109 Fun Facts About Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and which childhood friend?

Paul Allen, who had known Gates since their Seattle school days, had already run Traf-O-Data with him, selling a rudimentary computer for analysing road-traffic counts.

Microsoft's name, first written with a hyphen, was coined by a co-founder from what two words?

Micro-computer software was squeezed into 'Micro-Soft' when the company was founded in 1975; the hyphen had gone by late 1976, when the name was officially registered.

Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter for which early microcomputer?

Altair 8800 maker MITS was offered a demo before the interpreter existed; written on a simulator, with no Altair to test on, it worked flawlessly at MITS in March 1975.

In which city was Microsoft founded in 1975?

Albuquerque, New Mexico was home to MITS, the microcomputer maker that licensed Microsoft's first product, so the founders set up beside it; the company left for the Seattle area in January 1979.

Microsoft's headquarters are in which Washington city?

Redmond became home in February 1986, weeks before Microsoft went public; the first campus was six buildings for 800 staff, and the company is now by far the city's largest employer.

MS-DOS began life as a product Microsoft bought from Seattle Computer Products called what?

86-DOS, nicknamed QDOS for 'Quick and Dirty Operating System', cost Microsoft about $75,000 in two payments; renamed MS-DOS for the IBM PC, it stayed Microsoft's to sell to rival PC makers.

Microsoft's first operating system, announced in 1980 before MS-DOS, was a licensed version of what?

Unix reached Microsoft under an AT&T licence; the company sold its version as Xenix and later handed it on to its partner, the Santa Cruz Operation.

Which stock exchange listed Microsoft when the company went public in March 1986?

Nasdaq listed Microsoft on March 13, 1986 at $21 a share; the rise that followed is estimated to have made about 10,000 employees millionaires by 2000.

Gates's co-founder left day-to-day work at the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with what?

The diagnosis was Hodgkin's lymphoma, treated with radiation; he recovered and went on to own the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers, dying in 2018 of complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Bill Gates dropped out of which university to build Microsoft?

Harvard got him back in 2007 to collect an honorary degree, when he joked that he had waited more than 30 years to tell his father he would come back and get it.

At which private Seattle academy did Microsoft's two founders meet and first get access to a computer?

Lakeside School's Mothers' Club used rummage-sale money to buy a Teletype terminal and computer time, and the two future founders, two class years apart, taught themselves to program on it.

Which Microsoft program, launched in 1983, was given away on a demo disk with PC World magazine?

Word began as Multi-Tool Word, led by Charles Simonyi, whom Microsoft had hired from Xerox PARC, where he built Bravo, the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processor.

Bill Gates announced Excel in 1985 at a joint press conference with which rival?

Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple unveiled Excel together in New York that May because the first versions ran only on the Macintosh; the aim was to beat Lotus 1-2-3, which had crushed Microsoft's earlier Multiplan.

Which program did Microsoft gain in 1987 by buying its maker, Forethought, for about $14 million?

PowerPoint was just three months old and ran only on the Macintosh, turning out overhead transparencies rather than slideshows; the Windows version waited until 1990.

Office 2007 replaced the old menus and toolbars with which tabbed strip?

The Ribbon was built to make Office's features easier to discover, grouping commands under tabs instead of burying them in menus; Windows' own Paint and WordPad later adopted it.

Which Rolling Stones song did the Windows 95 launch campaign use, a nod to the new button?

'Start Me Up' sold the new Start button in the TV ads; press reports put the Rolling Stones' fee as high as $14 million, though Microsoft said it had paid about $3 million.

Windows 95 introduced long file names of up to how many characters?

Windows 95's VFAT file system allowed file names of up to 255 characters, ending the MS-DOS 8.3 limit, while keeping a short alias for older programs.

Microsoft Bob (1995) featured which animated guide, later the default search companion in Windows XP?

Rover the dog outlived Bob, which was dropped within a year; Melinda Gates, its marketing manager, later said it had needed a more powerful computer than most people owned.

Comic Sans was drawn to replace which typeface in Microsoft Bob's cartoon speech bubbles?

Times New Roman looked too formal to designer Vincent Connare, who modelled Comic Sans on comic-book lettering; it was finished too late for Bob and first shipped in other Microsoft software.

