Microsoft

What came to life as an idea between two childhood friends in the 1970s has become a “Tech Empire” that is a source of livelihood for around 166,475 people. The company’s net worth of one trillion dollars is a historical achievement and is hailed as one of the largest enterprises in the ranks of Amazon, Google, and more. In addition to this, Microsoft has also absorbed several platforms like LinkedIn and GitHub, fuelling the company’s overall growth.

The Hybrid Workplace

The Microsoft headquarters is located in Seattle. However, most of the employees carry out their tasks at desks located across America and from their global locations.

Most of Microsoft’s employees work remotely. This is because the co-founder Bill Gates was an avid proponent of the “Work from Home ” culture. With encouragement from Kathleen Hogan, vice president of the HR department, allowed thousands of workers to keep the job they love while also staying safe. Employees follow a “Hybrid Workplace” system where employees can work from any place with flexible schedules.

Microsoft provides excellent salaries and benefits, exciting work, and the chance to collaborate with very talented people. On the downside, there has been hearsay that work-life balance isn’t great, and there’s a lot of office politics etc which has changed over the last decade.

When Satya Nadella took charge in 2014, there was a shift in the perceptions, and Microsoft is now seen as an employee company. Nadellla stressed the importance of balancing work and personal life, which was perceived as a significant problem at Microsoft earlier. The CEO now relies heavily on a “Team” approach to run the company’s activities.

What is Microsoft up to now?

Microsoft has seen tremendous growth in revenue and the size of the company. The increase in online learning and work from home has led to education institutions and other enterprises using Microsoft products. The company now rakes in a steady 30 billion dollar revenue since 2020. The Cloud computing platform Azure, created by Microsoft, saw an increase of a whopping 62%. These numbers reflect the strength of both the engineers and the efforts of Chief Marketing Director Chris Capossela.

Microsoft is continuing to take strides in the medical field with the help of technology. In 2020, Microsoft rolled out “Covid Insights,” a website that can be used to understand the spread of the disease. This project resulted in the creation of a robot known as the Microsoft Premonition.

Scott Guthrie, the Executive Vice President of AI projects and the Microsoft Cloud, has made significant contributions in incorporating Artificial Intelligence or Smart computing into their products. For example, the Microsoft Brainwave project created the Microsoft Floating Point, which functions to lower the price of Deep Neural Network Architecture.

Microsoft is also working in the area of data security. The Election Guard Project is aimed at securing people’s votes. The project relies on homomorphic encryption to safeguard data from third parties.

The company understands the increasing difficulties of working from home and is constantly working on tools to increase productivity. These projects have now led to the ‘Together Mode’ and ‘Meditation Exercises’ built into the Microsoft Teams interface. Microsoft and its partners have expanded their portfolios to address the evolving needs of millions of consumers, students, and businesses around the world still working and learning remotely.

At Ignite 2021, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about the five attributes that will drive the next generation of innovation from the cloud:

ubiquitous and decentralized computing
sovereign data and ambient intelligence
empowered creators and communities everywhere
expanded economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce
trust by design
With innovative projects and exciting ideas, Microsoft finds itself on a good trajectory and is all set to lead the industry in the years to come.

Achievements, Awards and CSR

In 2017, the company won the International Innovation Award for its contributions to the software industry. In addition, several employees are lauded for their work in their respective fields. Rico Malwar, the Chief Scientist for Research at Microsoft, received the Amar G.Bose award at the beginning of 2020 as a recognition of his work in multimedia signal processing. The company has also been recognized for its diversity in the workforce and its empowerment of female employees. The company was number 1 in Just Capital’s list of companies. It was felicitated by the Carbon Disclosure Project for “Climate Performance Leadership.” At Microsoft the team is deeply committed to its corporate social responsibility commitment which says. “We believe that companies that can do more, should. That’s why we focus on four key areas in which technology can and must benefit the future of humanity and our planet.” Globally, nonprofits received $1.9 billion in donated or discounted technology and services and there’s more.