The crashes affected many organizations such as banks, airports, and emergency services, and numerous airlines grounded flights worldwide. Within hours, CrowdStrike released a patch for the faulty update that prevented future crashes, but affected computers had to be fixed manually, so problems persisted for some time. In December 2022, Microsoft announced a new 10-year deal with the London Stock Exchange for products including Microsoft Azure; Microsoft acquired ~4% of the latter company as part of the deal. In early September 2021, it was announced that the company had acquired Takelessons, an online platform which connects students and tutors in numerous subjects. The acquisition positioned Microsoft to grow its presence in the market of providing an online education to large numbers of people.
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Microsoft also released the Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro joystick in an attempt to further expand its profile in the computer hardware market. Skeptics questioned the system software vendor’s decision to produce application software. Gates said that doing so was not what InfoWorld phrased as a “big-time operation”, but Microsoft spent aggressively, with a reportedly “unlimited” R&D budget despite others in the industry advising against overexpansion. Word was first released in the spring of 1983, and free demonstration copies of the application were bundled with the November 1983 issue of PC World, making it one of the first programs to be distributed on-disk with a magazine. (Earlier magazine on-disk distributions included Robert Uiterwyk’s BASIC in the May 1977 issue of Information Age.) However, Xenix was never sold to end users directly although it was licensed to many software OEMs for resale. It grew to become the most popular version of Unix, measured by the number of machines running it (note that Unix is a multi-user operating system, allowing simultaneous access to a machine by several users).
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- In April 2004, Microsoft launched a community site for developers and users, titled Channel 9, that provides a wiki and an Internet forum.
- In May 2016, Microsoft announced another 1,850 job cuts mostly in its Nokia mobile phone division.
- Claiming more than a million installed MS-DOS machines, founder and chairman Bill Gates has decided to certify Microsoft’s jump on the rest of the industry by dominating applications, operating systems, peripherals and, most recently, book publishing.
- 1991 also marked the founding of Microsoft Research, an organization in Microsoft for researching computer science subjects, and Microsoft Visual Basic, a popular development product for companies and individuals.
- Later, in 2006, the company launched Microsoft adCenter, a service that offers pay per click advertisements, in an effort to further develop their search marketing revenue.
His role as Chief Software Architect was filled immediately by Ray Ozzie, the company’s Chief Technical Officer. Bill Gates stated “My announcement is not a retirement – it’s a reordering of my priorities.” Microsoft entered the multibillion-dollar game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo, with the release of the Xbox. The Xbox finished behind the dominant PlayStation 2 selling 24 million units compared to 155 million overall; however they managed to outsell the GameCube which sold 21 million units.
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- Hyphenated in its early incarnations, on November 26, 1976, the company was registered under “Microsoft” name with the Secretary of State of New Mexico.
- Microsoft has not released statements regarding Activision’s recent legal controversies regarding employee abuse, but reports have alleged that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, a major target of the controversy, will leave the company after the acquisition is finalized.
- It has also been criticized for the use of permatemp employees (employees employed for years as “temporary”, and therefore without medical benefits), the use of forced retention tactics, which means that employees would be sued if they tried to leave.
- When the Internal Revenue Service audited these transactions, ProPublica reported that Microsoft aggressively fought back, including successfully lobbying Congress to change the law to make it harder for the agency to conduct audits of large corporations.
Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2. When Microsoft launched several versions of Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, they had captured over 90% market share of the world’s personal computers. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its current best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system; Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software; Xbox, a line of entertainment of games, music, and video; Bing, a line of search engines; and Microsoft Azure, a cloud services platform. As reported by several news outlets, an Irish subsidiary of Microsoft based in the Republic of Ireland declared £220 bn in profits but paid no corporation tax for the year 2020.
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In May 2025, Microsoft announced that it is laying off more than 6,000 employees, around three percent of the company’s entire workforce. In July 2025, Microsoft announced another round of layoffs, cutting approximately 9,000 employees in its largest workforce reduction in over two years. The cuts affected multiple divisions, including Xbox, with 830 positions eliminated at its Redmond, Washington headquarters. Amid the layoffs, Microsoft also announced that it was quitting Pakistan after 25 years of operations. While the exit was part of shift in business strategies and preference for cloud based models, the company’s exit from Pakistan was also reportedly attributed to “growing difficulties” with the country’s business environment.
On June 18, 2012, Microsoft unveiled the Surface, the first computer in the company’s history to have its hardware made by Microsoft. On July 31, 2012, Microsoft launched the Outlook.com webmail service beta to compete with Gmail. In guise of competing with other Internet Companies such as the search service Google, in 2005 Microsoft announced a new version of its MSN search service.
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This Unix variant would become home to the first version of Microsoft’s word processor, Microsoft Word. Originally titled “Multi-Tool Word”, Microsoft Word became notable for its use of “What You See Is What You Get”, or WYSIWYG pioneered by the Xerox Alto and the Bravo text editor in the 1970s. Allen came up with the original name of Micro-Soft, a portmanteau of microcomputer and software. Hyphenated in its early incarnations, on November 26, 1976, the company was registered under “Microsoft” name with the Secretary of State of New Mexico. The first employee Gates and Allen hired was their high school collaborator Ric Weiland. The company’s first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan, entitled “ASCII Microsoft” (now called “Microsoft Japan”), and on November 29, 1979, the term, “Microsoft” was first used by Bill Gates.
