Appearances

1. April 4, 1975Microsoft FoundedBill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company in Albuquerque to sell their BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. The original name was 'Micro-Soft'—with a hyphen. A year later, Gates' 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists', written in response to widespread piracy of Altair BASIC, became one of the earliest articulations of the idea of commercial software, and a symbolic document in the history of the industry.
2. August 12, 1981MS-DOS 1.0 — Shipping with the IBM PCMicrosoft adapted 86-DOS (formerly QDOS), which it had bought from Seattle Computer Products, and shipped it as PC DOS 1.0 with the IBM PC. Crucially, Microsoft retained the right to sell the same software, as MS-DOS, to any other compatible-machine manufacturer. Bill Gates' licensing strategy here produced the next fifteen years of PC OS dominance.
3. November 20, 1985Windows 1.0 ReleasedMicrosoft's first graphical environment, running on top of MS-DOS. Tiled (not overlapping) windows, limited colour, and a thin application library—the reviews were unkind, but it was the start of Microsoft's decade of sustained GUI investment that led to Windows 95. It lagged the Macintosh by one year and ten months.
4. August 1989The First Microsoft Office SuiteMicrosoft released Office for Macintosh, packaging Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as a single purchase. The Mac version came first; the Windows version followed in 1990. The strategy of bundling document, spreadsheet, and presentation into one unit was the foundation of two decades of near-monopoly on enterprise productivity software.
5. May 22, 1990Windows 3.0 — The First Commercially Successful WindowsOverlapping windows, the Program Manager, virtual-memory management, full VGA colour. Diverging from the OS/2 line being co-developed with IBM, Windows 3.0 went to market as an independent DOS-hosted GUI and sold two million copies in six months. It was the turning point at which Microsoft broke from the IBM joint venture and set out on its own.
6. August 24, 1995Windows 95 Released32-bit preemptive multitasking, long file names, plug-and-play, and—most lastingly—the Start menu and taskbar. For many people the image of 'what a PC is' was set by this product. The campaign built around the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' and the midnight launches drew lines around the block; the PC had become a household appliance. Seven million copies were sold in the first week.
7. May 1998United States v. Microsoft — The Antitrust CaseThe US Department of Justice and twenty states sued Microsoft over anticompetitive practices in the browser market, including the integration of Internet Explorer into Windows. A 2000 ruling ordered the company split in two; the appellate court overturned the remedy, and a 2001 settlement focused on conduct restrictions. Microsoft was not broken up, but the case turned the company from the 'Windows-first' strategy of the 1990s toward a more cautious industry posture.
8. November 2001Xbox Released — Microsoft Enters the Console MarketMicrosoft released its first home console, Xbox. Essentially derived from PC hardware (a Pentium III, an NVIDIA GPU, a hard drive), it later led the popularisation of online play through Xbox Live (2002). Xbox added a third major pillar to the PlayStation–Nintendo duopoly and established the three-way contest that continues today.
9. June 2002Nokia 7650 Launches — Symbian S60 Opens the Smartphone EraOn 26 June 2002, Nokia launched the Nokia 7650 — the first mass-produced device running Symbian OS on the Series 60 (later S60) platform, and Nokia's first camera phone. With a slide-up body, a 176×208-pixel colour screen, GPRS data, and open Symbian application execution, Nokia established the template for what would later be called the smartphone. Symbian reached 65% of the global smartphone OS market by 2007 and cumulative sales of around 250 million devices. Then the iPhone and Android arrived; Nokia collapsed, sold the handset business to Microsoft in 2014, and Microsoft sold it on in 2016, ending the lineage.
10. February 2010Microsoft Azure Generally AvailableMicrosoft commercialised the cloud computing service it had announced in 2008, branded Windows Azure (renamed Microsoft Azure in 2014). Following AWS, it leaned on integration with existing enterprise software (Active Directory, Office, SQL Server) and grew rapidly; by the late 2010s it was the world's second-largest cloud provider. The central business of Satya Nadella's tenure as CEO (2014–).
