Criticism of Microsoft has followed various aspects of its products and business practices. Among grant recipients from the Asia-Pacific region are the Sri Lankan IT company Fortude, the Thailand-based Vulcan Coalition, and the Indonesian organization Kerjabilitas. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, announced that it had donated an initial batch of supplies, including 15,000 protection goggles, infrared thermometers, medical caps, and protective suits, to healthcare workers in Seattle, with further aid to come. The company was the official jersey sponsor of Finland’s national basketball team at EuroBasket 2015, a major sponsor of the Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT (2017–2020) and a sponsor of the Renault F1 Team (2016–2020). On August 23, 2012, Microsoft unveiled a new corporate logo at the opening of its 23rd Microsoft store in Boston, indicating the company’s shift of focus from the classic style to the tile-centric modern interface, which it uses/will use on the Windows Phone platform, Xbox 360, Windows 8 and the upcoming Office Suites. The company’s retail locations are part of a greater strategy to help build a connection with its consumers.
In the same month, Microsoft acquired Australia-based video editing software company Clipchamp. 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. Intune for Education is a new cloud-based application and device management service for the education sector. 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.
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On March 13, 2020, Gates announced that he is leaving the board of directors of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus more on his philanthropic efforts. Microsoft is ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; and it was the world’s largest software maker by revenue in 2022 according to Forbes Global 2000. On July 2, 2025, Microsoft announced it would cut nearly 4% of its workforce, around 9,000 jobs, to control costs amid heavy AI infrastructure spending, while also restructuring management and streamlining operations. The company had restructured operations in Russia after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, but those restructuring efforts had failed. On February 28, 2025, Microsoft announced that Skype would be shutting down on May 5, 2025, to streamline its focus on Microsoft Teams. Microsoft also announced relaunch of its controversial tool, Recall, in November 2024 after addressing privacy concerns.
In May 2016, Microsoft announced another 1,850 job cuts mostly in its Nokia mobile phone division. In mid-2025, Microsoft’s Russian division, Microsoft Rus LLC, filed for bankruptcy after President Vladimir Putin stated that foreign services providers should be throttled in Russia to make way for domestic software. Microsoft stated that the underlying cause had been fixed but acknowledged ongoing residual impacts on some Microsoft 365 apps and services. The service includes Copilot, a GPT-4 based large language model tool to query and visualize data, write code, initiate simulations, and educate researchers. On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced the acquisition of American video game developer and holding company Activision Blizzard in an all-cash deal worth $68.7 billion. 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.
- Subsequently, two employees interrupted AI executive Mustafa Suleyman at a speaking event on April 4, 2025, in protest at the company’s support of Israel.
- In 2020, ProPublica reported that the company had diverted more than $39 billion in U.S. profits to Puerto Rico using a mechanism structured to make it seem as if the company was unprofitable on paper.
- The Surface was unveiled on June 18, becoming the first computer in the company’s history to have its hardware made by Microsoft.
- 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.
- Free technical support is traditionally provided through online Usenet newsgroups, and CompuServe in the past, monitored by Microsoft employees; there can be several newsgroups for a single product.
- In April 2018, Microsoft released the source code for Windows File Manager under the MIT License to celebrate the program’s 20th anniversary.
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It is estimated to encompass over 8 million ft2 (750,000 m2) of office space and 30,000–40,000 employees. In 2023 Microsoft consumed 24 TWh of electricity, more than countries such as Iceland, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, or Tunisia. Microsoft also subsidizes regional public transport, provided by Sound Transit and King County Metro, as an incentive. 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.
- Now, you’ll have to scan the QR code using your iPhone or Android smartphone.
- Noted for its internal lexicon, the expression “eating your own dog food” is used to describe the policy of using pre-release and beta versions of products inside Microsoft to test them in “real-world” situations.
- WhatsApp from Meta is a free messaging and calling app used by over 2 billion people across 180+ countries.
- However, the plan was short-lived, as Altman was subsequently reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO and Brockman rejoined the company amid pressure from OpenAI’s employees and investors on its board.
- It was announced that the division would be led by Jordan Hoffman, who previously worked for Deepmind and Inflection.
- Other companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM and Lotus, being much slower to adapt to the new situation, would give Microsoft market dominance.
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. On February 12, 2009, Microsoft announced its intent to open a chain of Microsoft-branded retail stores, and on October 22, 2009, the first retail Microsoft Store opened in Scottsdale, Arizona; the same day Windows 7 was officially released to the public. Azure Services Platform, the company’s entry into the cloud computing market for Windows, launched on October 27, 2008. 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 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. The company’s 1986 initial public offering (IPO) and subsequent rise in its share price created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees.
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Your files and memories are secure in the cloud with 5GB of storage for free and 1TB with a paid Microsoft 365 subscription. Quickly design anything for you and your family—birthday cards, school flyers, budgets, social posts, videos, and more—no graphic design experience needed. Find your favorite apps, your files, and your inspiration with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on the web.
Subsequently, two employees interrupted AI executive Mustafa Suleyman at a speaking event on April 4, 2025, in protest at the company’s support of Israel. 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. The employees, part of the group No Azure for Apartheid, sought to address the company’s involvement in the Israeli government’s use of its technology. 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 is run by a board of directors made up of mostly company outsiders, as is customary for publicly traded companies. In April 2019, Microsoft became the third U.S. public company to be valued at over $1 trillion.b As of 2024update, Microsoft has the third-highest global brand valuation. In 2018, Microsoft became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, a position it has repeatedly traded with Apple in the years since. 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. 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. On July 19, 2024, a global IT outage impacted Microsoft services, affecting businesses, airlines, and financial institutions worldwide.
present: Acquisitions, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows 11
Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the rise of personal computers through software like Windows, and has since expanded to Internet services, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, video gaming, and other fields. In the same month, Microsoft announced the open source implementation of Windows Forms and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which will allow for further movement of the company toward the transparent release of key frameworks used in developing Windows desktop applications and software. However, unlike desktop and mobile apps, it doesn’t allow you to make telephone and video calls.
Microsoft implemented a new strategy for the software industry, providing a consistent user experience across all smartphones using the Windows Phone OS. As a result, in 2010 Microsoft revamped its aging flagship mobile operating system, Windows Mobile, replacing it with the new Windows Phone OS that was released in October that year. 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. Increasingly present in the hardware business following Xbox, Microsoft 2006 released the Zune series of digital media players, a successor of its previous software platform Portable Media Center. On October 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP, unifying the mainstream and NT lines of OS under the NT codebase. 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.
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Relatively strong sales of both products helped to produce a record profit in 2007. Microsoft Office 2007, released at the same time, featured a “Ribbon” user interface which was a significant departure from its predecessors. Branching out into new markets in 1996, Microsoft and General Electric’s NBC unit created a new 24/7 cable news channel, MSNBC. Backed by a high-profile marketing campaign and what The New York Times called “the splashiest, most frenzied, most expensive introduction of a computer product in the industry’s history,” Windows 95 quickly became a success.
ET said that the company has restored affected infrastructure and was directing traffic to other infrastructure to recover. ET, Microsoft said that it had found that “a portion of service infrastructure in North America” was not handling traffic correctly and that it was trying to fix the problem. ET, the company said in an X post that it was investigating an issue affecting Outlook. Outlook represents a core part of Microsoft 365 productivity software bundles.
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. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app brings together https://www.kinghills.casino/ your favorite apps in one intuitive platform that keeps your data secure with enterprise data protection. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app empowers your employees to do their best work with Copilot in the apps they use daily.
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