Microsoft is 50 years old, and the company has a lot to show for its first half century. Just about everyone can rattle off its most significant inventions. If you ever use a screen, there’s a strong chance you’re using one of its products or services. Office. Azure. Xbox. Surface. And, of course, good old (inescapable and implacable) Windows. All of that helps make Microsoft the third most valuable company in the world (worth $3.11 trillion, according to Investopedia) as of this writing.
Still, even trillion-dollar companies can’t turn everything into gold. Microsoft came up with plenty of splashy ideas over the decades. Some of those creations hung around for years, decades even, and helped make the company the industry behemoth it is today. A few completely changed computing as we know it.
But many didn’t last. We moved on. And we have pretty much forgotten them.
Here are Microsoft 10 innovations that helped move technology forward. Maybe you recall them fondly and believe they went too soon. Perhaps you think some of this tech overstayed its welcome. Or you don’t remember them at all. Let’s take a look back as we head into the company’s next half-century.
Did we miss some fantastic, forgotten Microsoft innovation? Let us know in the comments below.
MS-DOS (1981-2000)
(Credit: Microsoft)
The first forgotten breakthrough comes with a lot of caveats. Microsoft didn’t create the first disk operating system (DOS), which lets users access files on a storage disk. It wasn’t even the first to use the DOS acronym.
But it became the most famous and influential DOS of them all.
That leads to another little caveat: Microsoft’s world-changing DOS wasn’t even initially developed at Microsoft. You can read the full story of the rise of DOS here. Microsoft snapped it up for $50,000 in 1981 (a little under $175,000 today, with 2025 inflation), though some reports put the figure at $75,000.
The first ever Microsoft advertisment in PC Magazine featured MS-DOS. (Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Why buy DOS? Microsoft needed to supply an operating system to IBM, which was about to launch the personal computing revolution. (It begat PC Magazine and more.) That move alone would have cemented Microsoft’s place in the history of software development. However, the license it arranged with IBM was non-exclusive. In other words, Microsoft could provide MS-DOS to as many PC manufacturers as desired. That proved to be another industry-changer, if not a world-changer. Licensing operating systems to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) has been Microsoft’s bread and butter ever since.
MS-DOS uses a command-line interface, where you type all the commands. It proved durable enough to power the first several years of Windows underneath the surface. (You can still find the interface in Windows 11; just type CMD into the taskbar search box.) Microsoft issued eight versions of the OS through 2000, with the last two underpinning Windows 95/98/Me.
Putting it simply: Without DOS, there would have been no Windows. And indeed, without MS-DOS, there would be no Microsoft as we know it.
Microsoft Encarta (1993-2009)
(Credit: Microsoft)
Once upon a time, if you wanted easy access to all world knowledge (or at least a big chunk of it), you had to have a complete encyclopedia set on a bookshelf. Microsoft blew that notion out of the water by making the encyclopedia a searchable multimedia experience available on CD-ROM.
Cramming all that information onto a disc was allegedly a pet project for Bill Gates. In the 1980s, Microsoft tried to partner with Encyclopædia Britannica, but the venerable publisher rejected the notion of moving from print to disc. Then EB took the step by itself, and others like Grolier and Compton followed suit. So Microsoft launched a project, code-named Gandalf, teaming up with Funk & Wagnalls; the result, launched in 1993, was Encarta. Initial cost: $395 (close to $900 today). At the launch, PC Magazine wrote, “Microsoft Encarta is to encyclopedias what Excel is to spreadsheets. Its handsome interface makes Encarta one of the best-looking products ever beamed across a VGA monitor.”
The price soon dropped to $99 and went as low as $80. Thus began the so-called “encyclopedia wars” during the decade of the CD-ROM. In December 1997, we reviewed no fewer than seven of these disc-based compendiums. Microsoft won the war by undercutting everyone else’s price, even bundling Encarta discs with PCs, and producing regional versions in multiple languages. By the late 1990s, the data in Encarta came from Collier’s and others, as well as original partner Funk & Wagnalls—all of which soon gave up printing encyclopedias.
