Microsoft is a software company based in Redmond, Washington. Bill Gates and Paul Allen started it in 1975. It is best known for the Windows operating system and the Office suite of productivity programs.
Today a large part of its work is cloud computing. Azure is its cloud platform, and Microsoft 365 bundles Office apps with online storage and collaboration tools. The company also owns LinkedIn, GitHub and the Xbox gaming business. Dynamics 365 covers business software for sales and finance.
Microsoft makes hardware too, including the Surface line of laptops and tablets and the Xbox consoles. It has a long partnership with OpenAI and builds AI assistants called Copilot into its products. Governments, schools and companies of every size use its software. Satya Nadella has been chief executive since 2014 and moved the company toward cloud services and subscriptions. Microsoft also sells security products, developer tools such as Visual Studio, the Edge browser and the Bing search engine. Its Windows system runs on most desktop computers.