Tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week.
“I’ve found myself reflecting on how Microsoft has remained a consequential company decade after decade in an industry with no franchise value. And I realize that it’s because -time and time again, when tech paradigms have shifted- we have seized the opportunity to reinvent ourselves to stay relevant to our customers, our partners and our employees. And that’s what we are doing again today,” Microsoft chairman and chief executive officer Satya Nadella said in a statement of the company ahead of its 50th birthday festivities at its Redmond, Washington headquarters on Friday.
Here are 18 major milestones Microsoft counted on its way to the big 5-0.
Microsoft was founded in 1975 by childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Gates & Allen named the company “Micro-Soft” for microprocessors and software. They were inspired by the January 1975 cover of the Popular Electronics magazine featuring Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System’s Altair 8800, an early version of a personal computer. Allen suggested that they could develop software for the microcomputer.
The company was later officially incorporated in 1981 with Bill Gates as president and chairman of the board, and Paul Allen as executive vice president.
The company moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico first to Bellevue, Washington, right outside Seattle, in January 1, 1979. Seven years after that, Microsoft re-settled its corporate campus to close by Redmond, Washington in February 26, 1986, and has stayed there ever since.
Tech giant IBM (IBM) awarded Microsoft a contract to provide an operating system for its Personal Computer (PC) in 1980. The following year, IBM debuted its PC equipped with the 16-bit MS-DOS version 1.0, marking Microsoft’s entry into the operating systems business, which it would eventually grow to dominate in a few years time.
Bill Gates announced the first version of Microsoft’s user interface Windows for its MS-DOS operating system in 1985.
Gates described Windows at the time as a “unique software designed for the serious PC user.”
Windows allowed users to run unrelated programs simultaneously and transfer data between programs, paving the way for modern operating systems and affordable PC use in homes.
Microsoft stock went public with an initial public offering at the NASDAQ on March 13, 1986 at $21 per share. The stock was trading just shy of $380 per share as of Friday’s close.
Microsoft introduced the first version of Office on August 1, 1989 for Apple’s (AAPL) Mac computers.
Called Office for the Macintosh, Microsoft’s new productivity software grouped its Microsoft Word with two more desktop applications, Excel and Powerpoint.
Despite the collaboration, Microsoft and Apple were rivals, and in the midst of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Apple claiming that Microsoft’s Windows operating system was too similar to its Macintosh OS. The legal battle ended in 1994 with an Apple loss.
Microsoft released the first version of its internet browser, Internet Explorer, in August 1995 as part of its Windows 95 release.
It was Microsoft’s first foray into the internet, and was followed by the circulation of Gates’ Internet Tidal Wave memo acknowledging the Internet’s transformative power and marking a decisive shift in the company’s approach to integrating it into its products.
The Windows 95 release also was the first time Microsoft introduced the Start button and task bar, recycle bin and desktop shortcuts. It sold 7 million copies in its first five weeks and became the world’s most popular operating system at the time.
Bill Gates passed the baton to Steve Ballmer as Microsoft’s CEO in January 2000. Ballmer had been working at the company since 1980 when he joined as Microsoft’s first business manager and landed the IBM deal.
Gates transitioned into a technology advisor role and served as chairman of the board until 2014.
Ballmer would go on to serve as the CEO for 13 years before retiring.
Microsoft released its now mega-popular video gaming console Xbox in November 2001. At the time, the video gaming console market was dominated by the likes of Sony (SONY) and Nintendo (NTDOY).
“The future of gaming starts today, and it starts with Xbox,” Bill Gates said in a press release at the time.
Microsoft introduced Azure at a conference in October 2008, marking the company’s first entry into the cloud computing market.
At the time of it’s introduction, the program was referred to under the codename “Project Red Dog.” It was officially launched later in 2010 as Windows Azure, marketed as the internet version of the company’s largely successful Windows operating system, before being renamed to Microsoft Azure in 2014.
Azure has since become a core Microsoft service, and has further been infused with artificial intelligence capabilities.
Microsoft launched its own search engine Bing in June 2009 to rival Alphabet’s (GOOGL) hugely popular Google.
The company at the time described Bing as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine. It was a successor to the company’s Live Search.
Bing continues to operate today as the second most popular search engine after Google Search.
In what was the software giant’s largest acquisition at the time, Microsoft bought video conferencing platform Skype in 2011.
In its heyday, Skype was the leading video communication tool, so much so that the brand name acted as a verb for video chatting. But it eventually lost its crown to relative newcomers like Zoom, as Microsoft slowly transitioned its focus to its in-house video communication tool Teams, which the company introduced in 2017. Last month, Microsoft decided to shut down Skype for good by May 2025.
The Surface tablet, launched by Microsoft in 2012 for its RT operating system, was the first of Microsoft’s in-house first-party PC offerings.
Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was named the third CEO of Microsoft in February 2014.
Same year, newly minted CEO Nadella closed a $2.5 billion purchase of the wildly popular video game Minecraft.
Microsoft announced a multi-year partnership with then rising artificial intelligence company OpenAI in July 2019.
Marked by a $1 billion investment by Microsoft, the companies partnered to build new AI supercomputing technologies for Microsoft Azure. OpenAI ported its services to run on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft was named the rising company’s preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies.
It was this collaboration that enabled OpenAI to release its popular AI chatbot that revolutionized the AI trade, ChatGPT, in 2022.
The companies announced in 2023 that they would be extending their partnership.
On January 2022, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Activision Blizzard, a game development company behind popular video games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.
The $68.7 billion deal finalized in 2023 and became Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever.
Microsoft introduced Copilot, a so-called “everyday AI companion,” in September 2023.
Copilot is an AI assistant with a conversational chat interface that the company has since integrated across its products and services. Copilot’s portfolio of AI agents aim to enhance user productivity, and furthered Microsoft’s standing as a key player in the AI sphere.
The last year for Microsoft was marked by major breakthroughs in the world of quantum computing.
In February 2025, Microsoft unveiled its first quantum computing chip Majorana 1. To build the chip, Microsoft spent two decades building “topological superconductors,” a breakthrough material that created a brand new state of matter the company called “topological superconductivity.”
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