Detailed · 13 events
A History of Microsoft
1970s
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
Microsoft 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.
Microsoft'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.
Microsoft 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.
1990s
Overlapping 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.
32-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.
The 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.
2000s
Microsoft 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.
2010s
Microsoft 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–).
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 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.
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. 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.
A 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.