The company is often referred to as a „Velvet Sweatshop“, a term which originated in a 1989 Seattle Times article, and later became used to describe the company by some of Microsoft’s own employees. Historically, Microsoft has also been accused of overworking employees, in many cases, leading to burnout within just a few years of joining the company. The company has also been criticized for the use of permatemp employees (employees employed for years as „temporary“, and therefore without medical benefits), the use of forced retention tactics, which means that employees would be sued if they tried to leave.
To cope with the potential for an increase in demand for products and services, Microsoft opened a number of „holiday stores“ across the U.S. to complement the increasing number of „bricks-and-mortar“ Microsoft Stores that opened in 2012. The Surface was unveiled in June 2012, becoming the first computer in the company’s history to have its hardware made by Microsoft. Other companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM and Lotus, being much slower to adapt to the new situation, would give Microsoft market dominance. With a few exceptions of new companies, like Netscape, Microsoft was the only major and established company that acted fast enough to be a part of the World Wide Web practically from the start.

• In February 2019, hundreds of Microsoft employees protested what they termed war profiteering by the company from its $480 million contract to develop virtual reality headsets for the United States Army.
• In June 2024, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 1,000 employees from the company’s mixed reality and Azure cloud computing divisions.
• In March 2026, Microsoft-controlled discussion forums banned the nickname Microslop, used to express pushback against Microsoft’s Copilot-based and GenAI efforts.
• The cuts affected multiple divisions, including Xbox, with 830 positions eliminated at its Redmond, Washington headquarters.
• It created one of the world’s largest private bus systems, the „Connector“, to transport people from outside the company; for on-campus transportation, the „Shuttle Connect“ uses a large fleet of hybrid cars to save fuel.

The company is run by a board of directors made up of mostly company outsiders, as is customary for publicly traded companies. Microsoft is ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; and it was the world’s largest software maker by revenue in 2022 according to Forbes Global 2000. Microsoft also confirmed that its Maia 200 AI accelerator, first revealed in January 2026, had entered production deployment in data centers in Iowa and Arizona, powering workloads including Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 models. At Microsoft Build 2026 in June 2026, Microsoft announced the preview availability of Azure Cobalt 200 virtual machines, its second-generation Arm-based custom CPU, offering up to 135% better performance for cloud database workloads and 50% overall CPU performance improvement over the previous generation Cobalt 100.

1994: Windows and Office

• Other companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM and Lotus, being much slower to adapt to the new situation, would give Microsoft market dominance.
• In the same month, Microsoft announced the open source implementation of Windows Forms and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which will allow for further movement of the company toward the transparent release of key frameworks used in developing Windows desktop applications and software.
• Microsoft provides information about reported bugs in its software to intelligence agencies of the United States government, prior to the public release of the fix.
• A Big Tech company, Microsoft is the largest software company by revenue, one of the most valuable public companies, and one of the most valuable brands globally.
• The company has also been criticized for the use of permatemp employees (employees employed for years as „temporary“, and therefore without medical benefits), the use of forced retention tactics, which means that employees would be sued if they tried to leave.

In December 2013, the company made a statement to further emphasize that it takes its customers‘ privacy and data protection very seriously, saying that „government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‚advanced persistent threat,‘ alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks“. A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the corporation runs several programs that facilitate the sharing of such information with the U.S. government. The cuts affected multiple divisions, including Xbox, with 830 positions eliminated at its Redmond, Washington headquarters. In July Very Well 2025, Microsoft announced another round of layoffs, cutting approximately 9,000 employees in its largest workforce reduction in over two years. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra and chief design officer Allen Adham also resigned.

2011: Microsoft Azure, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Microsoft Stores

Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro. However, the plan was short-lived, as Altman was subsequently reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO and Brockman rejoined the company amid pressure from OpenAI’s employees and investors on its board. The service includes Copilot, a GPT-4 based large language model tool to query and visualize data, write code, initiate simulations, and educate researchers. In January 2023, CEO Satya Nadella announced Microsoft would lay off 10,000 employees.
The layoffs primarily affected Activision Blizzard employees, but some Xbox and ZeniMax employees were also affected. In November 2018, the company won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring augmented reality (AR) headset technology into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers. Consequently, in February 2011 Microsoft released a corporate bond amounting to $2.25 billion with relatively low borrowing rates compared to government bonds.

1994: Windows and Office

When the Internal Revenue Service audited these transactions, ProPublica reported that Microsoft aggressively fought back, including successfully lobbying Congress to change the law to make it harder for the agency to conduct audits of large corporations. Dame Margaret Hodge, a Labour MP in the UK said, „It is unsurprising – yet still shocking – that massively wealthy global corporations openly, unashamedly and blatantly refuse to pay tax on the profits they make in the countries where they undertake business“. This is due to the company being tax resident in Bermuda as mentioned in the accounts for ‚Microsoft Round Island One, a subsidiary that collects license fees from the use of Microsoft software worldwide. As reported by several news outlets, an Irish subsidiary of Microsoft based in the Republic of Ireland declared £220 bn in profits but paid no corporation tax for the year 2020. This characterization is derived from the perception that Microsoft provides nearly everything for its employees in a convenient place, but in turn overworks them to a point where it would be bad for their (possibly long-term) health.

2011: Microsoft Azure, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Microsoft Stores

Noted for its internal lexicon, the expression „eating your own dog food“ is used to describe the policy of using pre-release and beta versions of products inside Microsoft to test them in „real-world“ situations. Microsoft noted in a blog post that the attack might have been prevented if the accounts in question had enabled multi-factor authentication, a defensive measure which is widely recommended in the industry, including by Microsoft itself. The group, accessed „a very small percentage“ of Microsoft corporate email accounts, which also included members of its senior leadership team and employees in its cybersecurity and legal teams.