In May 2016, Microsoft announced another 1,850 job cuts mostly in its Nokia mobile phone division. In July 2015, Microsoft announced another 7,800 job cuts in the next several months. In October 2014, Microsoft revealed that it was almost done with eliminating 18,000 employees, which was its largest-ever layoff sweep. In September 2014, Microsoft laid off 2,100 people, including 747 people in the Seattle–Redmond area, where the company is headquartered. Another study, released by the Open Source Development Labs, claimed that the Microsoft studies were “simply outdated and one-sided” and their survey concluded that the TCO of Linux was lower due to Linux administrators managing more servers on average and other reasons.
In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission examined Microsoft for possible collusion due to the partnership with IBM, marking the beginning of more than a decade of legal clashes with the government. Microsoft released its version of OS/2 to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) on April 2, 1987. IBM had copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, so other companies had to reverse engineer it for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles, but no such restriction applied to the operating systems.
The company was the official jersey sponsor of Finland’s national basketball team at EuroBasket 2015, a major sponsor of the Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT (2017–2020) and a sponsor of the Renault F1 Team (2016–2020). On August 23, 2012, Microsoft unveiled a new corporate logo at the opening of its 23rd Microsoft store in Boston, indicating the company’s shift of focus from the classic style to the tile-centric modern interface, which it uses/will use on the Windows Phone platform, Xbox 360, Windows 8 and the upcoming Office Suites. The company’s retail locations are part of a greater strategy to help build a connection with its consumers. As per company executives, Microsoft had been on the lookout for a flagship location since 2009. On October 26, 2015, the company opened its retail location on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
According to the complaint and media reports, Microsoft’s cloud services may have been used to store or process surveillance-related data. The probe scrutinized Microsoft’s bundling of cloud services with products like Office and security tools, as well as its growing AI presence through its partnership with OpenAI. The employees, part of the group No Azure for Apartheid, sought to address the company’s involvement in the Israeli government’s use of its technology.
On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced the acquisition of American video game developer and holding company Activision Blizzard in an all-cash deal worth $68.7 billion. In October 2021, Microsoft announced that it began rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support for Microsoft Teams calls in order to secure business communication while using video conferencing software. In the same month, Microsoft acquired Australia-based video editing software company Clipchamp. In September 2021, it was announced that the company had acquired Takelessons, an online platform that connects students and tutors in numerous subjects. The announcement came with confusion after Microsoft announced Windows 10 would be the last version of the operating system.

• Microsoft has not released statements regarding Activision’s recent legal controversies regarding employee abuse, but reports have alleged that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, a major target of the controversy, will leave the company after the acquisition is finalized.
• In January 2020, the company announced a strategy to take the company carbon negative by 2030 and to remove all carbon that it has emitted since its foundation in 1975.
• In May 2025, Microsoft issued an unsigned statement confirming that these services had been made available to Israel, while denying that these tools were employed during the massacre of the people of Gaza.
• MSDN also offers subscriptions for companies and individuals, and the more expensive subscriptions usually offer access to pre-release beta versions of Microsoft software.
• The acquisition positioned Microsoft to grow its presence in the market of providing online education to large numbers of people.

Built-in security

In 2020, ProPublica reported that the company had diverted more than $39 billion in U.S. profits to Puerto Rico using a mechanism structured to make it seem as if the company was unprofitable on paper. As reported by several news outlets, an Irish subsidiary of Microsoft based in the Republic of Ireland declared £220 bn in profits but paid no corporation tax for the year 2020. This characterization is derived from the perception that Microsoft provides nearly everything for its employees in a convenient place, but in turn overworks them to a point where it would be bad for their (possibly long-term) health. It has also been criticized for the use of permatemp employees (employees employed for years as “temporary”, and therefore without medical benefits), the use of forced retention tactics, which means that employees would be sued if they tried to leave.

present: Acquisitions, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows 11

Microsoft initially moved onto the grounds of the campus on February 26, 1986, weeks before the company went public on March 13. In January 2020, the company announced a strategy to take the company carbon negative by 2030 and to remove all carbon that it has emitted since its foundation in 1975. In February 2010, however, Microsoft took a stance against adding additional public transport and high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes to the State Route 520 and its floating bridge connecting Redmond to Seattle; the company did not want to delay the construction any further. The “Connector” does not compete with the public bus system and works with it to provide a cohesive transportation network not just for its employees but also for the public.

