In 2016, the company bought the 32-acre (13 ha) campus, with plans to renovate and expand it by 25%. The company is planning to upgrade its Mountain View, California, campus on a grand scale. Additional offices are located in Bellevue and Issaquah, Washington (90,000 employees worldwide).

Video

In April 2021, Microsoft announced it would buy Nuance Communications for approximately $16 billion. On November 10, 2020, Microsoft released the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S video game consoles. Apple has imposed a strict limit on “remote desktop clients” which means applications are only allowed to connect to a user-owned host device or gaming console owned by the user. 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.
Criticism of Microsoft has followed various aspects of its products and business practices. Among grant recipients from the Asia-Pacific region are the Sri Lankan IT company Fortude, the Thailand-based Vulcan Coalition, and the Indonesian organization Kerjabilitas. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, announced that it had donated an initial batch of supplies, including 15,000 protection goggles, infrared thermometers, medical caps, and protective suits, to healthcare workers in Seattle, with further aid to come. The company was the official jersey sponsor of Finland’s national basketball team at EuroBasket 2015, a major sponsor of the Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT (2017–2020) and a sponsor of the Renault F1 Team (2016–2020). On August 23, 2012, Microsoft unveiled a new corporate logo at the opening of its 23rd Microsoft store in Boston, indicating the company’s shift of focus from the classic style to the tile-centric modern interface, which it uses/will use on the Windows Phone platform, Xbox 360, Windows 8 and the upcoming Office Suites. The company’s retail locations are part of a greater strategy to help build a connection with its consumers.

• 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.
• It was announced that the division would be led by Jordan Hoffman, who previously worked for Deepmind and Inflection.
• In November 2018, the company won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring augmented reality (AR) headset technology into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers.
• Now, you’ll have to scan the QR code using your iPhone or Android smartphone.
• WhatsApp from Meta is a free messaging and calling app used by over 2 billion people across 180+ countries.
• Other companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM and Lotus, being much slower to adapt to the new situation, would give Microsoft market dominance.
• On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a new multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

The company is run by a board of directors made up of mostly company outsiders, as is customary for publicly traded companies. In April 2019, Microsoft became the third U.S. public company to be valued at over $1 trillion.b As of 2024update, Microsoft has the third-highest global brand valuation. 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 September 2024, BlackRock and Microsoft announced a $30 billion fund, the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, to invest in AI infrastructure such as data centers and energy projects. Despite CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz clarifying that the issue was not a cyberattack, the incident had widespread consequences, leading to delays in air travel, financial transactions, and medical services globally. On July 19, 2024, a global IT outage impacted Microsoft services, affecting businesses, airlines, and financial institutions worldwide.
Send someone a picture or a video by selecting the paper clip icon. Access WhatsApp web messenger from the sidebar in the Opera browser for desktop. When you use WhatsApp in the Opera browser, you can do all of this for free over the internet, rather than using your mobile network. WhatsApp messenger is one of the most popular free messaging apps in the world. Never miss a message with WhatsApp notifications in your desktop browser’s sidebar.
Open the WhatsApp application on your mobile device. Once the page loads, a QR code will appear on the right side of the screen. Start by opening your preferred web browser (like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.) and navigate to web.whatsapp.com You’ll just need to connect your account by scanning a QR code with your phone. No, like video chatting, audio calls are also unavailable on the browser version of the app. The following steps assume you already have an account on the mobile app.

Create anywhere, anytime, with any app

In May 2016, Microsoft announced another 1,850 job cuts mostly in its Nokia mobile phone division. In mid-2025, Microsoft’s Russian division, Microsoft Rus LLC, filed for bankruptcy after President Vladimir Putin stated that foreign services providers should be throttled in Russia to make way for domestic software. Microsoft stated that the underlying cause had been fixed but acknowledged ongoing residual impacts on some Microsoft 365 apps and services. The service includes Copilot, a GPT-4 based large language model tool to query and visualize data, write code, initiate simulations, and educate researchers. On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced the acquisition of American video game developer and holding company Activision Blizzard in an all-cash deal worth $68.7 billion. In October 2021, Microsoft announced that it began rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support for Microsoft Teams calls in order to secure business communication while using video conferencing software.
Once you’re in a video call, you can even share your screen if you want. Given that limitation, we’d generally recommend that you use the desktop client whenever you can. The big ones are features—the WhatsApp web interface doesn’t allow you to place audio or video calls. The camera will be opened, and scan the QR code visible on your tablet screen.

