# Microsoft US software company founded 4 April 1975 in Albuquerque by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, now headquartered in Redmond, WA. CEO: Satya Nadella (since February 2014). ~228,000 employees, ~$281.7B revenue (2025), regularly trades top global market-cap with Apple. Atomic hub note — link out to specific units rather than reading this for depth. ## Business segments worth knowing - **Cloud** — Microsoft Azure; primary growth engine, the substrate for everything AI-related below - **Productivity** — Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook) - **OS** — Windows (consumer + enterprise) - **Developer** — Visual Studio, GitHub (acquired 2018), TypeScript, .NET - **AI products** — Copilot family (GPT-4-class models integrated across surfaces), Azure AI Foundry, custom silicon (Maia for language models, Cobalt CPU) - **AI partnership** — multi-year, multi-billion dollar deal with [[OpenAI]] (primary backer; Azure is OpenAI's exclusive cloud) - **Enterprise** — LinkedIn (acquired 2016), Dynamics 365 - **Gaming** — Xbox, Game Pass, Activision Blizzard ## AI-relevant arms to track separately - **[[Microsoft Research]]** — fundamental research lab; ships [[Webwright]], [[Phi]] models, healthcare AI, materials science work - **GitHub** — Copilot (the productized agent surface), Codespaces, the developer platform - **Azure** — the inference/training infrastructure most AI startups quietly run on ## Why it matters for PKM / agent work The most relevant Microsoft outputs for personal-knowledge-work and agentic coding are GitHub (Copilot, the open-source layer), Microsoft Research papers, and Azure as the under-the-hood platform for many AI products. Treat the Microsoft hub as a router to those. ## References - Website: https://www.microsoft.com/ - Microsoft Research: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft ## Related - [[Microsoft Research]] - [[OpenAI]] - [[Webwright]]