History of Microsoft Wikipedia

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. Following the release of Windows Phone, Microsoft underwent a gradual rebranding of its product range throughout 2011 and 2012—the corporation’s logos, products, services and websites adopted the principles and concepts of the Metro design language. Microsoft previewed 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, and was replaced by a consumer preview on February 29, 2012. On June 18, 2012, Microsoft unveiled the Surface, the first computer in the company’s history to have its hardware made by Microsoft.

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. 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.

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. On January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to a new home in Bellevue, Washington, since it was hard to recruit top programmers to Albuquerque. Shortly before the move, 11 of the then-13 employees posed for the staff photo on the right. 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.

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On July 29, 2015, Microsoft released the next version of the Windows operating system, Windows 10. The successor to Windows Phone 8.1, Windows 10 Mobile, was released November 20, 2015. In July 2012, Microsoft sold its 50% stake in MSNBC.com, which it had run as a joint venture with NBC since 1996. 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.

On August 24, 1995, it launched a major online service, MSN (Microsoft Network), as a direct competitor to AOL. MSN became an umbrella service for Microsoft’s online services, using Microsoft Passport (now called a Microsoft account) as a universal login system for all of its web sites. 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 station was launched on July 15, 1996, to compete with similar news outlets such as CNN.

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In January 2023, CEO Satya Nadella announced Microsoft would lay off some 10,000 employees. The announcement came a day after hosting a Sting concert for 50 people, including Microsoft executives, in Davos, Switzerland. Microsoft also announced a new multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment deal with OpenAI.

However, Microsoft encountered more turmoil in March 2004 when antitrust legal action would be brought against it by the European Union for allegedly abusing its market dominance (see Microsoft Corp. v. Commission). Eventually Microsoft was fined €497 million (US$613 million), ordered to divulge certain protocols to competitors, and to produce a new version of its Windows XP platform—called Windows XP Home Edition N—that did not include its Windows Media Player. Microsoft was also ordered to produce separate packages of Windows after South Korea also landed a settlement against the company in 2005. It had to pay out US$32 million and produce more than one version of Windows for the country in the same vein as the European Union-one with Windows Media Player and Windows Messenger and one without the two programs.

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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. 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 the Dragon, Skylanders, and Overwatch. In 2002, Microsoft launched the .NET initiative, along with new versions of some of its development products, such as Microsoft Visual Studio. The initiative has been an entirely new development API for Windows programming, and included a new programming language, C#. Windows Server 2003 was launched, featuring enhanced administration abilities, such as new user interfaces to server tools. In 2004, the company released Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, a version of Windows XP designed for multimedia abilities, and Windows XP Starter Edition, a version of Windows XP with a smaller feature set designed for entry-level consumers.

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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. Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro.

Around one month later, on March 13, the company went public with an initial public offering (IPO), raising US$61 million at US$21.00 per share at its opening on the fully electronic Nasdaq stock exchange. By then the company was the world’s largest producer of software for personal computers—ahead of former leader Lotus—and published the three most-popular Macintosh business applications. It was the company’s first major acquisition, and gave Microsoft a Silicon Valley base. The company had run out of local employees to hire; more than 90% of the company’s developers came from outside Seattle. 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 one revenue source in 1980.

On July 22, 2020, Microsoft announced plans to close its Mixer service, planning to move existing partners to Facebook Gaming. In January 2019, Microsoft announced that support for Windows 10 Mobile would end on December 10, 2019, and that Windows 10 Mobile users should migrate to iOS or Android phones. On February 20, 2019, Microsoft Corp said it will 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 political space from hacking. In February 2019, hundreds of Microsoft employees protested the company’s $480 million contract to develop VR headsets for the United States Army, calling it war profiteering. On October 8, 2017, Joe Belfiore announced that work on Windows 10 Mobile was drawing to a close due to lack of market penetration and resultant lack of interest from app developers. On October 10, 2018, Microsoft joined the Open Invention Network community despite holding more than 60,000 patents.