11. October 2012TypeScript Announced — MicrosoftA team at Microsoft led by Anders Hejlsberg (chief designer of C#) released TypeScript, layering a static type system onto JavaScript. Designed as a strict superset of JavaScript, with compilation producing ordinary JavaScript. Through the 2020s it became the de facto standard for large-scale web frontends; React, Vue, and Angular all moved their primary documentation to TypeScript examples.
12. February 4, 2014Satya Nadella Becomes CEO of MicrosoftSucceeding Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella—who had long led the cloud business—became Microsoft's third CEO. He shifted the company from the Windows-and-Office strategy of the 1990s and 2000s to one centred on Azure: Linux support, embrace of open source (the GitHub acquisition in 2018), and the large investment in OpenAI from 2019 onward. Over a decade in the role, Microsoft's market capitalisation grew more than tenfold, from roughly US$300 billion to over US$3 trillion.
13. October 2018Microsoft Acquires GitHub for US$7.5 BillionMicrosoft completed the acquisition of GitHub—the developer code-sharing and collaboration service—through a stock-for-stock deal. The transaction marked the complete reversal from the 1990s Microsoft that had argued 'open source is theft of intellectual property'. GitHub continued to operate independently, evolving toward an AI-integrated platform with Copilot in 2021 and Copilot Chat in 2023.
14. July 2019Microsoft Invests US$1 Billion in OpenAIMicrosoft announced a US$1 billion investment in OpenAI alongside an exclusive cloud partnership. OpenAI was, at that point, a research organisation that had just released GPT-2; the deal nevertheless became the move that defined the industry structure once the generative-AI boom arrived in 2022–23. An additional US$10 billion in January 2023 and the integration of GPT-4 into Bing in February 2023 cemented Microsoft's lead in the AI competition.
15. November 10, 2020Xbox Series X/S ReleasedMicrosoft released the high-end Xbox Series X (US$499) and the lower-priced digital Series S (US$299) simultaneously. Both used AMD Zen 2 / RDNA 2 silicon similar to PS5. Differentiating features included Quick Resume (suspend multiple games) and Smart Delivery (automatic cross-generation optimisation). Microsoft put Game Pass subscription—with cloud gaming included—at the centre of the strategy, deepening 'lock in by service, not by box'. With the US$68.7 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition in 2023, Microsoft's path settled into trailing PS5 in unit sales while competing through IP and subscription.
16. June 29, 2021GitHub Copilot — The Start of AI-Assisted CodingGitHub and OpenAI released Copilot as a technical preview—an AI pair programmer that autocompletes code inside the editor. Powered by OpenAI's Codex (GPT-3 fine-tuned on code), it could generate entire functions from a partial implementation or a docstring. It became a paid subscription in June 2022. Lawsuits over copyright licenses and the 'derivative work' status of GitHub's public code followed (Doe v. GitHub, 2022), but the product reshaped the developer experience across the industry and seeded the 2025 'AI coding IDE' competition among Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, and others.
17. October 5, 2021Windows 11 ReleasedDespite Microsoft's 2015 statement that Windows 10 would be 'the last Windows', the company released a major successor after a six-year gap. The UI was refreshed: a centred Start menu, rounded windows, Snap Layouts, Android app support. As a hard requirement, Windows 11 required TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, putting hundreds of millions of older PCs outside official support and on a path toward Windows 10's October 2025 end of life. The use of hardware requirements to force users to upgrade has been controversial.
18. January 23, 2023Microsoft Invests Another US$10 Billion in OpenAITwo months after ChatGPT's launch, Microsoft announced a multi-year, multi-stage extension of its investment in OpenAI. Reporting cited a total in the order of US$10 billion, which, with the 2019 US$1 billion, made it the largest AI-related investment in history. Azure became OpenAI's exclusive cloud, and GPT-4 was integrated across Microsoft's product line—Bing, Office, Teams, Windows, GitHub. Under the deal, Microsoft would receive a share of OpenAI's profits beyond a capped threshold; the two companies' finances became effectively inseparable.
