Shadowing Practice: Microsoft Is (Finally) Getting What They Deserve... - Learn English Speaking with Video

Les maken...
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On January 28th, 2026, Microsoft reported earnings that beat expectations on both revenue and profit, and the stock still dropped 10% in a single day, wiping out over $350 billion in value.
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That reaction tells you something important.
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Investors weren't reacting to what Microsoft reported, they were reacting to what Microsoft revealed.
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Because buried in those results was a much bigger story.
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Microsoft is pouring tens of billions into AI infrastructure at a time when growth is already starting to slow, all while relying on a strategy that's deeply tied to a partner whose own future is becoming increasingly uncertain.
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Let's go back to January 2023, when Microsoft announced a massive new investment in OpenAI worth $13 billion.
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Everyone called it the deal of the decade.
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What they didn't tell you is that a significant portion of that investment wasn't even cash, it was Azure credits.
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Microsoft was handing OpenAI vouchers redeemable at Microsoft's own data centers, booking the arrangement as investment, then also collecting the revenue when OpenAI used those credits.
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It's the financial equivalent of a landlord paying a tenant's rent to himself, calling it an investment and counting both sides of the transaction.
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Microsoft structured the deal so that they would collect 75% of OpenAI's profits until they had fully recouped their $13 billion investment.
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Analysts at Morgan Stanley looked at OpenAI's growth trajectory and projected Microsoft would hit full recoupment sometime in 2026.
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The problem with it was that it requires OpenAI to actually generate profits.
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OpenAI lost roughly $11.5 billion in a single quarter in 2025.
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You can't collect 75% of profits that don't exist.
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And because Microsoft accounts for its OpenAI state using what's called the equity method, those losses hit Microsoft's own books.
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They disclosed a $4 billion pre-tax hit in a single quarter.
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So that recoupment timeline is now dead.
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Instead of collecting profits, Microsoft is absorbing losses every three months.
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Then, on January 21st, 2025, 5.
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Altman stands at the White House with Oracle's Larry Ellison and SoftBank's Masayoshi Sun to announce the Stargate project.
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That same day, Microsoft disclosed it had lost its status as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider.
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Then the deals started stacking up.
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OpenAI signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle, a $22 billion deal with CoreWeave, and then the kill shot, a $38 billion seven-year deal with Amazon Web Services.
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By the time the dust settled, Microsoft still held about 27% equity in OpenAI,
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which sounds significant until you realize OpenAI had signed infrastructure deals across seven different vendors, and Microsoft was just one of them, capturing roughly 22% of where OpenAI's money was actually going.
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They went from being the exclusive partner to being one option on a list.
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The relationship that was supposed to define the AI era had been quietly shopped around to everyone including Microsoft's biggest competitor.
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Microsoft has 440 million commercial 365 subscribers.
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These are people who already live inside Word, Excel, Teams and Outlook every single day.
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They built an AI assistant directly into all of those products and charged $30 per user per month.
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On top of existing subscriptions to unlock it, only 2% of their entire subscriber base paid for it.
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A Gartner survey found that of organisations that had finished co-pilot trials, only 5% were moving to larger deployment.
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But the But the adoption numbers are almost a secondary problem, because the product itself has been generating headlines for all the wrong reasons.
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Let's talk about Recall.
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Microsoft announced it at their developer conference in 2024 as the flagship feature of a brand new PC category.
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Recall would take a screenshot of your screen every few seconds, run it through AI and let you search everything you'd ever seen or done on your computer.
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They called it a perfect memory.
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researchers called it a keylogger built into the operating system.
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And because Recall stored all of those screenshots in a local database that was unencrypted by default, a developer built a tool that could extract every single screenshot from that database within days of the announcement.
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Microsoft pulled the feature before it shipped, delayed it an entire year, added encryption, and still had to address security vulnerabilities after it finally launched in April 2025.
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by early 2026 fewer than 10% of Windows 11 PCs could even run it.
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Then there was EchoLeak, a zero-click prompt injection exploit in Copilot discovered in June 2025.
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A single email could silently pull data from your SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams through Copilot's AI context, with zero interaction from the user.
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Microsoft patched it, but security researchers noted the underlying attack technique had been publicly documented for over a year before the exploit was discovered in production.
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Microsoft spent years pushing Copilot into places users never asked for it.
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A button in Notepad, AI suggestions in Photos, prompts in File Explorer, a dedicated hardware key on new keyboards.
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Each update seemed to add a new place where Copilot would appear and offer to help with something you were already doing fine without it.
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Microsoft's Windows lead eventually acknowledged publicly that the operating system had gone off track with aggressive AI expansion while basic stability issues went unfixed.
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In March 2026, TechCrunch reported Microsoft was rolling back Copilot integrations across Windows.
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The executive who announced it said the goal was to integrate AI where it's most meaningful, which is a careful way of admitting they had been integrating it where it wasn't.
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The trust problem runs deeper than bad features.
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A net promoter score tracking Copilot's accuracy went from negative 3.5 to negative 24 in the span of two months in late 2025.
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Among users who stopped using Copilot after trying it, 44% said distrust of the answers was the primary reason.
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What makes this particularly uncomfortable is that industry observers have been saying for years that the AI push inside Microsoft has less to do with user demand and more to do with justifying the massive capital investments already made.
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Let's take a step back and look at where Microsoft actually stands in the AI landscape.
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Search was supposed to be the first big win.
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Bing chat launched in February the 2023 and Nadella told The Verge he wanted to make Google dance.
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Three years later Google has 90% of global search share.
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Bing has 4.3%.
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Microsoft spent a decade of investment and $13 billion to move that number by about one percentage point.
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In mobile AI, Google's Gemini crossed 750 million monthly active users.
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Apple chose Gemini as the foundation for a rebuilt Siri across 2 billion devices in a deal worth about a billion dollars a year.
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Microsoft is not in this picture at all.
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They have no mobile operating system, no consumer social network, no significant browser share.
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Their only consumer service is Windows and we just covered how that's going.
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In developer tools, GitHub Copilot was supposed to be the one clear win, but a competitor called Cursor hit 2 billion in annual revenue by early 2026.
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And according to one industry analysis, Anthropic captures 54% of the coding AI market and OpenAI about 21%.
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GitHub Copilot is somewhere in the remainder.
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Microsoft paid $650 million in 2024 to bring in Mustafa Suleiman, who co-founded DeepMind and previously served as CEO of Inflection AI to lead their in-house AI efforts.
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Two years later, his team has produced models that, by his own admission, will need another year or two to reach frontier capability.
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And while all of this was happening, three of the key people who built Microsoft's AI ambitions quietly walked out the door.
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The architect of Bing Chat, who went to Shopify, the president of Azure AI, who went to Anthropic, and the lead researcher behind the Fi models who went to open AI.
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By March 2026, Microsoft narrowed Suleiman's role and brought in a new executive to take over Copilot product, which is a fairly direct signal that the dual mandate wasn't working.
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A leaked internal comment from a senior Microsoft executive described most of their Copilot products as gimmicky.
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Another insider said, there is a delusion on our marketing side where literally everything has been renamed to have Co-Pilot in it.
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By that point, Microsoft had somewhere around 80 distinct products, with the word Co-Pilot in the name.
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The BBB's national advertising division ruled in June 2025 that Microsoft's Co-Pilot branding was misleading, citing unsupported productivity claims.
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Microsoft put in $13 billion and lost board influence, lost cloud exclusivity, lost the the consumer, lost the developer, and are now absorbing billions in losses every quarter from the company they funded.
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They built a product that 98% of their own existing customers declined to pay for.
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They pushed AI into every corner of their operating system until their own executives admitted it had gone off track.
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And when the market finally looked at all of that together on January, it wiped out $357 billion in a single session.
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Microsoft spent more than almost anyone, moved faster than most, had advantages nobody else had, and they are still watching from the outside as the platforms that will define this decade take shape without them at the centre.
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The question was never whether Microsoft could spend on AI.
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It was whether spending would be enough.
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And right now, the answer looks like no.

