Microsoft celebrates 50 years of adapting to change – Computerworld

In 1995 he set out a roadmap for the IT revolution in his first major text, The Road Ahead. Of the changes to come, he told Time magazine in a 1997 interview, “People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they?” That year he created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to address health and education issues of our time.

The arrival of the new century crowned a new CEO, Steve Ballmer. Gates stepped back to let the company’s first business manager continue with his strategy. Through 2013 Ballmer laid the first stones of the company’s video game business with the launch of the Xbox game console, and of the cloud with the 2008 launch of Azure. It was in 2011 that Office made the leap to the cloud with Office 365, and the company too a further step in collaboration with the purchase of the Skype video calling tool. In Ballmer’s final years in charge the Surface line of tablets emerged.

In 2014 comes the Satya Nadella era, characterized by a hitherto unknown acceleration of the technology industry around the planet. It stands out for the consolidation of cloud business and video games while introducing new trends, such as AI. Along the way, Windows 10, the purchase of LinkedIn, GitHub, the launch of Teams, which became the fastest growing application for the company, and the strong investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. His great achievement, perhaps, is to take Microsoft to a market value of $3 trillion dollars by 2024 thanks to this strategy. But it was in 2015 that he turns the technology around with a new corporate mission: “To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more” through IT.