The deal allowed Microsoft to license many shows from Viacom owned cable television and film studios for use on Xbox Live and MSN. On December 19, 2007, Microsoft signed a five-year, $500 million (~$727 million in 2024) contract with Viacom that included content sharing and advertisements. Microsoft also released a new version of its Office suite, called Microsoft Office 2007, alongside Windows Vista. On June 15, 2006, Bill Gates announced his plans for a two-year transition period out of a day-to-day role with Microsoft until July 31, 2008.
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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. 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.
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. Windows CE 2.0, the handheld version of Windows, was released this year, including a host of bug fixes and new features designed to make it more appealing to corporate customers. In 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released, marking the beginning of the takeover of the browser market from rival Netscape, and by agreement with Apple, Internet Explorer was bundled with the Apple Macintosh operating system as well as with Windows. The company also released the Microsoft SQL Server 6.5, which had built-in support for internet applications. Microsoft also released the Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro joystick in an attempt to further expand its profile in the computer hardware market.
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On August 8, 1989, Microsoft introduced its most successful office product, Microsoft Office. 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 February 16, 1986, Microsoft relocated their headquarters to a corporate office campus in Redmond, Washington. Softletter estimated that in 1986 the “Big Three” of Lotus (9%), Microsoft (8%, more than $250 million), and Ashton-Tate (6%) together had 23% of total revenue of the top 100 microcomputer software companies.
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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. On February 17, Microsoft released an update to its business line of software in Windows 2000. In March 1992, Microsoft released Windows 3.1 along with its first promotional campaign on TV; the software sold over three million copies in its first two months on the market.
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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. The company released Microsoft Bob, a graphical user interface designed for novice computer users, in March 1995. 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 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. In November, Microsoft released the first version of their popular database software Microsoft Access.
- The initiative has been an entirely new development API for Windows programming, and included a new programming language, C#.
- In April 2021, Microsoft announced it would buy Nuance Communications for approximately $16 billion (~$18.2 billion in 2024).
- By the mid-1980s Microsoft had gotten out of the Unix business, except for its ownership stake in SCO.
- 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.
- On August 24, 1995, it launched a major online service, MSN (Microsoft Network), as a direct competitor to AOL.
This effectively ended the formal business partnership between Gates and Allen, which had been strained months prior due to a contentious dispute over Microsoft equity. The company restructured on June 25, 1981, to become an incorporated business in its home state of Washington (with a further change of its name to “Microsoft Corporation, Inc.”). 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. Allen came up with the original name of Micro-Soft, a portmanteau of microcomputer and software.
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While Microsoft largely failed to participate in the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, some of the key technologies in which the company had invested to enter the Internet market started to pay off by the mid-90s. 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. 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. Microsoft also launched Slate, an online magazine edited by Michael Kinsley, which offered political and social commentary along with the cartoon Doonesbury.
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It sported several new features such as enhanced multimedia abilities and consumer-oriented PC maintenance options, but is often regarded as one of the worst versions of Windows due to stability problems, restricted real mode DOS support and other issues. The next update to the consumer line, Windows ME (or Windows Millennium Edition), was released on September 14, 2000. 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. On June 15, 2000, the company released a new version of its hand-held operating system, Windows CE 3.0. The documents also alluded to legal and other actions against Linux as well as other open source software. Finally, a great deal of controversy took place when a set of internal memos from the company were leaked on the Internet.
- In November, Microsoft released the first version of their popular database software Microsoft Access.
- On November 10, 2020, Microsoft released the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S video game consoles.
- Formerly codenamed “Longhorn” in the early development stages, Windows Vista was released to consumers on January 30, 2007.
- Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro.
Windows Server 2003 was launched, featuring enhanced administration abilities, such as new user interfaces to server tools. 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. 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.
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Microsoft also marketed through an Apple dealer in West Palm Beach, Florida two products for the Radio-Shack TRS-80. Visual Studio 2026 chicken road app is Microsoft’s next-generation Integrated Development Environment (IDE), designed to make software development faster, smarter, and more AI-driven. 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. Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro. Microsoft also announced a new multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment deal with OpenAI.
With the release of the Microsoft Mouse on May 2, 1983, Microsoft continued to expand its product line in other markets. Later, the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones after Columbia Data Products successfully cloned the IBM BIOS, quickly followed by Eagle Computer and Compaq. Is widely recognized as the most influential company in the microcomputer-software industry. InfoWorld stated in 1984 that Microsoft, with $55 million (~$140 million in 2024) in 1983 sales, When the IBM PC debuted, Microsoft was the only company that offered operating system, programming language, and application software for the new computer.
Due to potential copyright infringement problems with CP/M, IBM marketed both CP/M and PC DOS for US$240 and US$40, respectively, with PC DOS eventually becoming the standard because of its lower price. 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. IBM first approached Gates and Allen about Microsoft’s upcoming IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) in July 1980, shortly after Gates’s mother began working on United Way’s executive board with IBM CEO John Opel. By the mid-1980s Microsoft had gotten out of the Unix business, except for its ownership stake in SCO.
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). 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. In May 2016, the company announced it will lay off 1,850 workers, taking an impairment and restructuring charge of $950 million (~$1.21 billion in 2024).
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. In October, Windows for Workgroups 3.1 was released with integrated networking abilities such as peer-to-peer file and printing sharing. Novell, an owner of WordPerfect for a time, alleged that Microsoft used its inside knowledge of the DOS and Windows kernels and of undocumented Application Programming Interface features to make Office perform better than its competitors. During the transition from MS-DOS to Windows, the success of Microsoft Office allowed the company to gain ground on application-software competitors, such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