Experience classic Office apps enhanced with AI

In September 2024, BlackRock and Microsoft announced a $30 billion fund, the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, to invest in AI infrastructure such as data centers and energy projects. In June 2024, Microsoft announced that it was building a “hyperscale data centre” in South East Leeds. Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro. In March 2024, Inflection AI’s cofounders Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan announced their departure from the company in order to start Microsoft AI, with Microsoft acqui-hiring nearly the entirety of its 70-person workforce. However, the plan was short-lived, as Altman was subsequently reinstated as OpenAI’s spinnaus sign up CEO and Brockman rejoined the company amid pressure from OpenAI’s employees and investors on its board.

PowerPoint with Copilot

• On March 13, 2020, Gates announced that he is leaving the board of directors of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus more on his philanthropic efforts.
• A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the corporation runs several programs that facilitate the sharing of such information with the U.S. government.
• Among grant recipients from the Asia-Pacific region are the Sri Lankan IT company Fortude, the Thailand-based Vulcan Coalition, and the Indonesian organization Kerjabilitas.
• In July 2025, Microsoft announced another round of layoffs, cutting approximately 9,000 employees in its largest workforce reduction in over two years.
• Despite CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz clarifying that the issue was not a cyberattack, the incident had widespread consequences, leading to delays in air travel, financial transactions, and medical services globally.
• Microsoft implemented a new strategy for the software industry, providing a consistent user experience across all smartphones using the Windows Phone OS.
• Microsoft moved its headquarters from Bellevue to Redmond, Washington, on February 26, 1986, and went public with an initial public offering (IPO) at the NASDAQ exchange on March 13, with the resulting rise in stock making an estimated four billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.

At the time, data centers consumed up to 2% of all global electricity, and this amount was projected to increase. Noted for its internal lexicon, the expression “eating your own dog food” is used to describe the policy of using pre-release and beta versions of products inside Microsoft to test them in “real-world” situations. Helpful people can be elected by peers or Microsoft employees for Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status, which entitles them to a sort of special social status and possibilities for awards and other benefits. Free technical support is traditionally provided through online Usenet newsgroups, and CompuServe in the past, monitored by Microsoft employees; there can be several newsgroups for a single product.

2011: Microsoft Azure, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Microsoft Stores

In June 2016, Microsoft announced a project named Microsoft Azure Information Protection. Intune for Education is a new cloud-based application and device management service for the education sector. On March 1, 2016, Microsoft announced the merger of its PC and Xbox divisions, with Phil Spencer announcing that Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps would be the focus for Microsoft’s gaming in the future.

Microsoft Redmond Campus Refresh

In 2015, the construction of a data center in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, led to the destruction of a historic African American cemetery despite archeological recommendations for preservation. On July 29, 2015, Windows 10 was released, with its server sibling, Windows Server 2016, released in September 2016. On January 21, 2015, Microsoft announced the release of its first interactive whiteboard, named Surface Hub. On September 15, 2014, Microsoft acquired the video game development company Mojang, best known for Minecraft, for $2.5 billion.
On November 20, 2023, Satya Nadella announced that Sam Altman, who had been ousted as CEO of OpenAI just days earlier, and Greg Brockman, who had resigned as president, would join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. The service includes Copilot, a GPT-4 based large language model tool to query and visualize data, write code, initiate simulations, and educate researchers. In June 2023, Microsoft released Azure Quantum Elements to run molecular simulations and calculations in computational chemistry and materials science using a combination of AI, high-performance computing and quantum computing. On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a new multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI. Microsoft also named Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox brand since 2014, the inaugural CEO of the newly established Microsoft Gaming division, which now houses the Xbox operations team and the three publishers in the company’s portfolio (Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media, Activision Blizzard).