For this final installment in GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 series, we visited the company’s redeveloped headquarters. The new campus offers insights into Microsoft’s evolution over the past five decades, and a glimpse of the place where its future will take shape.
It had been eleven years since Microsoft’s three CEOs had appeared together on stage, and the public reunion Friday of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella for the company’s 50th anniversary brought back brought a flood of memories for all three.
What’s the significance of Microsoft in modern business and tech history? For the past several months, in the course of reporting GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 series, we’ve asked variations of that question in interviews and email exchanges with key leaders from the company over the years.
Satya Nadella sees in Microsoft’s history a blueprint for its future. “That very first product of ours — that BASIC interpreter for the Altair — I think says it all,” the Microsoft CEO said in an interview with GeekWire this week, as the company prepared to mark its 50th anniversary.
Founded in 1986 and staffed by a team of six, the Microsoft Archives preserve nearly 135,000 physical artifacts, 170,000 digital records, and half a petabyte of digitized video content.
As Microsoft prepares to mark its 50th anniversary, company veterans are reflecting on the pivotal role of the late Paul Allen, who started the company with Bill Gates in 1975.
Will artificial intelligence ever catch up with human intelligence? And if it does, is humanity doomed? Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold, who had the job of predicting the future of tech during Microsoft’s early years, was ready with some answers at GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 anniversary event Thursday night.
GeekWire hosted hundreds of longtime Microsoft employees, key executives, company faithful and tech community members Thursday night in Seattle at Microsoft@50, a GeekWire event to mark the company’s 50th anniversary.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen brought Microsoft into the world. Gates and Steve Ballmer saw the company through adolescence. Ballmer was in charge for high school and college. Satya Nadella is taking Microsoft into adulthood. That’s how Ballmer sees it these days.
GeekWire’s Microsoft@50 event, marking the tech giant’s milestone anniversary, will feature on-stage conversations with Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad… Read More
A new book, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft, finds universal business lessons in the company’s successes and also its failures, through case studies about different products and teams in various scenarios and stages of evolution.
Bill Gates talks about Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, parallels between AI and the early days of the PC, and where he sees the next big opportunities for innovation.
Even with Microsoft’s hard-driving culture, and its vision for a computer on every desk and in every home (running Microsoft software), the magnitude of its success took many of the company’s early employees by surprise, a new oral history project shows.
GeekWire revisits Bill Gates’ classic book, The Road Ahead, with insights from one of his coauthors, and finds parallels to the AI revolution happening now.
Microsoft’s bet on a market that didn’t really exist at the time — personal computer software — paid off in ways that its founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen never imagined.
For this second chapter in our Microsoft @ 50 series, GeekWire spent the past month revisiting Microsoft’s early years, from its founding in 1975 to its IPO in 1986, looking for a new understanding and enduring lessons from its startup story.
Just as the PC and cloud defined much of Microsoft’s first 50 years, and just as its struggles in mobile set the company back in the smartphone era, its success or failure in AI promises to determine its fate for decades to come.
