Tech titan turns 50: Microsoft in numbers

Ahead of its 50-year anniversary on April 4, a look back in numbers at some highs and lows:

- 365 –

Microsoft Office, the company's suite of software products containing Word, PowerPoint and Excel, was launched in 1989 and hit shelves a year later.

Over time it became the go-to home computer software across the world.

Two decades later the company rebranded it to the cloud-based Office 365, with a new licensing structure and payment via an online subscription-based system.

Released on the market in 2011, it also allowed consumers to pick and choose, allowing those not using Microsoft's operating system (Windows) -- Mac users for example have MacOS -- to buy and run 365 products.

The number 365, now synonymous with the company, underscored dynamism and flexibility, with products available anywhere, 365 days a year.

In Microsoft's latest quarterly figures published on January 29, the company said the number of users, or "consumer subscribers", of Office 365 was 86.3 million at the end of December 2024.

- 95 percent –

Microsoft's web browser Internet Explorer, first launched in 1995, reached its peak dominance of the market share in the early 2000s when it was the browser for up to 95 percent of world users, according to the web analytics site, WebSideStory.

But the browser was beleaguered with security issues, even prompting PC World magazine to dub version 6 as the "least secure software on the planet".

Internet Explorer's market share was progressively battered down as users turned increasingly to other browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox.

In 2022, Microsoft finally retired Internet Explorer, replacing it with Microsoft Edge, which has a market share of 5.3 percent, far behind Chrome at 66.3 percent and Safari with 18 percent, according to Statcounter data for February 2025.

- Three months –

While the first fifty years of Microsoft is by and large a phenomenal success story, there have been a fair share of flops along the way too.

Chief among those was the Kin, Microsoft's foray into social networking on mobile phones.

In development for two years, it launched on the US market in 2010, sold by Verizon, but after only around three months the provider pulled it off the shelves due to dreadful sales.

The planned European launch was then scrapped and Kin took its place in the annals of Microsoft's worst flops in history.

Here, it joined other now-forgotten aborted products such as Zune, a portable music player snuffed out by the iPod, or Portrait, an early failed version of Skype.

- 70.5 percent -

Microsoft's flagship operating system, Windows, ran on 70.5 percent of the world's desktop computers in February 2025, far ahead of Apple Mac's OS X (15.8 percent), according to StatCounter.

This dominance over global PCs has contributed to Microsoft -- like the other four Big Tech companies Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon -- drawing scrutiny from US and European antitrust investigators, sometimes resulting in hefty fines.

- $2,900 billion –

With Apple and Nvidia, Microsoft has one of the world's largest market capitalisations at around $2.9 trillion, as of the end of March.

- $80 billion –

One thing sure to feature in Microsoft's story to come is artificial intelligence.

It has made massive investments in the sector, one of the first tech giants to do so, and has earmarked $80 billion for AI between July 2024 and July 2025.

One of its key partnerships has been with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

However, the emergence in 2025 of China's AI startup model DeepSeek, trained at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI's systems, has stunned Silicon Valley.

Another area of key growth has been Microsoft's cloud-computing arm Azure, which has a market share of 21 percent, second behind Amazon Web Services (30 percent), according to Synergy Research Group.