Microsoft

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975. Their early work centered on developing a BASIC interpreter for MITS’s Altair microcomputer; in July 1975 the two sides signed a BASIC license agreement, and a letter Gates wrote that month contains an early record of the name “Micro-soft.” Microsoft marks April 4 as its founding anniversary.⁠[1][2]

Microsoft moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Bellevue, Washington, in 1979 and incorporated on June 25, 1981. In August 1981, the personal computer launched by IBM used Microsoft’s MS-DOS 1.0; in February 1986 the company moved to its Redmond campus, and its stock went public on March 13 of that year.⁠[3]

Windows 1.0 was released on November 20, 1985, initially as a graphical operating environment running on top of MS-DOS. Windows 3.0 and Windows 95, released later, expanded the product line; Windows 95 was released on August 24, 1995, and its Start menu, taskbar and Plug and Play became its signature interface and way of working.⁠[4][3]

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice and state governments brought an antitrust suit against Microsoft concerning competition in operating systems, browsers and middleware. On June 28, 2001, the appeals court partly affirmed and partly reversed the finding of liability for maintaining an operating system monopoly through anticompetitive means, reversed the finding of attempted monopolization of the browser market, remanded the tying issue, and vacated the original remedies order, including the breakup.⁠[5][6]

In January 2000, Steve BallmerSteve BallmerSteve Ballmer is an American businessman and philanthropist who joined Microsoft in 1980 and succeeded Bill Gates as its chief executive officer from 2000 to 2014. After stepping down he bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers, co-founded the philanthropy Ballmer Group with his wife Connie Ballmer, and founded the government-data website USAFacts.Open the full entry succeeded as Microsoft’s CEO. On November 15, 2001, the original Xbox went on sale in North America, extending Microsoft’s business further into game consoles and digital entertainment; its launch lineup included titles such as Halo.⁠[3][7]

The final judgment of November 12, 2002, imposed restrictions on Microsoft’s business conduct, including prohibiting retaliation against computer makers for supporting competing software, allowing the installation and display of non-Microsoft middleware, and requiring disclosure of specified interoperability interfaces and licensing of related communications protocols. The judgment’s preamble also states that the consent decree itself does not constitute an admission by any party regarding any issue of fact or law.⁠[8]

Windows Azure and SQL Azure ended their preview phases on February 1, 2010, and became commercially available, with service level agreements, in 21 countries and regions. Azure thus became an important Microsoft business providing cloud infrastructure and platform services to developers and enterprises.⁠[9]

On June 28, 2011, Microsoft launched Office 365 in 40 markets, combining Office applications with collaboration services such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online and offering them as a monthly subscription. Office tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook could thereby work together with email, shared documents and online meeting services.⁠[10]

Microsoft completed its acquisition of all outstanding shares of Skype on October 13, 2011. The business combinations note in its 2012 annual report records the purchase price as $8.6 billion, paid primarily in cash, with Skype consolidated into its financial statements. Skype subsequently became part of Microsoft’s communications services business.⁠[11]

On August 23, 2012, Microsoft unveiled a corporate logo consisting of a four-color square symbol and the Microsoft wordmark. The company explained that the wordmark uses the Segoe typeface and that the colored squares express its diverse product portfolio; the update echoed the visual changes to products such as Windows, Office and Xbox at the time.⁠[12]

On February 4, 2014, Microsoft’s board appointed Satya Nadella as CEO and a director, effective immediately. He had previously led the Cloud and Enterprise business. At the same time, Bill Gates moved from chairman to the role of founder and technology adviser, and John Thompson became chairman.⁠[13]

Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services business in 2014. Its fiscal 2015 fourth-quarter results then recognized a $7.5 billion non-cash impairment of assets related to the acquisition, along with $780 million in restructuring charges, reflecting a major restructuring of its phone hardware business.⁠[3][14]

On December 8, 2016, Microsoft announced that it had completed its acquisition of LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry. The deal linked the professional networking platform with Microsoft’s enterprise and productivity businesses; in its completion announcement, Microsoft described helping professionals become more productive as the direction of the combination.⁠[15]

On March 14, 2017, Microsoft Teams became generally available to Office 365 commercial customers in 181 markets and 19 languages. Built around team chat and collaboration, it integrates tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneNote; an earlier public preview had begun in November 2016.⁠[16]

On October 26, 2018, Microsoft announced that it had completed its acquisition of GitHub, with Nat Friedman becoming GitHub’s CEO. The announcement stressed that GitHub would continue to operate as an independent platform supporting developers across languages, tools and clouds.⁠[17]

On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced the extension of its partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment, the next phase following its 2019 and 2021 investments. The partnership covers AI supercomputing infrastructure, Azure OpenAI Service and the use of OpenAI models in Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise products.⁠[18]

In July 2023, Microsoft announced that Azure Active Directory would be renamed Microsoft Entra ID, aligning its name with the Entra identity and access management product family. Official developer guidance states that the name change itself does not change existing services, pricing, subscription plans, service level agreements or sign-in URLs, and does not require applications to modify authentication code because of the rename.⁠[19]

On October 13, 2023, Microsoft announced that the Activision, Blizzard and King teams had officially joined Xbox. The integration brought game franchises such as Call of Duty, Warcraft and Candy Crush into Microsoft’s gaming business.⁠[20]

