Microsoft@50 recap: Company faithful mark first 50 years and look to future at GeekWire event

Longtime Microsoft employees, key executives, company faithful and tech community members celebrated the tech giant’s 50th anniversary Thursday night in Seattle during Microsoft@50, a GeekWire event to mark the company milestone.

Hundreds of people turned out at Town Hall to mingle and share stories about where they were, who they knew and what they worked on over the years at the Redmond, Wash.-based company.

Attendees included pivotal figures from Microsoft’s past and present: David Marquardt, Microsoft’s first investor and former board member; Steve Wood, employee No. 6 from its Albuquerque days; former Windows chiefs Terry Myerson and Steven Sinofsky; former Office and Windows engineering leader Julie Larson-Green; former Xbox chief Robbie Bach; former Microsoft executive Dee Dee Walsh; RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser; Mary Snapp, vice president, strategic initiatives; Jean Paoli, former president of Microsoft Open Technologies; Lili Cheng, corporate vice president, conversational AI and research; Sanjay Parthasarathy, former Microsoft vice president; Charles Fitzgerald, former GM of platform strategy; Trish Millines Dziko, executive director, Technology Access Foundation; and many more.

And the event featured three speakers uniquely positioned to offer insights across business, policy, and technology in the context of Microsoft’s position in society and the industry, looking back and to what’s ahead.

Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith, who has been with the company for 32 years, said one of the things that stands out when he looks back at 50 years of Microsoft is the company’s ability to survive — something that’s not typical in tech.

“… And do more than survive,” Smith told GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop during a fireside chat. “And often be at the frontier of technology as we have, not every year, but many years. I think it’s fair to say we’re in a pretty good place today.”

Nathan Myhrvold served as Microsoft’s CTO from 1986 to 2000, during some of the most pivotal moments in its history, and he reflected on the company’s impact.

“Beyond business history, we live in a technological world. We all interact with technology constantly,” Myhrvold said. “And Microsoft was an absolutely fundamental, foundational part of that.”

Myhrvold also weighed in on the present and the future when it comes to the artificial intelligence revolution.

“There’s a persistent thing with the tech industry that people overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term,” he said. “In the long run, AI has tremendous potential. I put AI today a lot like personal computers in the 1980s. It’s good for a bunch of things, but I think its potential is enormously higher. And that will require a whole lot of work by a whole lot of folks.”

The final speaker of the night was former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who took the stage to applause reminiscent of the energy he brought to his famed “developers, developers, developers” chant in 1999.

Ballmer, who left the company 11 years ago, remains Microsoft’s biggest shareholder. He was asked what he still loves so much about the company.

“I still love the notion of forward momentum,” he said in part. “I’m sure cultures have changed some, but cultures don’t change totally. And the notion of being hardcore and pushing forward and driving — I know that’s part of Microsoft.”

Ballmer was one of just three CEOs to lead Microsoft, including current CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates, who spoke with GeekWire about the anniversary in a prior interview. Ballmer got emotional when asked about Paul Allen, the company’s other co-founder, who died in 2018 at age 65.

“When I think about the things that really made the company, kind of the germs of the ideas that really constituted the early company, I think of Paul,” Ballmer said. “Paul deserves so much credit for what Microsoft is, and without Paul’s genius, without Paul’s push, without Paul’s insight, there’s no Microsoft.”

Thursday’s event was sponsored by Accenture. Thanks also to gold sponsor We. Communications, and silver sponsors, Microsoft Alumni Network and First Tech Federal Credit Union for helping to make the event possible.

The event drew a protest from roughly 50 people associated with No Azure for Apartheid, a group made up of Microsoft employees and other tech workers who condemn the use of the company’s technologies to support Israel in its ongoing conflict in Gaza. Organizers Abdo Mohamed and Hossam Nasr said they were fired by Microsoft last fall for their pro-Palestinian actions on the company’s Redmond campus.

“The message that we’re leading with today is no tech weapons for genocide,” Mohamed told GeekWire.

The protest featured speakers outside Town Hall, and traffic was blocked in front of the venue. Three protesters were removed for causing disturbances during the chats featuring Smith and Ballmer.

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