Microsoft says it wasn’t hacked. But Anthropic may have found a more interesting way in.
EXPERT OPINION BY DAVE SOKOLIN, TECHNOLOGY INVESTOR
On Thursday, Microsoft Outlook went down, and governments and businesses around the world discovered just how dependent they still are on an email program introduced in 1997. Nearly 30 years later, we’re still organizing much of our working lives around Outlook.
Microsoft Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents, and Platform Charles Lamanna opened his statement with: “We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue.” The company later added that there was no indication of malicious or cyber activity.
Fair enough. But while everyone was wondering whether
Fair enough. But while everyone was wondering whether Microsoft had been hacked, I was wondering something else. Why are we still using it?
The Real Hack: Anthropic
Just two days earlier, Anthropic announced Claude Sheets, Whiteboards, and Data, with Meetings coming soon. Spreadsheets, collaboration, dashboards, meeting notes. Sound familiar? It’s starting to look a lot like Microsoft Office.
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But Anthropic isn’t simply recreating Office. Claude connects to systems like Salesforce and Snowflake, pulling information together to build dashboards, analyze data, and get actual work done. It doesn’t need to own your information. It just needs to become the place where you go to use it.
That’s the real hack
That’s the real hack. Why replace Microsoft’s entire software empire when you can potentially make its familiar interfaces unnecessary?
If you were starting a company today, would you automatically sign up for Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams? Or would you start with an AI platform that could do much of that work for you?
Source: www.inc.com
