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Microsoft’s deadline for phasing out brominated flame retardant (BFRs) and phthalates in all products was in 2012 but its commitment to phasing out PVC is not clear. In 2011, Greenpeace released a report rating the top ten big brands in cloud computing on the sources of electricity for their data centers. In August 2018, Microsoft implemented a policy for all companies providing subcontractors to require 12 weeks of paid parental leave to each employee. The Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, a report of how progressive the organization deems company policies towards LGBT employees, rated Microsoft as 87% from 2002 to 2004 and as 100% from 2005 to 2010 after it allowed gender expression. Bill Gates claims the cap on H1B visas makes it difficult to hire employees for the company, stating “I’d certainly get rid of the H1B cap” in 2005.
Criticism of Microsoft has followed various aspects of its products and business practices, including surveillance of employees, “Velvet Sweatshop” practices, tax manipulation, and antitrust violations. Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer, said the layoffs were not the result of employees being replaced by AI, but acknowledged that AI is changing how work is done. Amid the layoffs, Microsoft also closed its office in Pakistan and laid off its employees there as part of its move toward a software-as-a-service and AI operating model. In June 2024, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 1,000 employees from the company’s mixed reality and Azure cloud computing divisions. On October 7, Microsoft acquired Ally.io, a software service that measures companies’ progress against OKRs, planning to incorporate it into its Viva family of employee experience products. The public cloud computing platform provides access to quantum software and quantum hardware including trapped ion, neutral atom, and superconducting systems.
During the summer of 2015 the company lost $7.6 billion related to its mobile-phone business, firing 7,800 employees. Following the release of Windows Phone, Microsoft undertook a gradual rebranding of its product range throughout 2011 and 2012, with the corporation’s logos, products, services, and websites adopting the principles and concepts of the Metro design language. Increasingly present in the hardware business following Xbox, Microsoft 2006 released the Zune series of digital media players, a successor of its previous software platform Portable Media Center. It has been criticized for monopolistic practices, and the company’s software received criticism for problems with ease of use, robustness, and security.
A Big Tech company, Microsoft is the largest software company by revenue, one of the most valuable public companies, and one of the most valuable brands globally. The company became influential in the rise of personal computers through software like Windows and has since expanded into areas such as Internet services, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, video gaming, and more. 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.
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The European Commission issued a statement of objections, alleging Microsoft’s practice since 2019 gave Teams an unfair market advantage and limited interoperability with competing software. In June 2024, Microsoft faced a potential EU fine after regulators accused it of abusing market power by bundling its Teams video-conferencing app with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software. Microsoft was the first company to participate in the PRISM surveillance program, according to leaked NSA documents obtained by The Guardian and The Washington Post in June 2013, and acknowledged by government officials following the leak.
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- 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.
- In mid-2025, Microsoft’s Russian division, Microsoft Rus LLC, filed for bankruptcy after President Vladimir Putin stated that foreign services providers should be throttled in Russia to make way for domestic software.
- The cuts affected multiple divisions, including Xbox, with 830 positions eliminated at its Redmond, Washington headquarters.
- Intune for Education is a new cloud-based application and device management service for the education sector.
- The group, accessed “a very small percentage” of Microsoft corporate email accounts, which also included members of its senior leadership team and employees in its cybersecurity and legal teams.
In March 2026, Microsoft-controlled discussion forums banned the nickname Microslop, used to express pushback against Microsoft’s Copilot-based and GenAI efforts. In June 2025, a United Nations report on corporations complicit in the Gaza genocide showed that Microsoft was one of several companies “central to Israel’s surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction.” In mid-2025, Microsoft’s Russian division, Microsoft Rus LLC, filed for bankruptcy after President Vladimir Putin stated that foreign services providers should be throttled in Russia to make way for domestic software. The outage was traced back to a flawed update of CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software, which resulted in Microsoft systems crashing and causing disruptions across various sectors. On July 19, a global IT outage impacted Microsoft services, affecting businesses, airlines, and financial institutions worldwide. Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro.
To cope with the potential for an increase in demand for products and services, Microsoft opened a number of “holiday stores” across the U.S. to complement the increasing number of “bricks-and-mortar” Microsoft Stores that opened in 2012. The Surface was unveiled in June 2012, becoming the first computer in the company’s history to have its hardware made by Microsoft. Other companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM and Lotus, being much slower to adapt to the new situation, would give Microsoft market dominance. With a few exceptions of new companies, like Netscape, Microsoft was the only major and established company that acted fast enough to be a part of the World Wide Web practically from the start.
- The layoffs primarily affected Activision Blizzard employees, but some Xbox and ZeniMax employees were also affected.
- However, the plan was short-lived, as Altman was subsequently reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO and Brockman rejoined the company amid pressure from OpenAI’s employees and investors on its board.
- In June 2024, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 1,000 employees from the company’s mixed reality and Azure cloud computing divisions.
- Frequently criticized are the ease of use, robustness, and security of the Microsoft’s software.
- The program authorizes the government to secretly access data of non-US citizens hosted by American companies without a warrant.
- It is estimated to encompass over 8 million ft2 (750,000 m2) of office space and 30,000–40,000 employees.
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Additional offices are located in Bellevue and Issaquah, Washington (90,000 employees worldwide). It is estimated to encompass over 8 million ft2 (750,000 m2) of office space and 30,000–40,000 employees. In April 2016, the company sued the U.S. government, argued that secrecy orders were preventing the company from disclosing grattiano warrants to customers in violation of the company’s and customers’ rights.
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This inquiry was part of broader efforts by the U.S. government to enforce guidelines on the power of major tech companies. In November 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an investigation into Microsoft, focusing on potential antitrust violations related to its cloud computing, AI, and cybersecurity businesses. The program authorizes the government to secretly access data of non-US citizens hosted by American companies without a warrant.
Microsoft is ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; and it was the world’s largest software maker by revenue in 2022 according to Forbes Global 2000. Microsoft also confirmed that its Maia 200 AI accelerator, first revealed in January 2026, had entered production deployment in data centers in Iowa and Arizona, powering workloads including Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 models. At Microsoft Build 2026 in June 2026, Microsoft announced the preview availability of Azure Cobalt 200 virtual machines, its second-generation Arm-based custom CPU, offering up to 135% better performance for cloud database workloads and 50% overall CPU performance improvement over the previous generation Cobalt 100. On 9 March 2026, Microsoft unveiled the Copilot Cowork tool, which is based on Claude Cowork, tapping into the growing demand for autonomous agents.
In February 2019, hundreds of Microsoft employees protested what they termed war profiteering by the company from its $480 million contract to develop virtual reality headsets for the United States Army. December also saw the company discontinue the Microsoft Edge Legacy browser project in favor of the “New Edge” browser project, featuring a Chromium based backend. In the same month, Microsoft announced the open source implementation of Windows Forms and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which will allow for further movement of the company toward the transparent release of key frameworks used in developing Windows desktop applications and software. In December 2018, Microsoft announced Project Mu, an open source release of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) core used in Microsoft Surface and Hyper-V products. Intune for Education is a new cloud-based application and device management service for the education sector. Since Nadella became CEO, the company has changed focus towards cloud computing.
