Fifty years in the past, Invoice Gates and his childhood buddy Paul Allen based an organization known as “Micro-Tender” in a strip mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Half a century later, the corporate has cemented its place amongst tech giants and ranks because the world’s second-largest firm. Presently, the one firm with the next market cap is Apple, maker of the ever present iPhone.

Whereas Microsoft is reflecting on its previous successes in honor of its 50-year anniversary this April, together with Gates sharing the corporate’s authentic supply code, the tech large can be hustling to safe its place among the many leaders of the synthetic intelligence revolution. After largely lacking the boat on smartphones and the shift to cell gadgets, Microsoft is hoping to keep away from a repeat of this error and as an alternative dominate the fields of cloud computing and generative AI.

Microsoft nonetheless dominates workplace software program and working programs

Microsoft’s Home windows working system — initially known as MS-DOS — runs nearly all of the world’s computer systems. The corporate additionally made a reputation for itself by dominating the workplace software program market, and it nonetheless reigns supreme immediately.

As soon as obtainable on floppy disks after which CDs, the software program can now be downloaded on any system because of the ability of cloud computing. Though its fundamental competitor Google Docs is free for a lot of to make use of, Microsoft Workplace merchandise stay the usual for many workplaces all over the world.

Makes an attempt to diversify weren’t all the time residence runs

The corporate has made strikes to diversify past workplace software program and working programs all through the years. For instance, Microsoft launched Xbox consoles in 2001, launched the Bing search engine in 2009, and bought the LinkedIn social media web site in 2016.

Regardless of these strikes, Microsoft’s services and products usually lag behind its rivals. PlayStations outnumber Xboxes nearly two to 1, Google Search continues to dominate Bing, and different social media web sites like Fb, Instagram, and YouTube outperform LinkedIn.

Microsoft now bids on AI and cloud computing

Microsoft is now working laborious to future-proof its tech legacy via cloud computing and synthetic intelligence. Its cloud platform Microsoft Azure is at the moment the second-largest by market share, although Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) nonetheless leads by a large margin, and Google Cloud can be gaining in reputation.

The corporate has additionally made vital strikes to strengthen its AI choices. It invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI again in 2019, and over time has invested a complete of $14 billion. Microsoft has additionally developed its personal in-house AI instruments, akin to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Nevertheless, the tech large lacks its personal proprietary silicon chips and depends on different firms to provide these important AI mannequin parts. It stays to be seen whether or not Microsoft’s different AI investments might be sufficient to uphold its legacy for one more 50 years — or if it’s going to fall behind different AI firms.