# 440 Why Microsoft is Moving Into a Lower Margin Business | The Pirate Street Journal

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/christopher-lochhead-follow-your-different-325792/440-why-microsoft-is-moving-into-a-lower-margin-business-the-pirate-street-journal.md
Podcast: [Christopher Lochhead Follow Your Different™](https://stenobird.com/podcast/christopher-lochhead-follow-your-different-325792)
Published: 2026-07-08T09:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://lochhead.com/fyd-psj-microsoft-2026/
Audio file: https://media.blubrry.com/legends_and_losers/content.blubrry.com/legends_and_losers/440_FYD-PSJ_8_Microsoft_2026.mp3
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Duration seconds: 2234

## Resource

The business world is shifting in ways that most mainstream financial media is failing to capture. From Microsoft launching a consulting arm to Starlink eyeing your cell phone and Europe refusing to adopt air conditioning, the stories shaping our economic future are being misread at every turn. The Pirate Street Journal exists to fix that by examining these stories through a category design lens, revealing what is actually happening beneath the surface of the headlines. This is just one of the topics that Pirates Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon and Bri Clark discuss on this episode of Pirate Street Journal. Each week, the Category Pirates pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go. Microsoft Bets on Humans to Sell AI Microsoft launched a new company called Microsoft Frontier, backed by $2.5 billion, with the goal of sending engineers directly into client organizations to make AI actually work. On the surface, this looks like the world's highest-margin software business voluntarily stepping into one of the lowest-margin businesses in tech. Wall Street called it a stumble. It is actually a masterstroke. The real reason Microsoft is doing this comes down to a simple problem. Most enterprises have run AI pilots but have not reoriented their businesses around the technology. They are stuck, not because of technical limitations, but because they lack the vision for what AI could actually do for them. Microsoft is bridging that gap the same way early software companies always have, by pairing smart people with customers to find the use cases t…

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