On December 6, 2007, FASA founder Jordan Weisman announced that his new venture, Smith & Tinker, had licensed the electronic gaming rights to MechWarrior, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies from Microsoft.

In 1983, Microsoft announced the development of Windows, a graphical user interface ( GUI ) for its own operating system ( MS-DOS ), which had shipped for IBM PC and compatible computers since 1981.

Microsoft announced at the conference its intentions to develop a successor to both Windows NT and Windows 3. 1's replacement ( Windows 95, codenamed Chicago ), which would unify the two into one operating system.

Microsoft announced that they have discontinued the separate release of WinFS for Windows XP and Windows Vista and will gradually incorporate the technologies developed for WinFS in other products and technologies, notably Microsoft SQL Server.

At the Professional Developers Conference ( PDC ) 2008, Microsoft also announced Windows Server 2008 R2, as the server variant of Windows 7.

Both Red Hat and Microsoft announced plans to drop Itanium support in their operating systems due to lack of market interest ; although, other Linux distributions such as Debian remain available for Itanium.

Microsoft announced the Cairo project in 1991 ; the Cairo specification included similar object-oriented user interface features for a coming consumer version of Windows NT.

Similarly, Microsoft announced Language Integrated Query ( LINQ ) and DLINQ, an implementation of LINQ, in September 2005, to provide close, language-integrated database query capabilities with its programming languages C # and VB. NET 9.

In February 2011 Nokia announced its decision to drop Symbian technologies and base their future smartphones on Microsoft platform instead.

On 5 January 2010, a senior manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft announced on his official blog that Microsoft had just requested to join the SVG Working Group of the W3C in order to " take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users ," although no plans for SVG support in Internet Explorer were mentioned at that time.

When TrueType and the license to Microsoft was announced, John Warnock of Adobe gave an impassioned speech in which he claimed Apple and Microsoft were selling snake oil, and then announced that the Type 1 format was open for anyone to use.

On October 27, 1998, Microsoft announced that the name of the final version of the operating system would be Windows 2000, a name which referred to its projected release date.

It would have consisted of all Keen games packaged together for Microsoft Windows and Pocket PC, but it never got out of the planning stages, and was never even officially announced.

On April 16, 2012, Microsoft announced that Windows Media Player would not be included in Windows RT, the line of Windows designed to run on ARM based devices.

On January 12, 2006 Microsoft announced it had ceased development of Windows Media Player for Mac.

In 2009, Nigeria's EFCC announced that they have adopted smart technology developed by Microsoft to track down fraudulent emails.

Nonetheless, on January 11, 1995, Microsoft announced that it had licensed the Mosaic technology from Spyglass, which it would use to create Internet Explorer.

At the 2008 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft announced Azure Services Platform, a cloud-based operating system which Microsoft is developing.

In November, 2010, TurboHercules announced that it had received an investment from Microsoft Corporation.

On March 11, 1997, id Software released WinQuake, a version of the non-OpenGL engine designed to run under Microsoft Windows ; the original Quake had been written for DOS, allowing for launch from Windows 95, but could not run under Windows NT-based operating systems because it required direct access to hardware.

Steven Anthony " Steve " Ballmer ( born March 24, 1956 ) is an American businessman who currently serves as the CEO of Microsoft, having held that post since January 2000., his personal wealth is estimated at $ 15. 7 billion, ranking number 19 on the Forbes 400.

March 20, 1991, Microsoft adopted " Quick Basic " to Ruby Shell.

Worms was released on March 7, 2007 at a cost of 800 Microsoft points ($ 10 USD /£ 7 ) but is now 400 points to purchase.

* March 24 – Steve Ballmer, American CEO of Microsoft

Soldier of Fortune ( also known as SoF ) is a first-person shooter game created by Raven Software and published by Activision on March 27, 2000 for Microsoft Windows.

* Vanity Fair: " The Man who ate Microsoft " by David Margolick, March 2000

In March 2004, the European Commission in the European Union Microsoft antitrust case fined Microsoft € 497 million and ordered the company to provide a version of Windows without Windows Media Player, claiming Microsoft " broke European Union competition law by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems onto the markets for work group server operating systems and for media players ".

Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product, released in March 1995, although widely publicised prior to that date under the codename " Utopia ", which provided a new, non-technical interface to desktop computing operations.

