Microsoft at 50—still hellbent on domination

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As Microsoft turns 50, WIRED Start takes a look at how, for years, people counted the company out. Then Satya Nadella took control and it became more relevant— and scarier—than ever.

Jaime Teevan joined Microsoft before it was cool again.

Once she had completed her doctorate in artificial intelligence at MIT, Teevan had many career options, but was drawn to Microsoft’s respected, somewhat ivory-tower-ish research division.

Teevan remained at Microsoft while the mother ship blundered its way through the mobile era. Then, as the calendar flipped into the 2010s, an earth-shattering tech advance emerged. A method of artificial intelligence called deep learning was proving to be a powerful enhancement to software products. Google, Facebook, and others went on a tear to hire machine-learning researchers. Not so much Microsoft. “I don’t remember it like a frenzy,” Teevan says. “I don’t remember drama.” That was a problem. Microsoft’s focus remained largely on milking its cash cows, Windows and Office.

In 2014, Microsoft surprised people by promoting the ultimate company man, Satya Nadella, to CEO. Nadella had spent 22 years pulling himself up the ranks with his smarts and drive. And his likability. The latter trait was a rarity at the company. Nadella knew its culture intimately, and he knew he had to change it. Three years later, Teevan became Nadella’s third technical adviser—and the first to have a background in AI. Then she became chief scientist, and her task was to imbue the company’s products with the AI of the time. In 2019, Nadella made the bold decision to spend $1 billion to partner with OpenAI.

Then, late in the summer of 2022, she was invited to a demo of OpenAI’s latest large language model, GPT-4. Teevan wasn’t blown away. She knew how to break LLMs with requests that would expose the system as a sophisticated word jumbler. So she put it through its paces. The result? She was stunned. Not just by the way GPT-4 handled problems, but by its self-awareness. She hadn’t expected that kind of a performance for years, if not decades. Teevan knew what she had to do. OpenAI may have created GPT-4, but her employer had the rights to exclusively build it into its products—and could beat its fellow tech titans at the most pivotal moment since the arrival of the internet itself.

A year and a half later, for the first time in its nearly 50 years, Microsoft became worth $3 trillion.

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