The animated Office Assistant everyone calls Clippy is officially named what?

Clippit was the paperclip's official name; Office XP switched him off by default in 2001, and Microsoft's own launch campaign joked that he was out of a job.

Which Windows game was written by a summer intern, Wes Cherry, with cards drawn by Macintosh icon designer Susan Kare?

Solitaire shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990, partly to get nervous newcomers used to dragging and dropping; Cherry's version had a 'boss key' that hid the game, which he was asked to remove.

Windows XP's default wallpaper Bliss was photographed in 1996 in which region?

Charles O'Rear, a former National Geographic photographer, shot the hill on the road between Napa and Sonoma, California, on medium-format Velvia film, which is why the greens are so vivid.

The XP in Windows XP, released in 2001, is short for what?

Experience was the pitch: XP put home users on the sturdier NT core built for businesses, retiring the DOS-based line that ended with Windows Me.

Bill Gates handed the CEO job to Steve Ballmer in January 2000 and took what new title for himself?

Chief Software Architect kept Gates on the product side while Ballmer ran the company; he passed the title to Ray Ozzie in June 2006, when he announced his shift toward full-time philanthropy.

Before joining Microsoft, Steve Ballmer worked as an assistant product manager at which company?

At Procter & Gamble he shared an office with Jeff Immelt, later CEO of General Electric; he then tried screenwriting in Hollywood and attended Stanford's business school before joining Microsoft in 1980.

Which NBA franchise did Steve Ballmer buy in 2014?

Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling had just been banned from the NBA for life over racist remarks, forcing a sale; Ballmer's $2 billion bid won months after he stepped down as Microsoft's chief executive.

The original Xbox launched in November 2001 alongside which game, its signature title?

Halo: Combat Evolved shipped with the console on launch day, November 15; Microsoft had bought its developer, Bungie, in June 2000 and turned the game into the Xbox's flagship launch title.

The idea for the Xbox came from four engineers on which Microsoft team?

The name is a nod to DirectX; the console was designed to compete with Sony's PlayStation 2.

Microsoft's motion-sensing camera controller, first released in November 2010, was called what?

Kinect sold eight million units in 60 days, but bundling its successor with the Xbox One made that console $100 dearer than the PlayStation 4, and Microsoft unbundled it within a year.

Which Microsoft music player, launched in 2006 to take on the iPod, was discontinued in 2011?

Zune was built with Toshiba on its Gigabeat S player; its headline trick was beaming songs wirelessly to another Zune, yet a shared track expired after three plays or three days.

Microsoft's 2010 Windows Phone interface used a flat design language codenamed what?

Metro, the flat typography-led style of Windows Phone 7, spread to the Xbox dashboard and Windows 8 before Microsoft dropped the name in 2012, reportedly after a dispute with German retailer Metro AG.

In 2011 Microsoft made its then-largest acquisition, buying which communications app for $8.5 billion?

Skype was retired in May 2025, 14 years after the purchase, so that Microsoft could move its users to Teams.

Which brand did Microsoft unveil in June 2012 for the first PCs it designed and sold itself?

Surface took its name from Microsoft's earlier touchscreen table computer, which was renamed PixelSense; until then the company had left PC hardware to partners.

Which company's mobile phone business did Microsoft buy in a deal announced in 2013?

Nokia's devices and services unit became Microsoft Mobile in 2014; the following year Microsoft wrote down about $7.6 billion of the purchase and announced up to 7,800 job cuts.

Satya Nadella became Microsoft's CEO on February 4, 2014, having previously led which division?

Cloud and Enterprise, earlier called Server and Tools, was the unit Nadella had been steering from traditional server software toward cloud services, the shift he then pushed across the whole company.

Which game studio, maker of Minecraft, did Microsoft agree to buy in September 2014 for $2.5 billion?

Mojang, the Stockholm studio behind Minecraft, changed hands that November, months after its founder tweeted an offer to sell his share 'so I can move on with my life'.

Minecraft was originally created in Java by which Swedish developer?

Markus 'Notch' Persson built the first versions while still employed as a programmer elsewhere, then handed the game to Jens Bergensten weeks after its full release in 2011.

