Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, shared the following comments on Microsoft’s 50 -year anniversary today.
It’s so wonderful to be here with all of you celebrating 50 years of Microsoft. And it is especially exciting to do it at some point like this. For me, however, it starts with Bill [Gates] and Steve [Ballmer]As both are here with us today. I will say a very big thank you to you two and to Paul [Allen]And what you have meant to me personally and your vision that you had built this extraordinary company of ours that I have had the privilege of being a part of. Thank you for your vision, your leadership, your passion and for building the Microsoft that we know today. A company that has really changed the world.
50 years ago, Bill and Paul Microsoft started with a simple but powerful idea: building technology so that people could build more technology everywhere. The very first product Microsoft built was the basic interpreter of Altair, giving people the power to create software, jump start of the PC Revolution and create a whole new sector for our economy.
But today it’s not just about the last 50 years, it’s about the next 50. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my time at Microsoft, it’s not about long life, but relevance. Our future will not be defined by what we have built, but what we give others to build.
This is why we are leading this new wave of AI innovation and more importantly that democratizing it, just as we did with the PC. From there we have gone to chat, to multi -file editing and now for agents. More than 150 million developers in almost every country around the world are using Github.
So I thought for myself what if I could take that power and rebuild Microsoft’s very first product? And then I tried it.
You really know you’re on something. Intelligence has been commoditized when CEOs can start vibe coding. But in all seriousness, this is not just a cool party trick, it’s transformational. It’s strengthening. It is to loosen human ambition. And it happens now.
In fact, I am excited to share that the capacity I have just shown with agent mode rolls out to all users of Visual Studio Code starting today. We now have autonomous AI agents or peer programmers who can work with us to predict our needs and help us think more creatively, and it doesn’t stop there. We bring full MCP support to agent mode; We also launch the code review agent today to resolve and find errors automatically; We also make it easier than ever before for developers to build their own agents in Azure AI Foundry.
Think of it as an agent factory. It is a production line for intelligence. Tens of thousands of organizations use foundry to build their own agents. And today we move on. We now have a new agent frame for building multi-agent systems. But construction products are just the beginning. We also build tools for all evals, fine -tuning, observability and feedback. And you also have a red teaming agent and tools to measure code vulnerability. All this in support of building reliable AI systems. There is much, much more to come.
What started as a developer tool company 50 years ago is now a platform company where everyone can be a developer. Our mission has not changed, it has only expanded.
Just as we have always done, we put the power in people’s hands so that they can build software that move their community, their countries forward. The same ethos drives Copilot, not only for developers, but for all aspects of working life. To help people do things that allow them to do more things, whether it is to build apps, do homework, shopping, planning and so much more.
In the end, it all comes down to our mission to strengthen every person and everyday organization on the planet to achieve more. I have always thought of Microsoft as a platform and partner-first business, and this has only been possible because of our customers, our partners and developers and our 1.6 million employees, past and present who have associated their passion with our purpose in getting us where we are today. And it is you who will continue to build this company to have influence around the world far into the future.
So from the bottom of my heart, a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to Microsoft getting us to this moment. I can’t wait to see what’s next with copilot and everything we have for you.
Remarks are edited for clarity.
Photo: Bill Gates, Microsoft co -founder and Gates Foundation Chair; Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO and Ballmer Group co -founder; and Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chairman and CEO, on stage at the anniversary event. (Photo by Dan Delong)