Windows Vista was criticized for being heavy and needing large amounts of power to run the desktop widgets and the Aero theme. Many people continued to use Windows XP for many years after, due to its stability and low processing needs. Microsoft entered the personal digital assistant (PDA) market in November with Windows CE 1.0, a new built-from-scratch version of their flagship operating system, designed to run on low-memory, low-performance machines, such as handhelds and other small computers. 1996 saw the release of Windows NT 4.0, which brought the Windows 95 GUI and Windows NT kernel together. Microsoft also marketed through an Apple dealer in West Palm Beach, Florida two products for the Radio-Shack TRS-80. The other was authored by a professor at the University of Hawaii called „MuMATH“ and had the ability to do mathematics in long integer math to avoid floating point numbers.

Protect your personal data

During the previous summer of 2015 the company wrote down $7.6 billion (~$9.8 billion in 2024) related to its mobile-phone business and fired 7,800 employees from those operations. On September 15, 2014, Microsoft acquired the video game development company Mojang, best known for its wildly popular flagship game Minecraft, for $2.5 billion (~$3.25 billion in 2024). In July 2012, Microsoft sold its 50% stake in MSNBC.com, which it had run as a joint venture with NBC since 1996.

Fortune Magazine named Microsoft as the „1993 Most Innovative Company Operating in the U.S.“ The year also marked the end of a five-year copyright infringement legal case brought by Apple, dubbed Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., in which the ruling was in Microsoft’s favor. Microsoft also released Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a new version of the consumer line of Windows, and Windows NT 3.1, a server-based operating system with a similar user interface to consumer versions of the operating system, but with an entirely different kernel. As part of its strategy to broaden its business, Microsoft released Microsoft Encarta on March 22, 1993, the first encyclopedia designed to run on a computer. Microsoft Works, an integrated office program which combined features typically found in a word processor, spreadsheet, database and other office applications, saw its first release as an application for the Apple Macintosh towards the end of 1986. Microsoft Works would later be sold with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Bookshelf, a reference collection introduced in 1987 that was the company’s first CD-ROM product.

On October 1, Microsoft announced its intention to launch a news operation, part of a new-look MSN, at the time of the Windows 8 launch that was later in the month. 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. Microsoft released Windows XP and Office XP in 2001, a version that aimed to encompass the features of both its business and home product lines. The release included an updated version of the Windows 2000 kernel, enhanced DOS emulation abilities, and many of the home-user features found in previous consumer versions. XP introduced a new graphical user interface, the first such change since Windows 95. The operating system was the first to require Microsoft Product Activation, an anti-piracy mechanism that requires users to activate the software with Microsoft within 30 days.

Microsoft initially moved onto the grounds of the campus on February 26, 1986, weeks before the company went public on March 13. The headquarters has since experienced multiple expansions since its establishment. It is estimated to encompass over 8 million ft2 (750,000 m2) of office space and 30,000–40,000 employees.

On June 15, 2000, the company released a new version of its hand-held operating system, Windows CE 3.0. Previous versions of Windows CE supported only a small subset of the WinAPI, the main development library for Windows, and with Version 3 of Windows CE, the operating system now supported nearly all of the core functionality of the WinAPI. The next update to the consumer line, Windows ME (or Windows Millennium Edition), was released on September 14, 2000.

2014: Windows 8, Xbox One, Outlook.com, and Surface devices

On June 26, 2009, Microsoft started taking pre-orders at a discounted price for Windows 7 which was launched on October 22, 2009. Windows 7 has several editions, which acknowledge the rise of netbook computers with reduced processing power. Formerly codenamed „Longhorn“ in the early development stages, Windows Vista was released to consumers on January 30, 2007. Microsoft also released a new version of its Office suite, called Microsoft Office 2007, alongside Windows Vista. Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, the next versions of the company’s server operating system and development suite, respectively, were released on February 27, 2008.