PC Magazine’s mega-review of CD-ROM enclopedias from 1997. (Credit: PCMag)
Times changed. In 2000, Microsoft had to put Encarta online to keep up with user needs, but it kept the CDs going until the end. It tried to convert Encarta into an online subscription service with a subset of free stuff for all. Not surprisingly, as traffic and sales flagged, Microsoft lost interest and handed off maintenance to another company. In 2009, it shut the doors on Encarta for good. And it did so without ever mentioning Wikipedia—the open-source site that created a new vision of what an online encyclopedia could be. In the end, Encarta topped out at 62,000 articles, compared with Wikipedia’s 3 million at the time. Today, the site has 6.9 million, and that’s just in English.
Internet Explorer (1995-2022)
(Credit: Microsoft)
Thirty years ago, the capital-I “Internet” was a novelty to many people. As was another bit of jargon: “World Wide Web.” Many considered America Online the only way to get connected. Not everyone had an email address.
It was a market ripe for exploitation. Microsoft got into the game with the Internet Jumpstart Kit, part of a set of add-on goodies called the Plus! for Windows 95 pack. Inside that, as of August 1995, was Internet Explorer (IE), a reworked version of Spyglass Mosaic. Microsoft was ready to take on Netscape, the browser powerhouse at the time.
Buried in our multi-page coverage of Windows 95 is this coverage of the debut of IE. (Credit: PCMag)
IE did it all, like supporting CSS and other standards for displaying webpages. It was, for a time, the default browser on what was then called “Mac OS.” (Why? The arrangement was a small part of the deal between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs that saved Apple in the late 1990s.) By 2003, IE was a behemoth, accounting for 93% of the users on the web.
Because of that user base, supporting IE became all-important in the advent of Web 2.0, as visiting websites for information gave way to using sites as full-fledged productivity applications. Corporations spent billions on the IE-compatibility effort.
Being big brings big risks. IE’s advantages also made it easier for malware makers to go on the attack via the browser. Fixing that would have broken many systems, so Microsoft had to keep chugging along, and IE gained an unfavorable reputation. Soon, market share eroded. Google Chrome slowly grew to dominance (and maintains it today), while IE became a laughing stock and an also-ran. You can read more about the downfall in our farewell to Internet Explorer.
MSN TV (1996-2013)
In 2007, as part of PC Magazine’s 25th anniversary, writer Cade Metz wrote about Steve Perlman, who had a dream of interactive TV long before it was possible. The advent of the internet made it possible. Perlman launched a company with a set-top box, both called WebTV, that let people go online with their televisions, and 150,000 people snapped it up. Microsoft did too, buying WebTV for over half a billion dollars, which it made back over the next decade. Microsoft renamed it MSN TV in 2001 and put out Version 2 in 2004. Hook up MSN TV to a modem (dial-up or broadband), and subscribers (paying $9.95 per month or $99.95 per year) could surf, message, and view media on the couch, in front of the TV.
The advent of MSN-TV 2.0 was announced in PC Magazine’s special Autum 2004 issue. (Credit: PCMag)
The service survived 18 years, one of the few 1990s “thin client terminal” services for consumers to do so (sorry, Network Computer). Eventually Microsoft’s attention wandered to other living-room solutions like Xbox; plus, media streamers and smartphones were taking over. The service was shut down on September 30, 2013.
Pocket PC (1998-2007)
Was the Pocket PC the first computer you could put in a pocket? No. Palm, the first personal digital assistant (PDA), beat it by a couple of years. Microsoft wasn’t even the first company to use the name “Pocket PC.” (For the uninitiated, think of a PDA as a smartphone without the phone. To interact with one, you usually used a stylus. You had to learn a whole new way to write to use it.)
Palm devices were popular enough for Microsoft to jump on the PDA bandwagon with the Palm-size PC (PsPC). As usual, Microsoft supplied the operating system—Windows CE—while hardware manufacturers tried to create devices that would make people want it.
PC Magazine ran a prominent feature in August 1999 on this new paradigm of “Connect Anywhere” computing. (Credit: PCMag)
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Microsoft went with the name Pocket PC in 2000 as HP, Casio, and Compaq issued devices running Windows CE 3.0. Microsoft unveiled the lineup in an event at Grand Central Station and at the Chicago version of Comdex, a trade show that was the CES of its day. The release was seen as a do-or-die move for Microsoft if it wanted to be a serious player in mobile computing.
