A recent discussion on the history of data platforms revealed a powerful pattern: the corporate data landscape has been shaped by two great waves of commoditization, and the second is cresting right now.
The First Wave crashed over analytics in the 2000s. Specialized BI tools like Tableau and MicroStrategy offered powerful, yet expensive, insights. Microsoft then disrupted the market with Power BI, leveraging its scale to make sophisticated dashboards a low-cost commodity.
With analytics solved, the bottleneck shifted to complex data engineering and storage. This created the Second Wave, giving rise to specialized platforms like Snowflake and Databricks. Today, history is repeating itself. Microsoft Fabric is accelerating this second wave by unifying the entire data estate—from storage and engineering to BI and AI—into a single, low-code platform.
The market’s hunger for this integrated, cost-effective approach is undeniable, evidenced by Fabric’s rapid adoption by 25,000 companies, including 67% of the Fortune 500. By commoditizing the underlying data infrastructure, Fabric allows organizations to pivot from manual data wrangling to the next true differentiator: integrating AI across the enterprise. It’s a remarkable evolution, especially considering that two decades ago, a major technical win was just centering a P&L table correctly on a webpage.
#MicrosoftFabric #DataStrategy #AI #fabric #data
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-fabric
Author: Jim Fahrenbach
Midwest Machines and Minds 
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