Which company did Microsoft buy in 2016 for $26.2 billion, then its largest acquisition?

LinkedIn, the professional networking site, kept its own brand and chief executive after the deal closed in December 2016, running as a largely independent unit.

How long after its March 2016 launch was Microsoft's chatbot Tay shut down for offensive tweets?

Tay was pulled about 16 hours after going live on March 23, 2016, once trolls had taught it to post racist tweets; the name stood for 'thinking about you' and it was billed as 'the AI with zero chill'.

Which rival operating system did Steve Ballmer call a 'cancer' in 2001?

Linux later won the company over: Microsoft became a top-tier sponsor of the Linux Foundation with a seat on its board, and Windows 10 gained a built-in Linux subsystem in 2016.

Which code-hosting platform did Microsoft buy in 2018 for $7.5 billion?

GitHub's sale unsettled some of its developers: rival GitLab said it imported more than 100,000 projects in the days after the news, though GitHub went on operating independently.

Microsoft became the third US company worth $1 trillion in 2019, after Apple and which other firm?

Amazon touched $1 trillion in September 2018, a month after Apple; the 'US' matters because China's PetroChina briefly hit the mark on its first day of trading in 2007.

Which Windows version did a Microsoft evangelist once call 'the last version of Windows'?

Windows 10 was meant to be updated indefinitely as a service, which is what the remark at a 2015 conference reflected, yet Windows 11 arrived on October 5, 2021.

Which game publisher did Microsoft buy for $68.7 billion in a deal completed in October 2023?

Activision Blizzard, maker of Call of Duty, joined Microsoft after a 21-month fight with regulators; Britain approved the deal only once cloud-streaming rights went to Ubisoft.

Microsoft's cloud computing platform, launched in 2010, is called what?

Azure was first shown in 2008 under the codename Project Red Dog and sold as Windows Azure until 2014, when Microsoft dropped 'Windows' from the name.

Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in January 2023 in which AI company?

OpenAI got a reported $10 billion more from the deal; that November Microsoft said it would hire the firm's ousted chief Sam Altman, only for him to be reinstated within days.

Which 24-hour cable news channel did Microsoft co-found in 1996?

MSNBC paired Microsoft's MSN with NBC News; Microsoft sold out of the channel from 2005 and the website in 2012, yet the 'MS' survived even the 2025 renaming to MS NOW.

The EU's 2004 antitrust ruling forced Microsoft to sell Windows XP editions stripped of which program?

Windows Media Player was the program at issue; the stripped versions were called Edition N, a name EU regulators chose after rejecting Microsoft's own suggestion, 'Reduced Media Edition'.

Bill Gates's internal 1995 memo that turned Microsoft toward the web was titled what?

'Internet Tidal Wave', sent on May 26, 1995, called the internet 'crucial to every part of our business'; his book The Road Ahead, out that November, was substantially revised a year later.

Microsoft's first international office, opened in 1978, was in which country?

The first office abroad was ASCII Microsoft in Japan, born of a 1977 agreement with Kazuhiko Nishi's ASCII Magazine; Nishi went on to become Microsoft's vice-president for the Far East.

Which hardware product, launched in 1983, was one of Microsoft's first non-software items?

A mouse: the Microsoft Mouse, nicknamed 'green-eyed' for its two green buttons, shipped with a tutorial two years before Windows 1.0 gave people much to click on.

Which security firm's faulty update caused the July 2024 global Windows outage?

A defective CrowdStrike Falcon sensor update on July 19, 2024 crashed about 8.5 million Windows machines; its CEO stressed it was not a cyberattack, but flights, payments and hospitals were disrupted for days.

Which Microsoft program began in 1995 with code licensed from a small firm called Spyglass?

Internet Explorer was built on Spyglass's Mosaic code for a fee plus a share of sales; Microsoft then gave the browser away with Windows, and Spyglass settled for $8 million in 1997.

What was the codename of Windows Vista during its early development?

Longhorn was planned as a quick stop between Windows XP, codenamed Whistler, and a bigger release called Blackcomb: the Longhorn is a bar between those two ski mountains in British Columbia.

