best meaning of best in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English LDOCE

A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the corporation runs several programs that facilitate the sharing of such information with the U.S. government. The cuts affected multiple divisions, including Xbox, with 830 positions eliminated at its Redmond, Washington headquarters. In July 2025, Microsoft announced another round of layoffs, cutting approximately 9,000 employees in its largest workforce reduction in over two years. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra and chief design officer Allen Adham also resigned.
Criticism of Microsoft has followed various aspects of its products and business practices, including surveillance of employees, « Velvet Sweatshop » practices, tax manipulation, and antitrust violations. Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer, said the layoffs were not the result of employees being replaced by AI, but acknowledged that AI is changing how work is done. Amid the layoffs, Microsoft also closed its office in Pakistan and laid off its employees there as part of its move toward a software-as-a-service and AI operating model. In June 2024, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 1,000 employees from the company’s mixed reality and Azure cloud computing divisions. On October 7, Microsoft acquired Ally.io, a software service that measures companies’ progress against OKRs, planning to incorporate it into its Viva family of employee experience products. The public cloud computing platform provides access to quantum software and quantum hardware including trapped ion, neutral atom, and superconducting systems.
Additional offices are located in Bellevue and Issaquah, Washington (90,000 employees worldwide). It is estimated to encompass over 8 million ft2 (750,000 m2) of office space and 30,000–40,000 employees. 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.

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  • Blizzard president Mike Ybarra and chief design officer Allen Adham also resigned.
  • Baker stated « The new logo, in Helvetica italic typeface, has a slash between the o and s to emphasize the « soft » part of the name and convey motion and speed ».
  • Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro.
  • Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business using their skills in computer programming.
  • Microsoft is an outspoken opponent of the cap on H-1B visas, which allows companies in the U.S. to employ certain foreign workers.

In June 2022, Microsoft published the report on Russian cyber attacks and concluded that state-backed Russian hackers « have engaged in « strategic espionage » against governments, think tanks, businesses and aid groups » in 42 countries supporting Kyiv. 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. Microsoft’s logo with the tagline « Your potential. Our passion. »—below the main corporate name—is based on a slogan Microsoft used in 2008.

2014: Windows 8/8.1, Xbox One, Outlook.com, and Surface devices

  • In June 2024, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 1,000 employees from the company’s mixed reality and Azure cloud computing divisions.
  • The increased necessity for remote work and distance education drove demand for cloud computing and grew the company’s gaming sales.
  • The program authorizes the government to secretly access data of non-US citizens hosted by American companies without a warrant.
  • 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.
  • The Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, a report of how progressive the organization deems company policies towards LGBT employees, rated Microsoft as 87% from 2002 to 2004 and as 100% from 2005 to 2010 after it allowed gender expression.

Most notably provides the Azure cloud computing platform, Microsoft SQL Server database software, and Visual Studio. Its flagship hardware products are the Surface lineup of PCs and the Xbox brand of video game consoles, the latter including the Xbox network. Its best-known software products are the grattiano Windows line of operating systems and the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, which most notably include the Word word processor, Excel spreadsheet editor, and PowerPoint presentation program. Microsoft has been dominant in the IBM PC–compatible operating system and office software suite markets since the 1990s.

2011: Microsoft Azure, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Microsoft Stores

This inquiry was part of broader efforts by the U.S. government to enforce guidelines on the power of major tech companies. In November 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched an investigation into Microsoft, focusing on potential antitrust violations related to its cloud computing, AI, and cybersecurity businesses. The program authorizes the government to secretly access data of non-US citizens hosted by American companies without a warrant.
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. In the same month, Microsoft acquired Australia-based video editing software company Clipchamp. The increased necessity for remote work and distance education drove demand for cloud computing and grew the company’s gaming sales. In May 2018, Microsoft partnered with 17 American intelligence agencies to develop cloud computing products.

In August 1977, the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office of ASCII Microsoft. Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business using their skills in computer programming. Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023 Among the company’s business segments, second-quarter sales for aeronautics, which includes the F-35 fighter jet, rose 9.3% to $8.11 billion, besting the FactSet consensus of $7.61 billion.
Microsoft is ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; and it was the world’s largest software maker by revenue in 2022 according to Forbes Global 2000. Microsoft also confirmed that its Maia 200 AI accelerator, first revealed in January 2026, had entered production deployment in data centers in Iowa and Arizona, powering workloads including Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 models. At Microsoft Build 2026 in June 2026, Microsoft announced the preview availability of Azure Cobalt 200 virtual machines, its second-generation Arm-based custom CPU, offering up to 135% better performance for cloud database workloads and 50% overall CPU performance improvement over the previous generation Cobalt 100. On 9 March 2026, Microsoft unveiled the Copilot Cowork tool, which is based on Claude Cowork, tapping into the growing demand for autonomous agents.

Microsoft is an outspoken opponent of the cap on H-1B visas, which allows companies in the U.S. to employ certain foreign workers. Noted for its internal lexicon, the expression « eating your own dog food » is used to describe the policy of using pre-release and beta versions of products inside Microsoft to test them in « real-world » situations. Microsoft noted in a blog post that the attack might have been prevented if the accounts in question had enabled multi-factor authentication, a defensive measure which is widely recommended in the industry, including by Microsoft itself. 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. In December 2013, the company made a statement to further emphasize that it takes its customers’ privacy and data protection very seriously, saying that « government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’ alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks ».