How Microsoft has succeeded in 50 years

In 2005, Microsoft leaders began anxious. Windows and Office was in good condition, but the company’s leading software engineer, Ray Ozzie, warned them that the emerging trend threatened the existence of Microsoft in particular.

Ozzie in Ozi warned in the form of services and programs backed by ads, “Ozzzie is in its form.” A famous note. “This model has the ability to influence mainly on how we do and other developers building, introducing and investing innovations.”

Ozzie wanted Microsoft to prepare for the world -based world, fearing that the company would leave behind. In the years that followed the Ozzie Memorandum, Google started building an online competitor to Office through the Google document service that it was selling to companies and providing them free to consumers. But the idea of ​​moving to the cloud remained controversial internally. Doing this would increase the traditional Microsoft method of selling software-to-eating in short-term profits significantly.

“It was a courageous invitation, it was not a common call at Microsoft at that time,” says Rajesh JHA, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Experience and Devices Group. Steve Palmer, CEO of Microsoft, decided to move forward with it, move the office to the cloud and fully launch Azzure in 2010.

Office 365 was initially launched in Beta, and Microsoft has faced the OFICE FOR Web Transforming Challenges. “The first days of Office 365 were cruel,” JHA recognized. Microsoft had to make the strenuous transmission of the moving applications that were built for a different architecture and an era to the cloud and made this scale properly. “I remember Steve (Palmer) talks to me and says,” I got your back, go to fix these things. “

The type of change that Microsoft has moved again and again during its 50 -year -old history, an era with success, axis and failure. It is easy to think that Microsoft will feel embarrassed by the launch of Windows 8, Zune’s performance, and its failure in smartphones – definitely, the company wishes that these things have achieved better. But serious attempts to something new are the bottom line.

“We are still present and drive things because we accept change,” says Stephen Bathchi, head of the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group. freedom. “This is the pearls about Microsoft This is a kind of unique with an old company that we presented, in an industry that changes quickly like our foals.”

Today’s Microsoft is 50 years old. The company was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in the role of Micro Nokov. Many have changed since then, but in many ways, the company’s primary business model and spirit remains as it is: Make programs that everyone needs and install everywhere.

Gates and Allen started that strategy with Altair Basic, a key translator for Altair 8800 – a MITS computer, instead they made. After creating one translator for one computer, they started bringing it to every other computers maker that it will take. After the success of Microsoft Basic, the company will repeat the strategy using MS-DOS, and eventually Windows and Office.

But building those platforms that must be used has taken a lot of experiments, and Microsoft often had the right idea in the wrong time-and it was made in the main markets as a result.

Microsoft had Smartwatches Spot watches decades before Apple Watch and Windows XP, which works on the tablet, years ago from the iPad. One of the largest mistakes of the company was the mobile phone. Microsoft has tried a lot of devices and programs over the years that it should have been in perfect mode to be the primary alternative to the iPhone. Instead, its platform was burned, and the company chanted billions of dollars to acquire Nokia in an uneleche to catch up with the knees.

However, those familiar with Microsoft says they are these experiences that have ultimately caused many successes to the company.

“We are used to doing these invention sessions with Bill (Gates), which was very enjoyable,” says Bathiche. “I was very young when Bell was present, so I was allowing this crazy world and showing him all these great things that we were doing in devices and programs, and I think he really appreciates it.”

Some of these experiments will cancel the secure of the cloud computing and cloud progress, which helps to pave the way for laptops and Microsoft tablets. Other hardware and software experiments led to Xbox, the best example of Microsoft in combining programs and devices in a successful consumer product. In her heart, Xbox revolves around enabling developers to build convincing games with programs, and was originally called “Windows Entertainment” and was developed by Microsoft DirectX members to enter Sony’s control unit in the living room.

Other Microsoft projects have taken a more dizziness to become successful products. One of the main cases mentioned by Bathiche is Cortana, the first -time audio assistant for his phone platform. The assistant was not a substitute for Siri and Alexa and was finally closed.

“Cortana days, that was really difficult,” admitted. The Microsoft project requires the development of technologies about the local account and to improve arm chips. “Therefore, although I failed to enable this type of solution, I took all those techniques that we developed as a team and we applied it to Windows and Surface.”

