The program authorizes the government to secretly access data of non-US citizens hosted by American companies without a warrant. In June 2024, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 1,000 employees from the company’s mixed reality and Azure cloud computing divisions. Its best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems and the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, which most notably include the Word word processor, Excel spreadsheet editor, and the PowerPoint presentation program. Often described as a https://www.justbit-nl.nl/ Big Tech company, Microsoft is the largest software company by revenue, one of the most valuable public companies,a and one of the most valuable brands globally.
- In July 2015, Microsoft announced another 7,800 job cuts in the next several months.
- Microsoft also announced relaunch of its controversial tool, Recall, in November 2024 after addressing privacy concerns.
- On September 21, 2020, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire video game company ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, for about $7.5 billion, with the deal expected to occur in the second half of 2021 fiscal year.
- On October 7, Microsoft acquired Ally.io, a software service that measures companies’ progress against OKRs.
- Other companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM and Lotus, being much slower to adapt to the new situation, would give Microsoft market dominance.
- MSDN also offers subscriptions for companies and individuals, and the more expensive subscriptions usually offer access to pre-release beta versions of Microsoft software.
In November 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an investigation into Microsoft, focusing on potential antitrust violations related to its cloud computing, AI, and cybersecurity businesses. On August 20, 20 Microsoft employees and their allies were arrested after refusing to disperse from a protest on Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington campus. After the disruptions at these events, Microsoft contacted the FBI in search of assistance in surveilling its pro-Palestinian employees and their allies. In May 2025, Microsoft issued an unsigned statement confirming that these services had been made available to Israel, while denying that these tools were employed during the massacre of the people of Gaza.
Microsoft entered the operating system (OS) business in 1980 with its own version of Unix, licensed from AT&T Corporation a year before, called Xenix, but it was MS-DOS that solidified the company’s dominance. It has been criticized for its monopolistic practices, and the company’s software received criticism for problems with ease of use, robustness, and security. In April 2019, Microsoft became the third public U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has changed focus towards cloud computing, as well as its acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.
In 2011, Greenpeace released a report rating the top ten big brands in cloud computing on the sources of electricity for their data centers. In December 2013, the company made a statement to further emphasize that it takes its customers’ privacy and data protection very seriously, saying that “government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’ alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks”. Microsoft provides information about reported bugs in its software to intelligence agencies of the United States government, prior to the public release of the fix. In May 2025, Microsoft announced that it is laying off more than 6,000 employees, around three percent of the company’s entire workforce. The company is run by a board of directors made up of mostly company outsiders, as is customary for publicly traded companies. The public cloud computing platform provides access to quantum software and quantum hardware including trapped ion, neutral atom, and superconducting systems.
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- It created one of the world’s largest private bus systems, the “Connector”, to transport people from outside the company; for on-campus transportation, the “Shuttle Connect” uses a large fleet of hybrid cars to save fuel.
- In October 2024, Microsoft fired two employees, software engineers Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal, who organized an unauthorized vigil at its Redmond headquarters to honor Palestinians killed in the Gaza war.
- The company released the Xbox later that year, entering the video game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo.
- Microsoft also supports initiatives through its AI for Accessibility grant program, providing funding to various global organizations that create technologies to enhance accessibility for individuals with disabilities.
- In June 2016, Microsoft announced a project named Microsoft Azure Information Protection.
- In March the company also established guidelines that censor users of Office 365 from using profanity in private documents.
- In December 2013, the company made a statement to further emphasize that it takes its customers’ privacy and data protection very seriously, saying that “government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’ alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks”.
In April 2016, the company sued the U.S. government, argued that secrecy orders were preventing the company from disclosing warrants to customers in violation of the company’s and customers’ rights. Following media reports about PRISM, NSA’s massive electronic surveillance program, in May 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Microsoft. A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the corporation runs several programs that facilitate the sharing of such information with the U.S. government. In July 2025, Microsoft announced another round of layoffs, cutting approximately 9,000 employees in its largest workforce reduction in over two years. In November 2018, the company won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring augmented reality (AR) headset technology into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers. On November 14, 2014, Microsoft overtook ExxonMobil to become the second most-valuable company by market capitalization, behind only Apple Inc.
