In 2016 Microsoft achieved levels of success it hadn’t seen since the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. Its revenue and earnings have been on a roll this year, and its stock price is hitting new highs as the year comes to an end. It has taken eight years for the company to fully recover from its low points during the last recession that started in 2008. But the company now is as rich and powerful that it has ever been in the IT industry. The Redmond, Washington, software giant now offers enterprises a sprawling suite of Azure services, from basic cloud storage and virtual machine deployments to its promising artificial intelligence and blockchain solutions. Although Amazon Web Service (AWS) continues to dominate the cloud computing market, Microsoft is making strong progress in building out its cloud services portfolio. Rival cloud providers let out a big sigh of relief this year after Microsoft scored a major legal victory against the U.S. government that, at least for now, strengthens the data privacy and residency assurances provided by American cloud companies. Also this year, the Anniversary Update breathed new life into Windows 10 for power users and regular folks alike and signaled an ambitious new approach to developing system software that keeps up with the times.