These technologies, from improving Cortana to get Windows Phone to run arm chips, helped Microsoft’s work with Surface Pro X and Windows early experiences. “This will prepare us over the next decade,” says Bathiche.

This date talks about the reason why the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella is very aggressive when it comes to AI.

One of the most important Microsoft deals in the era of Nadella was its partnership with Openai. Microsoft I originally invested $ 1 billion At Openai in 2019 to become the exclusive provider of cloud computing services for the artificial intelligence research laboratory. Then this partnership was extended in 2023 with an additional increase 10 billion dollars in investmentA few months after the launch of Chatgpt and the fastest growing application in history.

This investment has fueled Microsoft’s ongoing Amnesty International Fears that Google was coming years It is in expanding the efforts of artificial intelligence. For Bathiche, the era of artificial intelligence shows these patterns that allow companies like Microsoft to take advantage of the constant change in the ability to calculate and build new experiences or new model factors.

“When we had the first computers, they will download a very specific program and this is the only thing they can do,” says Bathiche. Microsoft saw the opportunity early to build Windows as a developer to speak to computers easily and create applications with the graphical user interface at the top. Then the internet was a layer of more, which changed how to deliver programs.

“Now we are on the next layer, the agent layer,” says Bathiche, who describes smart programs that work independently on behalf of the user. “This is the exciting we are trying to discover.” Microsoft has always developed a program by collecting an application like Word, then everyone gets the same program, whether it was delivered via a pressed disk or online. Microsoft is now trying to create programs that adapt to flying.

“The race is continuing to collect this code uniquely, individually, for every person on this planet. The reason is that these AI’s agent’s experiences that we are talking about are really related to allocation, understanding and deep allocation,” says Bathiche.

This push towards unique and personal programs through artificial intelligence has been paid unprecedented, and the AI ​​AI teams from Microsoft continuously have to adapt to new models or new devices that open more AI’s capabilities. We have recently seen it with Microsoft’s fast dependence of the Microsoft Microsoft model in the AZURE AI.

“All the systems that we have built 50 years ago need to apply to artificial intelligence agents,” says Asha Sharma, Vice -President of the Microsoft Intelligence Organization platform at Microsoft. “For Azure Ai Foundry, we are thinking about how we evolve to become the operating system in the back interface of each agent.”

Microsoft imagines a world in which artificial intelligence agents will work alongside you as digital colleagues and collaborators. “I think many of the systems we have built for 50 years will be a critical infrastructure for the digital workforce,” said Sharma. “We need to think about not just understanding human facades, but the facades are understandable.”

Part of winning the battle of artificial intelligence will return to the special microsoft models, and the use of competing models wisely. Microsoft has recently unveiled Musa Muse Ai, which was trained on Xbox Edge of bleeding To generate the way of playing. Nadella stressed the importance of AI’s Microsoft Microsoft during a Meeting the town’s last employee hall meeting“When I think about what we are trying to do with Muse, this is the righteous. You can do basic research, take out a model, then translate it into a real feature in Copilot.”

Besides digital changes and Xbox changes, Microsoft also alluded to basic ways that artificial intelligence in the material world can live. “I think some of our artificial intelligence agents in the future will be embodied by agents able to develop plans and take action on behalf of users in physical environments,” says Ashley Lorenz, Vice President and Administrative Director of Microsoft Research. “Not only is engineering environments only carefully that we have many robots per day, but in many almost organized environments that people live and work in. One of the challenges he faces is teaching artificial intelligence how to think about relationships between things and environments in time and space.”

Self -powered robots such as science fiction may seem now, but Microsoft is increasingly focused on robots, health care and even quantum computing, so it seems that anything possible over the next fifty years. Since Microsoft Mobile Miss, I have always felt that the company warns of losing the next big thing, so I expect completely the era of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft’s flexibility and its ability to predict what is the following – like Gates in the first days of Microsoft or Ozzie in 2005 – has set the company over the past fifty years. Microsoft’s possible moments forced to make large bets that were not always successful but led to change.

Now, Microsoft has gone Everything in artificial intelligence. Its efforts may contribute to “exclusivity”, a time point in which artificial intelligence exceeds the capabilities of humans, and perhaps even our control. How does this seem to be guessing anyone. But if the noise bubble of artificial intelligence explodes, which is mobile fluctuations from Windows more than azure, I am sure one thing: Microsoft will adapt to the challenge.