Services

On March 1, 2016, Microsoft announced the merger of its PC and Xbox divisions, with Phil Spencer announcing that Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps would be the focus for Microsoft’s gaming in the future. On September 15, 2014, Microsoft acquired the video game development company Mojang, best known for Minecraft, for $2.5 billion. A developer preview was released on September 13, which was subsequently replaced by a consumer preview on February 29, 2012, and released to the public in May. The initiative is meant to speed innovation through simple software changes in telecommunications networks, wireless networks, data centers, and other networking areas.

• Your calls work across devices, even on slower connections, using your phone or tablet’s Internet service.Group chats to keep you in contactStay close to friends and family through end-to-end encrypted group chats and calls.
• WhatsApp web messenger is built right into the Opera desktop browser, so you can chat and browse easily without downloading anything.
• On June 4, 2018, Microsoft officially announced the acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion, a deal that closed on October 26, 2018.
• On July 19, 2024, a global IT outage impacted Microsoft services, affecting businesses, airlines, and financial institutions worldwide.
• On September 3, 2013, Microsoft agreed to buy Nokia’s mobile unit for $7 billion, following Amy Hood taking the role of CFO.
• Following the release of Windows Phone, Microsoft undertook a gradual rebranding of its product range throughout 2011 and 2012, with the corporation’s logos, products, services, and websites adopting the principles and concepts of the Metro design language.
• In August 1977, the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office of ASCII Microsoft.

Corporate identity

The desktop app and the web interface are very similar, but there are a few critical differences. Again you’ll find the QR code on the side of the website the same way as you’ll find it on a desktop or a laptop. You’ll need to scan the QR code using your phone.

Subsequently, two employees interrupted AI executive Mustafa Suleyman at a speaking event on April 4, 2025, in protest at the company’s support of Israel. In May 2025, Microsoft issued an unsigned statement confirming that these services had been made available to Israel, while denying that these tools were employed during the massacre of the people of Gaza. The employees, part https://www.kinghills.casino/ of the group No Azure for Apartheid, sought to address the company’s involvement in the Israeli government’s use of its technology. In October 2024, Microsoft fired two employees, software engineers Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal, who organized an unauthorized vigil at its Redmond headquarters to honor Palestinians killed in the Gaza war.
Consequently, in February 2011 Microsoft released a corporate bond amounting to $2.25 billion with relatively low borrowing rates compared to government bonds. Though the company had subsequent increases in dividend payouts, the price of Microsoft’s stock remained steady for years. When Microsoft went public and launched its initial public offering (IPO) in 1986, the opening stock price was $21; after the trading day, the price closed at $27.75.
During the summer of 2015 the company lost $7.6 billion related to its mobile-phone business, firing 7,800 employees. The company released the Xbox later that year, entering the video game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo. Use your phone’s camera to scan the QR code shown on the web.whatsapp.com page. Just scan a QR code to pair your phone’s WhatsApp app with the desktop version of WhatsApp and continue the conversation in your browser.

present: Acquisitions, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows 11

People who use its products and services often end up becoming dependent on them, a process known as vendor lock-in. In 2011, Greenpeace released a report rating the top ten big brands in cloud computing on the sources of electricity for their data centers. Another community site that provides daily videocasts and other services, On10.net, launched on March 3, 2006. In July 2025, Microsoft announced another round of layoffs, cutting approximately 9,000 employees in its largest workforce reduction in over two years. In May 2025, Microsoft announced that it is laying off more than 6,000 employees, around three percent of the company’s entire workforce.
December also saw the company discontinue the Microsoft Edge Legacy browser project in favor of the “New Edge” browser project, featuring a Chromium based backend. Developed in part by researchers from Kindai University, the water pump mechanisms use artificial intelligence to count the number of fish on a conveyor belt, analyze the number of fish, and deduce the effectiveness of water flow from the data the fish provide. In August 2018, Toyota Tsusho began a partnership with Microsoft to create fish farming tools using the Microsoft Azure application suite for Internet of things (IoT) technologies related to water management. In August 2018, Microsoft released two projects called Microsoft AccountGuard and Defending Democracy.
Free technical support is traditionally provided through online Usenet newsgroups, and CompuServe in the past, monitored by Microsoft employees; there can be several newsgroups for a single product. MSDN also offers subscriptions for companies and individuals, and the more expensive subscriptions usually offer access to pre-release beta versions of Microsoft software. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback. 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. The DoJ had “changed data request rules on alerting the Internet users about agencies accessing their information.” In April 2016, the company sued the U.S. government, argued that secrecy orders were preventing the company from disclosing warrants to customers in violation of the company’s and customers’ rights.