Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Microsoft will officially hit the half-century mark on Friday as the Windows giant turns 50 years old. What do you consider the highs and lows of the company's journey to dominance?

In addition to its successes, the House of Bill has also encountered numerous gaffes and missteps along the way. For every Windows 3.0 and 3.1, there is a Microsoft Bob and Windows 8.

There was a time when Microsoft's wares were nearly impossible to avoid. MS-DOS and then Windows were ubiquitous. Although the megacorp's strategy with Windows Mobile and Windows Phone ceded the smartphone market to rivals, Microsoft still dominates the enterprise with its productivity suite despite some spirited efforts from Google and others.

Selecting milestones and millstones for the Redmond-based biz is tricky since there are so many. The operating systems would have to take prominence, as well as the productivity applications. Also worth noting are the programming languages. Although Microsoft did not invent BASIC, its particular dialect proved popular.

Then there are bets on the cloud and, most recently, its investments in artificial intelligence. We asked the company's chatbot, Copilot, for its take on Microsoft's achievements, and it suggested the acquisitions of GitHub and LinkedIn. The multibillion-dollar purchase of Nokia, on the other hand, was on Copilot's list of mistakes, and rightly so.

Other mistakes included underestimating Google's browser, Chrome, which outpaced Microsoft's Internet Explorer in innovation, as well as the iPod rival, Zune. Cruelly, Copilot also said that Windows Vista was not one of Microsoft's finest hours.

Then again, it also told us there were 25 years in a half-century:

However, it is the users who deal most directly with the impact of Microsoft's decisions. This hack's journey began with Microsoft's take on BASIC and progressed through various CONFIG.SYS settings (to persuade certain applications to work on MS-DOS systems), then a job offer to work on software support for something called "Microsoft Access" before culminating with a jaunt through Microsoft's servers and cloud.

So, how have the last 50 years been for you? Are you in Team Clippy, or has Microsoft's recent AI push left its earlier achievements or failures in the shade? Let us know in the comments below. ®