Which Microsoft phones, launched in May 2010 for young social-media users, were pulled from sale within two months?

Kin grew out of Microsoft's 2008 purchase of Danger, maker of the T-Mobile Sidekick, and reportedly cost about $1 billion; unsold stock was later reissued with its social features stripped out.

Which speech-recognition company, maker of Dragon dictation software, did Microsoft agree to buy in 2021?

Nuance Communications had refocused on health care, where doctors dictate notes with Dragon, and cost $19.7 billion including debt; its speech engine also sat behind Apple's original Siri.

The original Xbox sold about 24 million units, narrowly outselling which rival console?

GameCube sales ended near 22 million, while the PlayStation 2 passed 155 million; the win was costly, as Microsoft lost about $4 billion on the first Xbox.

Which 1983 home computer standard did Microsoft and ASCII Corporation create with numerous hardware partners?

MSX let Sony, Panasonic, Philips and others build compatible machines running Microsoft BASIC; few reached the United States, but it sold well in Asia, and the first two Metal Gear games debuted on it.

The antitrust case that nearly split Microsoft in 2000 centred on its bundling a free browser with Windows to crush which rival?

Netscape's Navigator was the browser Microsoft set out to beat; Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the company split in two in June 2000, but an appeals court threw out the breakup a year later.

Which comedian was paid $10 million to appear alongside Bill Gates in Microsoft's 2008 television adverts for Windows?

Jerry Seinfeld's adverts were dropped from television within weeks, when Microsoft switched to a different campaign and kept the longer cuts for its website.

Which wrestler joined Bill Gates on stage in Las Vegas to unveil the original Xbox console at CES?

The Rock made a surprise appearance during Gates's keynote speech, ten months before the console reached the shops.

Which computer giant first approached Microsoft in July 1980 about software for its planned personal computer?

IBM came calling shortly after Bill Gates's mother joined a United Way board alongside John Opel, the IBM president who became its chief executive months later. The operating system Microsoft supplied became MS-DOS.

What did a Belgian prankster's gang pelt Bill Gates with when they ambushed him in Brussels in 1998?

Pies were Noël Godin's trademark, and his group drank Trappist beer for courage before the ambush. A year earlier the gang had pied the future French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Which ambient music pioneer composed the six-second startup sound that greeted users of Windows 95?

Brian Eno made 84 tiny pieces for the job, and later admitted he wrote the chosen one on a Mac, having never used a PC in his life.

Microsoft paid $240 million in 2007 for a 1.6% stake in which young social network?

Facebook was valued at around $15 billion by the deal, at a time when the site was not yet four years old.

Which web portal turned down Microsoft's unsolicited $44.6 billion takeover offer in 2008?

Yahoo held out for more even after Microsoft raised its bid to $47 billion. Eight years later it agreed to sell its core business to Verizon for about a tenth of that.

Which three-key Windows login shortcut did Bill Gates call a mistake in 2013, saying he had wanted a single button?

Ctrl+Alt+Delete was devised by engineer David Bradley in a few minutes, as a quick way to restart a PC during development.

Which travel booking site was launched inside Microsoft in October 1996 before being floated as a separate company?

Expedia's shares were priced at $14 for the 1999 flotation, opened at $37 and ended their first day above $53, almost four times the offer price.

Microsoft signed a 20-year deal in 2024 to buy all the power from which mothballed American nuclear plant?

Three Mile Island's Unit 1, shut in 2019 after years of losses, is the reactor the deal revives. It stood beside the one that partly melted down in 1979, America's worst commercial nuclear accident.

Microsoft Teams was unveiled in November 2016 as a direct competitor to which workplace chat app?

Slack answered with a full-page newspaper advert welcoming the competition. Months earlier Microsoft had weighed a multibillion-dollar bid for the company.

Which name did Microsoft give the search engine that replaced Live Search in 2009, after testing it internally as Kumo?

Bing was announced by Steve Ballmer at a conference in San Diego; the test name it shed came from a word meaning both spider and cloud.

Which browser, codenamed Spartan during development, replaced Internet Explorer as the default in Windows in 2015?

Edge was later rebuilt on Chromium, the open-source project that also underpins Google Chrome, which let Microsoft bring its browser to Macs.