19. February 7, 2023New Bing and Microsoft Copilot — LLMs Enter SearchMicrosoft unveiled 'New Bing'—Bing search with GPT-4-based chat integrated—and announced its plans to bring Copilot to Microsoft 365 in the same period. Only two months after the ChatGPT launch, this brought LLMs into the central battlefronts of search and productivity software at once, and triggered the industry-wide pivot to 'how do we integrate an LLM into our existing product?'. Google announced Bard the following day in response.
20. October 13, 2023 (closed)Microsoft Closes US$68.7 Billion Acquisition of Activision BlizzardThe acquisition Microsoft announced in January 2022 closed on 13 October 2023 after regulatory review across multiple jurisdictions. At US$68.7 billion, it was the largest deal in gaming history and one of the largest M&A transactions in tech overall. Major IP—Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Candy Crush—moved under Xbox / Microsoft Gaming. The US FTC's attempt to block it was denied in federal court; the UK CMA cleared a restructured deal in which Activision's cloud-streaming rights outside the EEA were sold to Ubisoft for fifteen years. Three months after closing, in January 2024, Microsoft Gaming laid off 1,900 staff, and the strategy of putting Call of Duty on Xbox Game Pass on day one accelerated the company's all-in pivot to subscriptions.
21. November 17–22, 2023The OpenAI Coup — Altman Fired, Reinstated in Five DaysOn 17 November, the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman as CEO, citing 'a lack of consistent candour in his communications with the board'. The dismissal grew out of tensions between AI-safety and acceleration factions and questions about Altman's conduct. About 700 of 770 employees signed a letter threatening to resign; Microsoft signalled it would take Altman aboard; and within five days, on 22 November, Altman was reinstated. The safety-leaning directors were removed, and Bret Taylor (chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo joined the new board. The episode is remembered as a shock to the very governance structure of the AI industry.
22. May 20, 2024Copilot+ PC and Recall — On-Device AI and an Instant RetreatMicrosoft introduced Copilot+ PC—a new PC category requiring an NPU of at least 40 TOPS—alongside on-device AI features. More than twenty devices from Surface, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS, and Samsung launched together on 18 June, starting with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (45 TOPS). The headline feature, Recall, captured a screenshot of the user's screen every five seconds, OCR'd and embedded it, and stored it in a local SQLite database for natural-language search. Ten days after the launch, former Microsoft threat-intelligence analyst Kevin Beaumont disassembled the preview and showed the database was a plaintext SQLite file readable in two lines of code—and that passwords were among the captured content. Recall slipped the June launch, was reworked behind a VBS enclave with mandatory Windows Hello authentication and opt-in default, and re-released to Windows Insiders on 22 November 2024. The opening of the AI-PC era—and a demonstration of how difficult on-device-AI privacy design is.
23. July 19, 2024The CrowdStrike Falcon Outage — The Largest IT Outage in HistoryOn 19 July, a faulty update file (Channel File 291) distributed by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor sent an estimated 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide into bootloop / blue-screen failure. Airline flights (Delta cancelled about 7,000 flights, with reported losses of US$500 million), hospitals, bank ATMs, emergency response systems, and broadcasters were simultaneously taken down. Total estimated economic loss exceeded US$10 billion, the largest of any single IT outage. Recovery required manual boot into Safe Mode; many organisations needed days to weeks. The incident exposed, at global scale, the supply-chain risk of SaaS security products and the weakness of software validation processes.
24. October 14, 2025Windows 10 End of SupportMicrosoft formally ended free support for Windows 10, ten years and three months after its July 2015 release. Security updates ended; consumers could pay US$30 per year for Extended Security Updates, or use a free path through 2027 conditional on a Microsoft account and OneDrive sync. At end of support, an estimated 30–40% of the Windows install base was still on Windows 10. Debate intensified over the environmental cost of hundreds of millions of PCs that could not be upgraded to Windows 11 because of hardware requirements. The transition exposed that an OS major-version change is not a UI cosmetic but a generator of large-scale electronic waste.