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With a few exceptions of new companies, like Netscape, Microsoft was the only major and established company that acted fast enough to be a part of the World Wide Web practically from the start. Microsoft moved its headquarters from Bellevue to Redmond, Washington, on February 26, 1986, and went public with an initial public offering (IPO) at the NASDAQ exchange on March 13, with the resulting rise in stock making an estimated four billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. IBM had copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, so other companies had to reverse engineer it for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles, but no such restriction applied to the operating systems.
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It shipped on July 21, 1993, with a new modular kernel and the 32-bit Win32 application programming interface (API), making it easier to port from 16-bit (MS-DOS-based) Windows. In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission examined Microsoft for possible collusion due to the partnership with IBM, marking the beginning of more than a decade of legal clashes with the government. Microsoft released its version of OS/2 to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) on April 2, 1987. In August 1977, the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office of ASCII Microsoft. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems’s (MITS) Altair 8800 microcomputer, which inspired Allen to suggest that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device. In 1972, they founded Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data.
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In May 2016, the company announced it was laying off 1,850 workers, and taking an impairment and restructuring charge of $950 million. During the summer of 2015 the company lost $7.6 billion related to its mobile-phone business, firing 7,800 employees. To cope with the potential for an increase in demand for products and services, Microsoft opened a number of “holiday stores” across the U.S. to complement the increasing number of “bricks-and-mortar” Microsoft Stores that opened in 2012. A developer preview was released on September 13, which was subsequently replaced by a consumer preview on February 29, 2012, and released to the public in May. Following the release of Windows Phone, Microsoft undertook a gradual rebranding of its product range throughout 2011 and 2012, with the corporation’s logos, products, services, and websites adopting the principles and concepts of the Metro design language.
Intune for Education is a new cloud-based application and device management service for the education sector. On March 1, 2016, Microsoft announced the merger of its PC and Xbox divisions, with Phil Spencer announcing that Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps would be the focus for Microsoft’s gaming in the future. In 2015, the construction of a data center in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, led to the destruction of a historic African American cemetery despite archeological recommendations for preservation. On July 29, 2015, Windows 10 was released, with its server sibling, Windows Server 2016, released in September 2016. On January 21, 2015, Microsoft announced the release of its first interactive whiteboard, named Surface Hub.
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In September 2024, BlackRock and Microsoft announced a $30 billion fund, the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, to invest in AI infrastructure such as data centers and energy projects. In June 2024, Microsoft announced that it was building a “hyperscale data centre” in South East Leeds. Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro.
December also saw the company discontinue the Microsoft Edge Legacy browser project in favor of the “New Edge” browser project, featuring a Chromium based backend. The specific computer programs used in the process fall under the Azure Machine Learning and the Azure IoT Hub platforms. Developed in part by researchers from Kindai University, the water pump mechanisms use artificial intelligence to count the number of fish on a conveyor belt, analyze the number of fish, and deduce the effectiveness of water flow from the data the fish provide. In August 2018, Microsoft released two projects called Microsoft AccountGuard and Defending Democracy.
Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to market BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows. The Maia 200 chip, which is being produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is making its way to Microsoft data centers in Iowa, with deployments headed to the Phoenix area next. The organization requested that European data protection authorities investigate whether this data processing complies with EU law. Concerns were raised about Microsoft’s licensing practices potentially locking customers into its services and its AI investments possibly sidestepping regulatory oversight.
The increased necessity for remote work and distance education drove demand for cloud computing and grew the company’s gaming sales. On September 21, 2020, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire video game company ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, for about $7.5 billion, with the deal expected to occur in the second half of 2021 fiscal year. In February 2019, hundreds of Microsoft employees protested the company’s war profiteering from a $480 million contract to develop virtual reality headsets for the United States Army. In December 2018, Microsoft announced Project Mu, an open source release of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) core used in Microsoft Surface and Hyper-V products.