The 50 best things Microsoft has ever made
This week, on April 4th, Microsoft turns 50 years old. The company has gone through sweeping changes over that time — from two guys in New Mexico to more than a quarter-million employees worldwide, from making text-based operating systems to holographic video games — but through the decades, it’s remained a foundation of the tech world.
Microsoft has made a lot of products over its 50 years, ranging from file formats and PC accessories to cloud servers and design languages. A great many were duds — it’s hard to nail everything over five decades — but a lot were memorable, fascinating, or simply excellent products that would go on to be used by billions of people or change the industry in their wake.
For Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, The Verge spent time sorting through all of those products to decide on the 50 best — the ones we loved, the ones that changed the tech world, or at least the ones we couldn’t get out of our heads.
Our general rule was this: everything on the list had to be a consumer product or otherwise something consumers engaged with. (Sorry, Azure.) The specific version we mention also has to have been made or published by Microsoft at the time of i …