This November 2000 advertisement in PC Magazine featured Pocket PC. (Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Pocket PC devices were priced higher than Palm devices, but they had color screens, early Wi-Fi, and even mini versions of the IE browser. Data synchronization between the Pocket PC and desktop apps was another key selling point. Pocket PC 2002 came out a couple of years later, some as “phone editions,” so they could be more than just a PDA, some with GPS. Manufacturers over the years included the three listed above plus Acer, Asus, Dell, HTC, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, and even ViewSonic. Some devices tried full physical keyboards to compete with BlackBerry. Pocket PC’s popularity grew so much that even Palm issued hardware running Windows CE 5.0.
The Apple iPhone came along in 2007 and changed everything. Microsoft made fun of the Apple innovation…then had to follow suit. It had already tried a title change in 2003, renaming the hardware platform to Windows Mobile. It didn’t help. Microsoft finally had to go full smartphone with Windows Phone in 2010…which, in the long run, also didn’t help. By 2014, the soon-to-be-defunct OS was renamed to Windows Phone as well. In that endless shuffle, the Pocket PC name was all but forgotten.
You can look at the streaming services that dominate entertainment today and draw a through-line back to Windows Media Center (WMC). The product shipped first in the Windows XP Media Center Edition in 2002, which sold well, and became a standard part of several editions of the Windows OS over the next decade.
Don’t confuse WMC with Windows Media Player (which is still available in Windows 11). Media Center was exactly what it sounds like: a home entertainment hub run on a PC. One of the big selling points: full digital video recorder (DVR) options for saving TV programs, the kind of thing made famous by TiVo at the turn of the century. If you had dual TV-tuner cards installed in your PC, WMC could even record two shows simultaneously. It could also show slideshows, play music, and play back DVDs. For many, it was the core of a growing media library. PCMag devoted a cover to making media center PCs in late 2004, with a line reading “Toss Your TiVo!” One analyst said in 2005, “It should become the consumer face of Windows.”
The cover of PC Magazine in November 2004 featured media centers. (Credit: PCMag)
But WMC, like TiVo, couldn’t keep up with internet-based DVRs or streaming, so Microsoft pulled the plug. The company killed WMC as a Windows 8 option in 2012; if users upgraded systems that had WMC to Windows 10, the update deleted the software outright. (A sobering reminder that you don’t really own your software, most of the time.)
People still get nostalgic about the glory days of WMC. The modern equivalents are Kodi or Plex media servers.
Smart Personal Objects Technology, aka SPOT (2002-2008)
Microsoft has a long history with watches. It introduced the Data-Link in a partnership with Timex back in the 1990s, but there wasn’t anything unique about it, except that a computer could sync data (like an address book) with the device. The PC would flash lights on the screen, which the watch sensor could then interpret.
The Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT) tech was a step up, and it wasn’t meant to be limited to just a watch, though watches were what most partners made. SPOT was an initiative to monitor everything in the house—SPOT was meant to be built into appliances and more, like clocks, even the coffee maker. It was the Internet of Things before IoT existed. Bill Gates himself introduced SPOT at the Vegas Comdex in 2002. The announcement said that by injecting software, the tech would make everything like ”clocks, pens, keychains, and billfolds…smarter, more personalized, and more useful.” What could go wrong with that?
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The first SPOT devices, announced at the 2003 CES, were all watches from names like Fossil and Suunto. They worked with a wireless service Microsoft developed called MSN Direct, which used an FM broadcast signal instead of 3G or Wi-Fi. Getting Windows Live Messenger missives over MSN Direct became a key use of a SPOT watch.
PC Magazine’s SPOT coverage began in July 2003. (Credit: PCMag)
SPOT watches stopped production in 2008, although the MSN Direct service stayed on life support until January 2012 to power them. Despite migrating MSN Direct to Windows Mobile, that service also got its plug pulled. By then, there were better ways to send data, like Wi-Fi and 3G.