David Neil Cutler, Sr. ( born March 13, 1942 ) is an American software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including RSX-11M, VMS and VAXELN at Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows NT at Microsoft.

Microsoft has not published any materials regarding NGSCB on their MSDN site since March 2004, and none of the principal features described in the existing NGSCB materials have appeared in the two major versions of Windows since 2004 ( Windows Vista and Windows 7 ).

The magazine was created as a merger between the Microsoft Systems Journal ( MSJ ) and Microsoft Internet Developer ( MIND ) magazines in March 2000.

The European Commission, in its March 24, 2004 decision on Microsoft's business practices, quotes, in paragraph 463, Microsoft general manager for C ++ development Aaron Contorer as stating in a February 21, 1997 internal Microsoft memo drafted for Bill Gates:

IBM and Microsoft parted ways — MS-DOS 6 was released in March, and PC DOS 6. 1 ( separately developed ) followed in June.

HP announced plans on March 2011 for a version of webOS by the end of 2011 to run within the Microsoft Windows operating system to be used in HP desktop and notebook computers in 2012.

This was followed in 2006 by GameSpot ’ s report on March 20 that Transmeta was working on an “ unnamed ” Microsoft project.

The issues of February and March 2004 contained advertisements by Microsoft in a " social " atmosphere with a picture of children, which led to agitation.

Rosen attended the March 2012 state dinner with her lobbying client John Kelly of Microsoft.

* March 26: The Melissa worm was released, targeting Microsoft Word and Outlook-based systems, and creating considerable network traffic.

* March 7: Mylife ( computer worm ) is a computer worm that spread itself by sending malicious emails to all the contacts in Microsoft Outlook.

Software can be quite a profitable industry: Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft was the richest person in the world in 2009 largely by selling the Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office software products.

After sixteen years, Microsoft discontinued the Encarta line of products in 2009.

For advocating Microsoft technologies, de Icaza was criticized by Richard Stallman on the Software Freedom Day 2009 as " Traitor to the Free Software Community ".

On June 15, 2009, THQ released Red Faction: Guerrilla, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Windows.

For Microsoft Windows systems, the average selling price ( ASP ) showed a decline in 2008 / 2009, possibly due to low-cost Netbooks, drawing $ 569 at U. S. retail in August 2008.

LucasArts released a remake with updated audiovisuals titled The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition in July 2009 for iPhone, Microsoft Windows, and Xbox 360 exclusively via download.

IDC's Worldwide Database Management Systems 2009 – 2013 Forecast and 2008 Vendor Shares ranks Oracle database as the leader in DBMS marketing share, followed by IBM DB2 and then Microsoft SQL Server.

In January 2009, it was reported by PCWorld that Microsoft closed down the ACES Game Studio, which was the department responsible for creating and maintaining the flight simulator series.

On January 22, 2009, it was reported that the development team was heavily affected by Microsoft's ongoing job cuts, with indications that the entire Microsoft Flight Simulator team had been laid off.

Microsoft confirmed the closure of the ACES studio on January 26, 2009, in a post on the official FSInsider Web site.

In 2009, 2010 Lockheed Martin announced that they had negotiated with Microsoft to purchase the intellectual property ( including source code ) for the Microsoft ESP product.

Microsoft launched an application store for Windows Mobile called Windows Marketplace for Mobile in October 2009, and then a separate Windows Phone Marketplace for Windows Phone in October 2010.

In 2009, researchers from Microsoft and North Carolina State University demonstrated a hypervisor-layer anti-rootkit called Hooksafe, which provides generic protection against kernel-mode rootkits.

On February 14, 2009, Many Faces of Go running on a 32-core Xeon cluster provided by Microsoft won against James Kerwin ( 1p ) with a handicap of seven stones.

Microsoft announced in April 2009 that Microsoft Agent support will be discontinued after Windows 7.

In September 2009, Bell and Microsoft Canada have decided to rename the Sympatico. msn. ca website to simply Sympatico. ca instead.

*" Gérard Bessette ," Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2009 ( Archived 2009-10-31 )

* Mass Effect series ( starting with Mass Effect 2, the first game was published by Microsoft )( 2009 –) by BioWare

In 2009, Kingsoft Office 2009 was released which has increased compatibility with Microsoft Office including support for the 2007 version file formats.