Microsoft Will Be a Major Player in a Future Electric Vehicle World
The company’s cloud technology is critical to self-driving capability
I recently wrote about the taGMan technology companies made up of Tesla, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and General Motors (GM). In my opinion, these seven companies will be leaders in a future world of electric vehicles, autonomous driving technology and mobility solutions.
One of these taGMan companies, Microsoft, reported record quarterly revenue yesterday. These record sales highlight the company’s almost unassailable position in their productivity, personal computing and cloud businesses. What is not widely known, however, is that Microsoft is winning business in what might become an $8 trillion global industry around self-driving vehicles. The recent announcement that Microsoft is leading a $2 billion investment round into GM’s Cruise autonomous driving subsidiary is a perfect example of Microsoft’s efforts
The Microsoft-GM-Cruise partnership allows Cruise to utilize Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing technology to commercialize its self-driving data solutions at scale. Importantly, Microsoft gets to stay close to Cruise’s autonomous technology to incorporate additional capabilities useful to other future autonomous technology customers.
“Microsoft’s wide range of partnerships will enable it to become a growing hub to attract self-driving car startups. It will use the expertise and experience of these startups to enhance its cloud and AI services for autonomous driving, and in turn attract more customers.” — Ben Dickson
As highlighted in a recent VentureBeat article by Ben Dickson, all companies developing self-driving capability are essentially developing artificial intelligence businesses. Only a few companies can assist with the algorithm development and big data analysis required to build the machine learning capability necessary for autonomous driving. Microsoft is one of those companies. And unlike others, it has has chosen to partner across many customers to cast a wide net over many capabilities. Ultimately, this strategy will produce a new and very profitable business for Microsoft as the world of TaaS develops.
Disclaimer
TaaSMaster, LLC is not a registered investment advisor or broker/dealer. All investment opinions expressed by TaaSMaster, LLC are from personal research and experience of the owner of the site and are intended as educational material. Although best efforts are made to ensure that all information is accurate and up to date, occasionally unintended errors may occur.
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