Elite Edition
IBM made this mistake in 1981. OpenAI, Google & Anthropic aren't .
Business Analytics Newsletter
· 5 min read
Hello !!
In 1981, IBM handed Microsoft a contract to supply the operating system for its personal computers. IBM thought it was buying a commodity. Microsoft understood it was acquiring a platform. The rest is the most consequential wealth-creation story in tech history.
That moment is happening again. Right now. And most people are watching the wrong race.
The chatbot era is already over
Everyone is still debating which AI gives better answers. That is last year’s competition.
What OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are actually building - aggressively, urgently, with billions of dollars - is something far more structural. They are each trying to become the layer that sits between you and everything you do digitally. The operating system for AI-powered work.
OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have each crossed an internal threshold in the last 12 months. The goal is no longer to build a model that answers questions better than the competition. The goal is to become indispensable infrastructure - the system that sits underneath everything your people do digitally, the way Windows sat underneath every application a company ran in the 1990s.
Not a tool you open. The environment you live in.
And the implications for how you think about enterprise AI deployment are significant - because the vendor decision you make this year may be far harder to reverse by 2027 than anyone is telling you.
What an “AI Operating System” actually means
A traditional OS controls how applications access hardware - memory, processing, storage. An AI OS does something more ambitious:
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