“Facts are easy to dispute. If you're going to dispute something, you can dispute facts. Narratives are sticky. And so you got to work a lot harder and a lot faster if there's a narrative out there that you don't like or you believe is inaccurate.”
GeekWire · October 2026
Shaw looks back on Vanity Fair's "lost decade" story about Microsoft, which he says the company underestimated because it got little immediate pickup. Reporters then brought up the "lost decade" in every interview for years, and he says it took a new CEO to reset it.
Transcript
Tell us about the Vanity Fair piece. So for people who didn't
know, this was the Lost
…that time was something that every reporter read. And so it became part of the perceived narrative of the company. And every interview, every reporter for the next four years would reference the lost decade. And so I should have seen that as a sticky narrative that needed to be fought. And this is the, you know, like, this is the point I was trying to make in my LinkedIn thing: is that you can, facts are easy to dispute. If you're going to dispute something, you can dispute facts. Narratives are sticky. And so you got to work a lot harder and a lot faster if there's a narrative out there that you don't like or you believe is inaccurate. And so it took us, you know, a new CEO to be able to sort of reset that.
It's funny because. Right around the same time, Amazon had a similar experience with the New York Times. And it wasn't exactly the same. And I'm not talking about the reporting tactic. This was the
crying at your desk.
Yeah, this was the Amazon's quote bruising workplace. I still remember the word bruising from the headline. And again, the reporters did not use the tactic that you mentioned, but it had a similar effect where initially it was like, huh, that's probably one New York Times story. And it became an…
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