On May 3, 2024, in a public memo to employees, Nadella made security Microsoft’s top priority and responded to the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board’s review of the 2023 Storm-0558 email intrusion. Microsoft set out the principles of secure by design, secure by default and secure operations, pursued improvements in identity, tenants, networks, engineering systems, and monitoring and response, and tied part of senior executive compensation to security progress.⁠[21]

Skype’s consumer service was retired on May 5, 2025, including its free and paid consumer features; Skype for Business was not part of the retirement. Microsoft offered a migration path in which users sign in to Teams Free with their Skype credentials, supporting the transfer of eligible contacts and chat history, with exceptions such as private conversations and chats with bots. The migration does not mean that all historical data and paid calling features carried over in full.⁠[22]

On September 12, 2025, the European Commission accepted Microsoft’s commitments on Teams competition concerns and made them legally binding. The measures include offering lower-priced suites without Teams, allowing customers with long-term licenses to switch, ensuring key interoperability between competing communication tools and designated Microsoft products, and helping customers export Teams data to use competing services.⁠[23]

In Build 2026 keynote highlights published on Microsoft’s official YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel, Nadella introduced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box and described the combination of models, context and tools as a new intelligence layer; the video also showcased Autopilots, long-running agents for enterprise tenants.⁠[24]

Microsoft reports results in three segments: Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing. For fiscal year 2026 it reported revenue of $331.839 billion, operating income of $155.237 billion and GAAP net income of $133.749 billion. These are fiscal-year figures through June 30, 2026, from its July 29 earnings release.⁠[25]

On October 8, 2026, at a White House Fraud Task Force press conference, Vice President JD Vance announced that, because of an ongoing investigation, the government had decided to suspend Microsoft from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program; Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling then said that, because of multiple active federal investigations, the Department of Labor was suspending Microsoft and Adobe from the program, and, citing criminal investigations led by the department’s inspector general, he also suspended CognizantCognizantCognizant (Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation) is a Nasdaq-listed information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey. Most of its employees are in India, and it is one of the major applicants for U.S. H-1B visas; in 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor suspended it from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program, citing an investigation into visa fraud.Open the full entry, InfosysInfosysInfosys (Infosys Limited) is an information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Bengaluru, India, founded in 1981 by N. R. Narayana Murthy and six others. Listed on Indian stock exchanges and the New York Stock Exchange, it had revenues of $20.158 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than 328,000 employees, and is one of India’s major information technology services companies.Open the full entry, Tata, WiproWiproWipro (Wipro Limited) is an information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Bengaluru, India. It began in 1945 as the vegetable oil maker Western India Vegetable Products and was transformed into an IT company under Azim H. Premji; listed on Indian stock exchanges and the New York Stock Exchange, it had revenues of about $10.5 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than 240,000 employees.Open the full entry, HCL and Capgemini, saying the department would not accept any new or process any pending applications involving these companies. PERM is generally required before most employment-based green card petitions can be filed; the action does not cancel existing H-1B visas held by these companies’ employees.⁠[26][27][27][27][27][27][28][28]

Vance said no company in the United States had abused the system more than Microsoft; he said Microsoft had laid off 6,000 American workers in the past year while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards, and that by that math Microsoft had replaced every worker it laid off with “one and a half” foreign “indentured servants.” He also said the suspension would last “as long as it needs to,” that the administration had tools to extend it indefinitely but wanted the companies to change their behavior, and that the government would continue to support Microsoft and maintain a good relationship with it but would deny it the ability to apply for permanent residencies until it showed it was serious about putting American workers first. Sonderling said that since 2009 the suspended companies had together requested almost 3 million foreign workers and received more than 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department was investigating companies that favor foreign workers and discriminate against American workers.⁠[27][27][27][27][27][27][27][27][27]

Microsoft responded with a statement the same day, saying the vast majority of its employees in the United States are Americans and that it looked forward to providing the administration with additional information; it said that of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing employees rather than to hire new people, and that the remaining filings were for people already legally in the United States who decided to join Microsoft, equal to only 1% of its U.S. workforce and not new arrivals to the country; Microsoft also said it files H-1B petitions only for those who meet the visa category’s rigorous standards and pays its H-1B employees the same as other employees doing comparable work. Microsoft’s stock fell 1.5% that day. The same day, Trump went ahead with a White House ceremony presenting Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. As of that day, prosecutors had brought no criminal charges in the labor investigation.⁠[29][29][29][29][29][29][30][31][26][32]

Microsoft Entra ID provides identity and access management for organizations; Microsoft Authenticator is a mobile verification app for personal Microsoft accounts and work or school accounts, supporting notification approval, verification codes, passwordless sign-in and passkeys. They serve different functions from communication products such as Teams and Skype and should not be regarded as successive renamings of the same software.⁠[19][33]

Microsoft’s documentation specifies that organizations can use basic multifactor authentication through security defaults without purchasing additional premium licenses; more granular features such as Conditional Access and risk-based policies correspond to licenses such as Entra ID P1 and P2. The actual verification methods and prompt conditions also depend on the configuration set by an organization’s administrators, so users’ sign-in experiences vary with licensing, policy and context.⁠[34]

Microsoft’s corporate address is One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, United States, and its official website is https://www.microsoft.com/ (opens in a new window) . Its official social media presences include @Microsoft on X, the Microsoft company page on LinkedIn and the @Microsoft channel on YouTube; the YouTube channel description links directly to the same X and LinkedIn accounts.⁠[3][35][36][37]