Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary today
There’s only a handful of companies in the world that, should our collective global memory of them be wiped overnight — as happened with the songs of The Beatles in the broadly fine 2019 movie “Yesterday” — the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people around the globe would alter almost immediately. Microsoft, which was founded 50 years ago today, is without doubt one of those businesses.
The house that Bill built
The world runs on Excel Spreadsheets. Everyone in a corporate job has made, or sat through, a mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation. Even Teams, much maligned though it is by almost anyone who comes into contact with it, was clocking 320 million monthly active users by 2023. Yet the suite of Office products and associated cloud services made up just over 20% of Microsoft’s total revenues last year.
The company, which is hosting a 50th anniversary/Copilot event today (because why simply celebrate five decades when you could shoehorn your flagship AI product into proceedings?), hauled in $245 billion in revenue last year, from an impressively vast array of services and products.
Still, going into the big day almost 5% down this week probably isn’t the present that Microsoft was hoping for.
The company, which is hosting a 50th anniversary/Copilot event today (because why simply celebrate five decades when you could shoehorn your flagship AI product into proceedings?), hauled in $245 billion in revenue last year, from an impressively vast array of services and products.
Still, going into the big day almost 5% down this week probably isn’t the present that Microsoft was hoping for.
