Liam Denning, Columnist

Halliburton and Microsoft Do Not Compute for OPEC

Innovation puts the emphasis on managing costs rather than controlling prices.

August 22, 2017 at 5:39 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

1503422452_GettyImages-501418568 — Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

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Say "platform" at an oil conference and you'll usually conjure up an image of some windswept deck on a rig far from shore. Like so much else, though, technology is rewriting the energy industry's dictionary.

Halliburton Co. and Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced a new alliance to "digitally transform the oil and gas industry," which, as a phrase, feels as if it was written by an artificial intelligence designed solely to set your teeth on edge. Before you click away, though, consider that this union of Big Oil and Big Data is a big reason OPEC is doomed.