Context & Background

The transcript from the video titled "Microsoft Is (Finally) Getting What They Deserve..." delves into the complexities surrounding Microsoft's investment in OpenAI and the subsequent effects on its business strategy and offerings. The insights provided paint a detailed picture of how corporate decisions, particularly in the tech industry, can influence investor reactions and consumer trust. Microsoft’s aggressive push into AI technology showcases both their ambitions and the hurdles they face, from financial losses to product shortcomings. Understanding these dynamics offers a rich context for learners looking to enhance their English speaking skills through real-world examples.

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

  • "Buried in those results was a much bigger story." – This phrase emphasizes the importance of looking beyond surface-level information.
  • "Generated profits that don't exist." – A striking way to talk about financial expectations versus reality.
  • "Captured roughly 22%." – Useful for discussing strategies and market share.
  • "Built directly into all of those products." – Highlights the integration of technology into everyday tools, a common topic in discussions.
  • "Aggressive AI expansion while basic stability issues went unfixed." – A phrase that points to the balance between innovation and functionality, relevant for many contexts.

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

To effectively practice your English speaking skills through this video transcript, follow this structured shadowspeak guide:

  1. Select a Segment: Choose a short segment of the transcript (1-2 sentences) that resonates with you or seems particularly challenging.
  2. Listen and Repeat: Play the video and listen carefully to the selected segment. Pause after each phrase and repeat it aloud, focusing on intonation and pronunciation to improve English pronunciation.
  3. Analyze the Context: Reflect on the meaning behind the phrases. Understanding context aids retention and helps in applying these phrases in your conversations.
  4. Record Yourself: Use your phone or any recording device to record your voice as you shadow the phrases. This will help you identify any pronunciation struggles.
  5. Feedback Loop: Compare your recording to the original audio. Focus on areas for improvement and repeat the process until you feel confident. This repetition is key to mastering shadowspeaks.

Utilizing these techniques while engaging with content like this video will not only bolster your vocabulary but also enhance your overall fluency, an essential skill for IELTS speaking practice and beyond.

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?

Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.