Microsoft's voice assistant, launched in 2014 with actress Jen Taylor as its American voice, went by which name?

Cortana was named after an artificial intelligence character from Microsoft's own games, voiced by the same actress. In 2014 it correctly called the first 14 knockout matches of the football World Cup.

Which background colour gave the infamous Windows crash screen its nickname, before a 2025 redesign turned it black?

Blue arrived with Windows 3.1, which changed the error screen from black, so the 2025 redesign took the dreaded message back to where it started.

Which Microsoft console's 'Red Ring of Death' hardware failures cost the company $1.15 billion in repairs?

Xbox 360 owners were given a three-year warranty in July 2007, in an open letter admitting the console's problems; the nickname echoed the Windows crash screen.

Which webmail service did Microsoft buy in 1997 for a reported $400 million and later rebrand as Outlook.com?

Hotmail was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and had been running for less than two years when Microsoft bought it.

Which CD-ROM encyclopedia did Microsoft publish from 1993 to 2009, after Britannica turned down a partnership?

Encarta was built instead on the text of the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia, under the internal codename Gandalf.

The US government's 1998 antitrust case accused Microsoft of using Windows to squeeze out which rival browser maker?

Netscape saw its share of the browser market fall from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to under one percent by 2006.

Microsoft went public in March 1986 at $21 a share on which stock exchange, where it trades as MSFT?

Nasdaq was a fully electronic market, and the flotation there raised $61 million for a company not yet eleven years old.

Which 2012 version of Windows dropped the taskbar's signature menu button, then restored it a year later?

Windows 8 dropped the button because its designers saw the desktop as just another app, not the heart of the system; complaints brought it back in the 8.1 update.

Which mobile puzzle hit from the studio King became a Microsoft property through the company's record 2023 takeover?

Candy Crush had earned more than $20 billion by 2023, and its maker King had itself been bought for $5.9 billion seven years before Microsoft's deal.

Microsoft held talks in 2020 to buy part of which video app, a deal that fell through that September?

TikTok, then facing a threatened US ban, was under pressure to sell its American operations. It ended the courtship by choosing Oracle as its trusted technology partner instead, and no sale to Microsoft took place.

Which name did Microsoft settle on during 2023 for the AI chatbot it was building into Windows and Office?

Copilot started that February under a different name, as a chat feature inside Microsoft's search engine, before the brand spread across the company's products.

Which Microsoft game series, first sold in 1982, is the company's longest-running software line, older than Windows?

Flight Simulator was licensed from Bruce Artwick's company Sublogic, which had already released versions for other home computers.

Which typeface became the default in Microsoft Office in 2007 and held the job for 17 years until Aptos replaced it?

Calibri was drawn by Lucas de Groot, who described its subtly rounded letters as having a warm and soft character.

Satya Nadella, who became Microsoft's third chief executive in 2014, was born in which Indian city?

Hyderabad is where Nadella went to school before an engineering degree in Karnataka. India later gave him the Padma Bhushan, its third-highest civilian award.

Which Xbox feature, introduced with the 2005 console, awards points that add up to a player's Gamerscore?

Achievements were the first easily accessible reward system to span every game on a console, and Sony followed three years later with Trophies.

Which Microsoft 365 app lets users build surveys and quizzes that are marked automatically?

Forms was launched in June 2016 as a tool for teachers in Office 365 Education, who could set a quiz and have every pupil's score worked out for them.

Which workplace social network did Microsoft buy in 2012 for $1.2 billion and later fold into Viva Engage?

Yammer let colleagues join a private network simply by holding an email address at their employer's domain; the name was phased out during 2023.

Plugging in which device crashed Windows 98 during a live demonstration with Bill Gates on stage at COMDEX?

A scanner did the damage, to cheers from the audience. The assistant who plugged it in, Chris Capossela, stayed on and later became Microsoft's chief marketing officer.

In October 2003 Microsoft began bundling its security fixes into one monthly release on which day of the week?

Tuesday was chosen, the second of each month, to cut the cost of patching after the Blaster worm. The day after soon earned the nickname Exploit Wednesday.