United States government

Concerns were raised about Microsoft’s licensing practices potentially locking customers into its services and its AI investments possibly sidestepping regulatory oversight. In October 2021, Microsoft announced that it began rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support for Microsoft Teams calls in order to secure business communication while using video conferencing software. Users can ensure that their calls are encrypted and can utilize a security code that both parties on a call must verify on their respective ends. On October 7, Microsoft acquired Ally.io, a software service that measures companies‘ progress against OKRs. Microsoft plans to incorporate Ally.io into its Viva family of employee experience products. As the smartphone industry boomed in the late 2000s, Microsoft had struggled to keep up with its rivals in providing a modern smartphone operating system, falling behind Apple and Google-sponsored Android in the United States.

According to Microsoft, the future of xCloud on iOS remains unclear and potentially out of Microsoft’s hands. Apple has imposed a strict limit on „remote desktop clients“ which means applications are only allowed to connect to a user-owned host device or gaming console owned by the user. 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 March 9, 2021, the acquisition was finalized and ZeniMax Media became part of Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios division. On February 20, 2019, Microsoft said it would offer its cyber security service AccountGuard to 12 new markets in Europe, including Germany, France and Spain, to close security gaps and protect customers in the political space from hacking.

Corporate identity

In April 2018, Microsoft released the source code for Windows File Manager under the MIT License to celebrate the program’s 20th anniversary. In April the company further expressed willingness to embrace open source initiatives by announcing Azure Sphere as its own derivative of the Linux operating system. In May 2018, Microsoft partnered with 17 American intelligence agencies to develop cloud computing products. The project is dubbed „Azure Government“ and has ties to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) surveillance program. On chicken road June 4, 2018, Microsoft officially announced the acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion, a deal that closed on October 26, 2018.

Microsoft Redmond Campus Refresh

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). By the mid-1980s Microsoft had gotten out of the Unix business, except for its ownership stake in SCO. Criticism of Microsoft has followed various aspects of its products and business practices.

Microsoft Refresh Project (Campus Modernization)

The outage was traced back to a flawed update of CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software, which resulted in Microsoft systems crashing and causing disruptions across various sectors. Despite CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz clarifying that the issue was not a cyberattack, the incident had widespread consequences, leading to delays in air travel, financial transactions, and medical services globally. Microsoft stated that the underlying cause had been fixed but acknowledged ongoing residual impacts on some Microsoft 365 apps and services. In June 2024, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 1,000 employees from the company’s mixed reality and Azure cloud computing divisions. The announcement came with confusion after Microsoft announced Windows 10 would be the last version of the operating system. The public cloud computing platform provides access to quantum software and quantum hardware including trapped ion, neutral atom, and superconducting systems.

• Windows at the time generated more revenue for Microsoft than OS/2, and the company decided to move more resources from OS/2 to Windows.
• In April 2021, Microsoft announced it would buy Nuance Communications for approximately $16 billion (~$18.2 billion in 2024).
• The company continued to branch out into new markets in 1996, starting with a joint venture with NBC to create a new 24-hour cable news television station, MSNBC.
• The next update to the consumer line, Windows ME (or Windows Millennium Edition), was released on September 14, 2000.
• On May 26, 1995, Bill Gates sent the „Internet Tidal Wave“ memorandum to Microsoft executives.
• As such, it needs subsidiaries present in whatever national markets it chooses to harvest.

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. Microsoft also released the Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro joystick in an attempt to further expand its profile in the computer hardware market. 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.

• 2007 also saw the creation of a multi-core unit at Microsoft, following the steps of server companies such as Sun and IBM.
• Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
• In April 2019, Microsoft became the third public U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion.
• Gates retired from his role as Chief Software Architect on June 27, 2008, a decision announced in June 2006, while retaining other positions related to the company in addition to being an advisor for the company on key projects.
• The first operating system publicly released by the company was a variant of Unix announced on August 25, 1980.

„Embrace, extend, and extinguish“ (EEE), also known as „embrace, extend, and exterminate,“ is a phrase that the U.S. Microsoft is frequently accused of using anticompetitive tactics and abusing its monopolistic power. People who use its products and services often end up becoming dependent on them, a process known as vendor lock-in. 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.

Microsoft has been dominant in the IBM PC–compatible operating system market and the office software suite market since the 1990s. 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. In the enterprise and development fields, Microsoft most notably provides the Azure cloud computing platform, Microsoft SQL Server database software, and Visual Studio.citation needed