Surface (2007-2013) and PixelSense (2012-2013)
You will be forgiven for never even knowing that Microsoft made an entire line of giant, touch-enabled surface-computing coffee tables. They weren’t made for you to buy. But maybe you played with one in an arcade or a lobby and didn’t even know it; casinos and hotels truly liked the idea. So did Steven Spielberg: Allegedly, the director saw one of these innovative interfaces during development and borrowed some of the ideas for Minority Report. PC Magazine gave the Surface a Technical Excellence award in 2007.
A PC Magazine opening page told the world about Surface in August 2007. (Credit: PCMag)
Surface shipped in 2008 as a 30-inch screen table-top powered by a projector that used infrared cameras to see fingers and objects for interaction. The whole thing weighed 198 pounds. The screen was 30 inches with 1,024 by 768 resolution. The point was to sit around it and play games, do work, and enjoy whatever interactivity it could support. Windows Central has an excellent take on how it aged after just one decade.
Microsoft had to change the name once its own Surface line of tablets and laptops emerged. It went with the moniker PixelSense. Samsung made one—and only one—so Microsoft could concentrate on the software platform. The cost of a PixelSense was a jaw-dropping $8,995 for the base model—another reason why it all went under so fast.
The experience lives on, somewhat, in the Surface Hub touch screens for business whiteboarding, conferencing, and collaboration. But these come upright, like a giant tablet mounted on a wall. They’re definitely not a table.
Kinect (2010-2017)
(Credit: Microsoft)
When the Nintendo Wii controller hit the market, Microsoft decided it needed its own motion-sensing gadget for Xbox. Project Natal, as it was initially dubbed, was going to be the next level in game control—no more giant joysticks and controllers. Instead, your whole body would be the input device, as you stood before a depth-sensing camera and multi-array microphone.
Made for the Microsoft Xbox 360, the original Kinect cost $150, less when bundled with the game system. A slew of family-friendly titles came out to support it—but not any names that would impress hard-core gamers. Our review called it “insanely fun” and a “great leap forward in motion gaming” with “stellar motion control.” Kinect even did voice controls before Alexa or Cortana. PCMag gave the technology an award for Technical Excellence.
But the Kinect never really took off. Microsoft tried again, pushing it with the Xbox One release in 2013, but a couple of years later, Microsoft scaled the Kinect’s capabilities back by dropping gesture controls. It slashed the price and introduced a cable to connect the controller to a Windows PC, but none of it helped. By 2016, Kinect was barely being marketed.
Microsoft ended all production of the gaming units in 2017. The technology was used in a research-oriented Azure Kinect Developer Kit product in 2019, but Microsoft eventually killed that, too. Apparently, people just don’t want to use their whole body as a controller when just fingers and thumbs while on the couch will do.
Skype Translator (2015-2025)
I won’t wax rhapsodic over Skype’s video calling, a pioneering Star Trek-esque innovation developed before Microsoft bought the company in 2011. With a price tag of $8.5 billion—$12.2 billion today—the purchase marked Microsoft’s biggest acquisition to that point. Sadly, the next 14 years didn’t go great, especially when the pandemic hit and companies like Zoom eclipsed Skype. Instead, let’s focus on one specific aspect of Skype that Microsoft got right: real-time translation.
The feature hit Skype on the desktop in 2015. It could real-time translate as many as nine spoken languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Spanish. The text-chat option could handle 50. The software had a bit of a lag, probably more than people would accept today, but it worked. In the first year after Skype previewed the tech, four times as many calls were being made on Skype.
In our final review of Skype, PCMag said, “No other service offers anything like this live translation.” This groundbreaker should have kept Skype on the map all through the pandemic.
Instead, the name synonymous with video calling—an app that once had users on it for 2 billion minutes per day—will sunset this year. However, the translation feature lives on in other products and services via the Microsoft Translator application programming interface (API)—including in Microsoft Teams, where many Skype users will get shifted. Many other players in video conferencing, such as Google and Zoom, have introduced translators of their own, too.
For more, check out our sibling site, ZDNet’s Microsoft 50th Anniversary retrospective.
About Eric Griffith
Senior Editor, Features
