Boz to the Future Episode 17: The Future According to Steven Sinofsky

Welcome back for another episode of Boz To The Future, a podcast from Reality Labs. In today’s episode, our host, Meta CTO and Head of Reality Labs Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, is joined by technologist and author of Hardcore Software Steven Sinofsky to talk about the recurring lessons of standing up new platforms, as well as writing and how AI may benefit the craft.

Sinofsky has had an expansive career with a front-row and driver’s seat in the thick of the PC revolution. He worked at Microsoft for over two decades, focused on its core businesses through a period of rapid growth not just for the company but the entire PC industry overall. Today, he spends most of his time investing in, advising, and serving on boards of small startups and large companies alike, as well as working as a board partner at Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. Sinofsky is also a prolific writer, having written on public blogs for over 20 years. His most recent book is currently being serialized on Substack. Titled Hardcore Software: Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution, it’s a detailed first-person account of his time starting at Microsoft as he grew with the company working on many leading products of that era.

Together, Sinofsky and Bosworth cover a range of topics, from the massive effort needed to build a new computing platform to the difficulty of building novel technologies in an era where everything “just works.” They look at how we’re once again at an exciting time in computing, where new form factors, like smart glasses with integrated AI features, begin to reveal technologies that could become increasingly ubiquitous in the near future.

They also talk about AI and how, even in its earliest inception, there was already a desire to harness it for utility that benefits people (spoiler alert: Clippy, an early assistant embedded in Microsoft Word to help people with their writing, makes an appearance). Sinofsky and Bosworth, who share a passion for writing, dig deeper into how today’s advances in generative AI could benefit some people’s pursuit of the craft.

You can tune in to Boz to the Future on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can follow Bosworth on Instagram, Twitter/X, and Threads @boztank. Follow Steven Sinofsky on Twitter/X, and get the e-book of Hardcore Software.