools of today, and it’s only been four years. Underwhelming as the tool was at that point, it’s not surprising that Microsoft wanted to be early.

This leviathan was built to turn totalizing control of the developer experience into money. Historically it did this through controlling tools: languages, interpreters, libraries, development environments. In the age of LLMs, this control now extends to the very structure of new code itself.

Microsoft is in the position to nudge the everyday work of every developer who relies on their AI products. 50 years into their existence, they are poised to seize a whole new dimension of power, profit and leverage.

What does this mean?

Start with feedback loops. Because Microsoft controls so many tools, they’ll be in a position to make them mesh better with LLM workflows, and to make them happier with machine-generated code. Microsoft also owns and controls loads of the GPU hardware needed to make LLMs run. They have the most favorable pricing for these workloads possible.

So we might expect, for example, for it to become really easy to prompt into existence a web application built on a resurgent Microsoft stack. It might become really cheap to prototype a game for Windows, because Microsoft builds scaffolding for those to be built by LLMs.

Between owning the hardware that runs LLMs, and the tools that make code happen, Microsoft will be in a position to tilt the whole computing game board so that loads of pieces drift deep into their pockets.

Of course, that’s if the old rules hold.

A funny thing about computing: sometimes the game surprises you.