The station was launched on July 15, 1996, to compete with similar news outlets such as CNN. Microsoft also launched Slate, an online magazine edited by Michael Kinsley, which offered political and social commentary along with the cartoon Doonesbury. In an attempt to extend its reach in the consumer market, the company acquired WebTV, which enabled consumers to access the Web from their televisions. In September, the Chinese government chose Windows to be the operating system of choice in that country, and entered into an agreement with the company to standardize a Chinese version of the operating system.
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It provided a high level of stability similar to that of its Unix counterparts due to its usage of the Windows NT kernel, and matching features found in the consumer line of the Windows operating system including a DOS emulator that could run many legacy DOS applications. The year 1998 was significant in Microsoft’s history, with Bill Gates appointing Steve Ballmer as president of Microsoft but remaining as chair and CEO himself. Windows 98 came with Internet Explorer 4.0 SP1 (which had Windows Desktop Update bundled), and included new features from Windows 95 OSR 2.x including the FAT32 file system, and new features designed for Windows 98, such as support for multiple displays. Microsoft launched its Indian headquarters as well, which would eventually become the company’s second largest after its U.S. headquarters. Finally, a great deal of controversy took place when a set of internal memos from the company were leaked on the Internet. The documents also alluded to legal and other actions against Linux as well as other open source software.
The SoftCard was first demonstrated publicly at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980. It was an immediate success; 5,000 cards, a large number given the microcomputer market at the time, were purchased in the initial three months at $349 (~$1,112 in 2024) each and it was Microsoft’s number chicken road app one revenue source in 1980. As of June 30, 2015, Microsoft has a global annual revenue of US$86.83 billion (~$112 billion in 2024) and 128,076 employees worldwide. It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. In 1980, Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM to bundle Microsoft’s operating system with IBM computers; with that deal, IBM paid Microsoft a royalty for every sale. In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2.
Activision Blizzard is best known for producing franchises, including but not limited to Warcraft, Diablo, Call of Duty, StarCraft, Candy Crush Saga, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Tony Hawk’s, Guitar Hero, and Overwatch. 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. Microsoft unveiled Windows 8, an operating system designed to power both personal computers and tablet computers, in Taipei in June 2011. 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. The Surface was unveiled on June 18, becoming the first computer in the company’s history to have its hardware made by Microsoft.
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These expanded on previous hardware commitments from Microsoft following its original Microsoft Mouse in 1983; as of 2007 the company sold the best-selling wired keyboard (Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000), mouse (IntelliMouse), and desktop webcam (LifeCam) in the United States. That year the company also launched the Surface “digital table”, later renamed PixelSense. On July 19, 2024, 8.5 million Windows computers around the world suffered crashes and were unable to restart, resulting from a faulty update that American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released for its Falcon Sensor security software.
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This changeover from OS/2 was frequently referred to in the industry as “the head-fake”. In the recent years, the popularity of OS/2 declined, and Windows quickly became the favored PC platform. 1991 also marked the founding of Microsoft Research, an organization in Microsoft for researching computer science subjects, and Microsoft Visual Basic, a popular development product for companies and individuals.
{In October, the Justice Department filed a motion in the federal district court in which they stated that Microsoft had violated an agreement signed in 1994, and asked the court to stop the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. The company released Microsoft Bob, a graphical user interface designed for novice computer users, in March 1995. The interface was discontinued in 1996 due to poor sales; Bill Gates later attributed its failure to hardware requirements that were too high for typical computers, and is widely regarded as one of Microsoft’s most unsuccessful products. } DreamWorks SKG and Microsoft formed a new company, DreamWorks Interactive (in 2000 acquired by Electronic Arts, which named it EA Los Angeles), to produce interactive and multimedia entertainment properties. On August 24, 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, a new version of the company’s flagship operating system which featured a completely new user interface, including a novel start button; more than a million copies were sold in the first four days after its release. Computerworld wrote in 1987 that “Gates has pushed Windows almost fanaticallly for years”.|Later in the decade, Gates and Allen repaired their relationship and together the two donated millions to their childhood school Lakeside. Employing over 88,200 staff members across 85 countries, Microsoft Corporation operates subsidiaries such as Microsoft Ireland Research, Microsoft Global Finance, and Microsoft Online. Its diverse business divisions encompass desktop programs, servers, entertainment devices, and personal communications services, making it a prominent player in the tech industry worldwide.|Relatively strong sales of both products helped to produce a record profit in 2007. The European Union imposed another fine of €899 million ($1.4 billion) for Microsoft’s lack of compliance with the March 2004 judgment on February 27, 2008, saying that the company charged rivals unreasonable prices for key information about its workgroup and backoffice servers. Microsoft stated that it was in compliance and that “these fines are about the past issues that have been resolved”.}