• The acquisition positioned Microsoft to grow its presence in the market of providing an online education to large numbers of people.
• Microsoft entered the multibillion-dollar game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo, with the release of the Xbox.
• In 2009, the opening show of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was hosted by Steve Ballmer for the first time.
• Microsoft began to expand its product line into computer networking and the World Wide Web.

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In December 2018, Microsoft announced Project Mu, an open source release of the UEFI core used in Microsoft Surface and Hyper-V products. December also saw the company rebuilding Microsoft Edge as a Chromium-based browser; it was publicly released on January 15, 2020. On February 4, 2014, Steve Ballmer stepped down as CEO of Microsoft and was succeeded by Satya Nadella, who previously led Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise division. On the same day, John W. Thompson took on the role of chairman, with Bill Gates stepping down from the position, while continuing to participate as a technology advisor. On April 25, 2014, Microsoft acquired Nokia Devices and Services for $7.2 billion (~$9.37 billion in 2024).

It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Microsoft continues to actively arm the ongoing genocide against Palestinians as Israel commits flagrant violations of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza, blocks and sabotages aid, and escalates ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,” No Azure for Apartheid stated. “Microsoft Ignite, the company’s premier conference with over 15,000 attendees, will be marketing Cloud & AI technologies — the same technologies Microsoft sells to the Israeli military to commit war crimes.” The group No Azure for Apartheid called on Microsoft to sever business with the Israeli military, and says that until it does, Microsoft is complicit in genocide in Gaza. 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.

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. Microsoft launched their second console, the Xbox 360, in 2005 – which was more successful than the original. By 2017, the Xbox 360 had sold 84 million units but failed to outsell its main rival, the PlayStation 3, which sold 87 million units when discontinued. The console was also outsold by the Wii, which introduced gesture control and opened up a new market for video games. Microsoft later used their popular controller-free Kinect peripheral to increase the popularity of the Xbox. 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. 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 August 8, 1989, Microsoft introduced its most successful office product, Microsoft Office.}

The memo described Netscape with their Netscape Navigator as a “new competitor ‘born’ on the Internet”. The memo outlines Microsoft’s failure to grasp the Internet’s importance, and in it Gates assigned “the Internet the highest level of importance” from then on. Microsoft began to expand its product line into computer networking and the World Wide Web.

The documents also alluded to legal and other actions against Linux as well as other open source software. While Microsoft acknowledged the documents, it claimed that they are merely engineering studies. Despite this, some believe that these studies were used in the real strategies of the company. Cytation in January 1986 became Microsoft’s first acquisition, forming the company’s CD-ROM division. On February 16, 1986, Microsoft relocated their headquarters to a corporate office campus in Redmond, Washington.

• This changeover from OS/2 was frequently referred to in the industry as “the head-fake”.
• For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for less than US$100,000, which IBM renamed to IBM PC DOS.
• Some people, especially developers who had ignored Windows and committed most of their resources to OS/2, were taken by surprise, and accused Microsoft of deception.
• 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.
• The documents also alluded to legal and other actions against Linux as well as other open source software.

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. Ireland became home to one of https://pin-up-download.in/ Microsoft’s international production facilities in 1985, and on November 20 Microsoft released its first retail version of Microsoft Windows (Windows 1.0), originally a graphical extension for its MS-DOS operating system. In August, Microsoft and IBM partnered in the development of a different operating system called OS/2. OS/2 was marketed in connection with a new hardware design proprietary to IBM, the PS/2.

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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. Soon afterward, Microsoft created the CodePlex collaborative development site for hosting open source projects. Activity grew quickly as developers from around the world began to participate, and by early 2007 commercial open source companies, such as Aras Corp. began to offer enterprise open source software exclusively on the Microsoft platform. Microsoft, in 2000, released new products for all three lines of the company’s flagship operating system, and saw the beginning of the end of one of its most prominent legal cases. On February 17, Microsoft released an update to its business line of software in Windows 2000. 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.