Detailed · 17 events
A History of Microsoft
1970s
Albuquerque, New Mexico Police Department (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain · Commons ↗ Bill 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.
1980s
- EVT.002T2MS-DOS 1.0 — Shipping with the IBM PCA History of Operating SystemsA General History of Information Technology
- EVT.003T3Windows 1.0 ReleasedA History of Operating Systems
Brucery (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Microsoft began shipping The Microsoft Office for the Macintosh: Word 4.0, Excel 2.2, PowerPoint 2.01, and Mail 1.37 in a single box. The first Office was a Mac product rather than a Windows one—and it was a four-application bundle that included an email client. Office for Windows did not arrive until 1 October 1990, and it shipped as three applications, Word 1.1, Excel 2.1d, and PowerPoint 2.0, with no mail. That autumn Microsoft also put the Mac suite on CD-ROM at US$949, manuals and clip art included, billing it as the first general business software for the Macintosh to be offered on disc. Bundling document, spreadsheet, and presentation into one unit of sale was the foundation of two decades of dominance in enterprise productivity software.
Questions this page answers
- Was the first Microsoft Office a Windows product?
- No. The first Office shipped for the Macintosh on 19 June 1989 with four applications: Word 4.0, Excel 2.2, PowerPoint 2.01 and Mail 1.37. Office for Windows arrived on 1 October 1990 with three applications and no mail client.
1990s
- EVT.005T2Windows 3.0 — The First Commercially Successful WindowsA History of Operating Systems
- EVT.006T1Windows 95 ReleasedA History of Operating SystemsA General History of Information TechnologyRead more →
AgnosticPreachersKid (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain · Commons ↗ On 18 May 1998 the US Department of Justice, twenty states and the District of Columbia sued Microsoft in federal court in Washington DC (Civil Actions 98-1232 and 98-1233) over anticompetitive conduct including the integration of Internet Explorer into Windows. On 5 November 1999 Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued Findings of Fact holding that Microsoft possessed monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems; his Conclusions of Law of 3 April 2000 found Sherman Act violations, and on 7 June 2000 the district court ordered the company split in two. On 28 June 2001 the DC Circuit upheld the core monopoly-maintenance liability but vacated the breakup and disqualified Judge Jackson from the remedy phase for discussing the pending case with reporters. DOJ and Microsoft agreed a settlement in November 2001, which Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly approved on 1 November 2002: conduct restrictions, not a breakup. Nine states and the District of Columbia held out, arguing the settlement was too weak.
2000s
- EVT.008T2Xbox Released — Microsoft Enters the Console MarketA History of Game Consoles and Game Technology
2010s
- EVT.009T2Microsoft Azure Generally AvailableA History of Cloud Computing
- EVT.010T3TypeScript Announced — MicrosoftA History of Programming Languages
Brian Smale and Microsoft · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Succeeding 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.
Microsoft completed its acquisition of GitHub, the developer code-sharing and collaboration service. The deal was announced on 4 June 2018 as a purchase for US$7.5 billion in Microsoft stock and closed on 26 October 2018—because the consideration was stock, the announced figure and the value at closing are not the same thing. Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin, became GitHub's CEO, reporting to Scott Guthrie. It marked the reversal of the Microsoft whose CEO Steve Ballmer had in 2001 called Linux 'a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches'. GitHub kept operating independently, and in June 2021 shipped the technical preview of GitHub Copilot.
OpenAI (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ Microsoft 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. A further investment in January 2023—reported to be on the order of US$10 billion—and the integration of GPT-4 into Bing in February 2023 cemented Microsoft's lead in the AI competition.
2020s
Brian Smale / Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Two 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.
- EVT.015T1New Bing and Microsoft Copilot — LLMs Enter SearchA History of Artificial IntelligenceA History of Search EnginesRead more →
Activision Blizzard (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ The 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.
