Detailed · 17 events
A History of Microsoft
1970s
01 events
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.
- Related people
- Bill Gates
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology
1980s
03 eventsMicrosoft 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.
- Related people
- Bill Gates
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation · International Business Machines (IBM)
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Operating Systems
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
1990s
03 eventsOverlapping 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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems
Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (logo, below threshold of originality) · Commons ↗ 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.
- Related people
- Bill Gates
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of Operating Systems
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
2000s
01 eventsMicrosoft 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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Game Consoles and Game Technology
2010s
05 eventsMicrosoft 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–).
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Cloud Computing
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Programming Languages
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Open Source and Free Software
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation · OpenAI
2020s
04 events
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation · OpenAI
Hstoops / Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Microsoft 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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation · OpenAI
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence · A History of Search Engines
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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Game Consoles and Game Technology
Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Microsoft 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.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation
- Appears in
- A History of Operating Systems