Microsoft's Project Natick, tested off Scotland's Orkney Islands from 2018, sank what beneath the sea for two years?

A data centre holding 864 servers ran reliably down there, cooled by sea water at its natural temperature, and was put to work on vaccine research during the pandemic.

Microsoft renamed its online storage service OneDrive after losing a 2013 trademark case to which British broadcaster?

Sky objected to the service's original name, SkyDrive, and the High Court agreed that it breached the broadcaster's trademark.

Which publisher of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout joined Xbox when Microsoft bought its parent company ZeniMax Media?

Bethesda's parent also owned id Software, so the 2021 deal put Doom and Quake under the same roof as Xbox.

Which British studio behind GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie did Microsoft buy in 2002, ending its Nintendo partnership?

Rare had been 49 percent owned by Nintendo, for which it made Donkey Kong Country; under Microsoft it went on to build the pirate game Sea of Thieves.

Which Microsoft language, released in 2012, is a superset of JavaScript that compiles back into it?

TypeScript adds optional type checking so that mistakes are caught before a program runs, then a compiler turns the files into plain JavaScript.

Who worked on Microsoft's first CD-ROM titles, took charge of Xbox in 2014 and later ran Microsoft Gaming?

Phil Spencer had joined the company in 1988 and stayed for more than three decades, becoming chief executive of Microsoft Gaming in 2022.

Which Xbox racing series was created as a rival to PlayStation's Gran Turismo and later added open-world Horizon games?

Forza splits in two: the Motorsport games are track simulations, while the Horizon spin-offs by British studio Playground Games are set around a roaming music and racing festival.

Which former Microsoft technology chief, the founder of Microsoft Research, later wrote the cookbook Modernist Cuisine?

Nathan Myhrvold took leave from the job to earn a culinary diploma in France, and his cookbook was later named the James Beard Foundation's cookbook of the year.

Dave Cutler, lead designer of Windows NT, joined Microsoft in 1988 from which minicomputer maker, where he built VMS?

Digital Equipment had cancelled the processor project Cutler was leading, and a group of its developers followed him to Microsoft. One tale says the letters WNT are VMS with each moved on by one.

Which name did Microsoft plan to give Windows before marketing chief Rowland Hanson argued against it?

Interface Manager lost out when Hanson, recruited from the skincare firm Neutrogena for his branding skills, persuaded the company that Windows would sell better.

Which American city lent its name to the internal codename for Windows 95 during its development?

Chicago was not the last place name on the list: the follow-up, Windows 98, began its development under the codename Memphis.

Which spreadsheet did Microsoft launch in 1982 to take on VisiCalc, before replacing it with Excel?

Multiplan sold over a million copies but could not catch Lotus 1-2-3, so Microsoft conceded the text-based market and bet on graphical spreadsheets instead.

Which founder of Microsoft's applications group, the team behind Excel, later paid for two trips to the space station?

Charles Simonyi, who was born in Budapest and left Hungary at 17, flew to the station aboard Russian Soyuz craft in 2007 and again in 2009.

Which Microsoft programming language, unveiled in 2000, was developed as COOL until trademark worries forced a new name?

C# started out as COOL, short for C-like Object Oriented Language, and its lead designer Anders Hejlsberg had earlier worked on Turbo Pascal.

Bill Gates's 1976 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' accused most home computer owners of doing what with Microsoft's BASIC?

Using it without paying was the charge: Gates claimed that more than nine in ten users had never bought their copy, and warned that nobody could write good software for nothing.

Which typeface, used for menu and dialog text across Windows, was also chosen for the Microsoft logo unveiled in 2012?

Segoe was designed by Steve Matteson at Monotype, and the German foundry Linotype protested that it looked too much like its own Frutiger family.

Microsoft's first offer to the teenager behind MikeRoweSoft.com in 2004 covered only which of his costs?

His registration fee came to just $10, an offer that so annoyed the 17-year-old Canadian that he asked for $10,000. He settled for an Xbox and a family trip to Microsoft's headquarters.

Which Sega console could run games built on a custom version of Microsoft's Windows CE, to make PC ports easier?

Dreamcast programmers ended up favouring Sega's own development tools over the ones Microsoft supplied to make porting easy.