Microsoft Wikipedia

Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business using their skills in computer programming. Microsoft has also been criticized for its role in providing services to Israel during the Gaza war. Its flagship hardware products are the Surface lineup of PCs and the Xbox brand of video game consoles, the latter including the Xbox network. Under his direction, the company has expanded its video gaming business to support the Xbox brand, establishing the Microsoft Gaming division in 2022 and acquiring Activision Blizzard in 2023. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington.

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. On September 15, 2014, Microsoft acquired the video game development company Mojang, best known for Minecraft, for $2.5 billion.

Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro. In March 2024, Inflection AI’s cofounders Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan announced their departure from the company in order to start Microsoft AI, with Microsoft acqui-hiring nearly the entirety of its 70-person workforce. 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. In January 2023, CEO Satya Nadella announced Microsoft would lay off 10,000 employees. Microsoft had 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, would leave the company after the acquisition is finalized.

2014: Windows 8/8.1, Xbox One, Outlook.com, and Surface devices

In May 2018, Microsoft partnered with 17 American intelligence agencies to develop cloud computing products. 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. 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 PowerPoint presentation program. Since prabhu365-nepal.com/ Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, the company has changed focus towards cloud computing and acquired LinkedIn in 2016. 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.

• In May 2018, Microsoft partnered with 17 American intelligence agencies to develop cloud computing products.
• In June 2023, Microsoft released Azure Quantum Elements to run molecular simulations and calculations in computational chemistry and materials science using a combination of AI, high-performance computing and quantum computing.
• In September 2014, Microsoft laid off 2,100 people, including 747 people in the Seattle–Redmond area, where the company is headquartered.
• In November 2014, Microsoft overtook ExxonMobil to become the second most-valuable company by market capitalization, behind only Apple Inc.

A Big Tech company, Microsoft is the largest software company by revenue, one of the most valuable public companies, and one of the most valuable brands globally. 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. This is due to the company being tax resident in Bermuda as mentioned in the accounts for ‘Microsoft Round Island One, a subsidiary that collects license fees from the use of Microsoft software worldwide. The company is often referred to as a “Velvet Sweatshop”, a term which originated in a 1989 Seattle Times article, and later became used to describe the company by some of Microsoft’s own employees. Historically, Microsoft has also been accused of overworking employees, in many cases, leading to burnout within just a few years of joining the company. The company 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.

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Microsoft Office 2007, released at the same time, featured a “Ribbon” user interface which was a significant departure from its predecessors. On October 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP, unifying the mainstream and NT lines of OS under the NT codebase. 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. 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.

1994: Windows and Office

On November 10, 2020, Microsoft released the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S video game consoles. 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. 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 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. In April 2018, Microsoft released the source code for Windows File Manager under the MIT License to celebrate the program’s 20th anniversary. 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.

The company released the Xbox later that year, entering the video game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo. 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. In August 1977, the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office of ASCII Microsoft. It has been criticized for monopolistic practices, and the company’s software received criticism for problems with ease of use, robustness, and security. Microsoft became the third publicly traded U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion in April 2019.