Later, in 2006, the company launched Microsoft adCenter, a service that offers pay per click advertisements, in an effort to further develop their search marketing revenue. Microsoft launched its Indian headquarters as well, which would eventually become the company’s second largest after its U.S. headquarters. Finally, a great deal of controversy took place when a set of internal memos from the company were leaked on the Internet.
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In July 2025, Microsoft announced another round of layoffs, cutting approximately 9,000 employees in its largest workforce reduction in over two years. On January 21, 2015, Microsoft announced the release of its first interactive whiteboard, named Surface Hub. On July 29, 2015, Windows 10 was released, with its server sibling, Windows Server 2016, released in September 2016. During the summer of 2015 the company lost $7.6 billion related to its mobile-phone business, firing 7,800 employees.
In an internal memo to Microsoft employees on May 16, 1991, Bill Gates announced that the OS/2 partnership was over, and that Microsoft would henceforth focus its platform efforts on Windows and the Windows NT kernel. Some people, especially developers who had ignored Windows and committed most of their resources to OS/2, were taken by surprise, and accused Microsoft of deception. Microsoft Works would later be sold with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Bookshelf, a reference collection introduced in 1987 that was the company’s first CD-ROM product.
In 2018, Microsoft became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, a position it has repeatedly traded with Apple in the years since. In April 2019, Microsoft became the third U.S. public company to be valued at over $1 trillion.[b] As of 2024[update], Microsoft has the third-highest global brand valuation. The company previously restructured operations in Russia in June 2022 after being significantly impacted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but stated those restructuring efforts have failed. 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.
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In November 1996, Microsoft Office 97 was released, which is the first version to include Office Assistant. Windows CE 2.0, the handheld version of Windows, was released this year, including a host of bug fixes and new features designed to make it more appealing to corporate customers. The company released Microsoft Bob, a graphical user interface designed for novice computer users, in March 1995. The interface was discontinued in 1996 due to poor sales; Bill Gates later attributed its failure to hardware requirements that were too high for typical computers, and is widely regarded as one of Microsoft’s most unsuccessful products. ] DreamWorks SKG and Microsoft formed a new company, DreamWorks Interactive (in 2000 acquired by Electronic Arts, which named it EA Los Angeles), to produce interactive and multimedia entertainment properties. On August Sugarino 12, 1981, after negotiations with Digital Research failed, IBM awarded a contract to Microsoft to provide a version of the CP/M operating system, which was set to be used in the IBM PC.
In February 2019, hundreds of Microsoft employees protested the company’s war profiteering from a $480 million contract to develop virtual reality headsets for the United States Army. In March the company also established guidelines that censor users of Office 365 from using profanity in private documents. In May 2016, the company announced it was laying off 1,850 workers, and taking an impairment and restructuring charge of $950 million.
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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. As of January 2014, Microsoft’s market capitalization stood at $314B, making it the 8th-largest company in the world by market capitalization. On November 14, 2014, Microsoft overtook ExxonMobil to become the second most-valuable company by market capitalization, behind only Apple Inc. In 2015, Reuters reported that Microsoft had earnings abroad of $76.4 billion which were untaxed by the Internal Revenue Service.
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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. The company has a history of antitrust battles in the U.S. and Europe, with over €2 billion in EU fines previously imposed for similar abuses. The program authorizes the government to secretly access data of non-US citizens hosted by American companies without a warrant. 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. Internal Revenue Service was alleging that the company owed the U.S. $28.9 billion in past taxes, plus penalties related to mis-allocation of corporate profits over a decade.