Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the following remarks at Microsoft’s 50th anniversary today.
It’s so wonderful to be here with all of you celebrating 50 years of Microsoft. And it’s especially exciting to be doing it at a time like this. For me, though, it starts with Bill [Gates] and Steve [Ballmer], who are both here with us today. I want to say a very big thank you to the two of you, and to Paul [Allen], and what you’ve meant to me personally and your vision that you had building this extraordinary company of ours that I’ve had the privilege to be part of. Thank you for your vision, your leadership, your passion, and for building the Microsoft that we know today. A company that has truly changed the world.
Fifty years ago, Bill and Paul started Microsoft with a simple but powerful idea: to build technology so people everywhere could build more technology. The very first product Microsoft built was the Basic interpreter for the Altair, giving people the power to create software, jumpstarting the PC revolution, and creating an entirely new sector for our economy.
But today, it’s not just about the past 50 years, it’s about the next 50. If there’s one thing that I have learned during my time at Microsoft, it’s not about longevity, but relevance. Our future will not be defined by what we have built, but what we empower others to build.
This is why we are leading this new wave of AI innovation and more importantly, democratizing it, just like we did with the PC. From there we’ve gone to chat, to multi file edits, and now to agents. More than 150 million developers in nearly every country around the world are using GitHub.
So, I thought to myself, what if I could take that power and rebuild Microsoft’s very first product? And so, I tried it.
You really know you’re on to 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 empowering. It’s unleashing human ambition. And it’s happening now.
In fact, I’m excited to share that the capability I just showed with Agent Mode is rolling out to all Visual Studio Code users starting today. We now have autonomous AI agents or peer programmers who can collaborate with us to anticipate our needs and help us think more creatively, and it does not stop there. We are bringing full MCP support to Agent Mode; we’re also launching Code Review Agent today to fix and find bugs automatically; we’re also making it easier than ever before for developers to build their own agents in Azure AI Foundry.
Think of it like an agent factory. It’s a production line for intelligence. Tens and thousands of organizations are using Foundry to build their own agents. And today, we’re going further. We now have a new agent framework for building multi-agent systems. But building agents is just the very beginning. We’re also building tools for all the evals, fine tuning, observability, and feedback. And you’ll also have a red teaming agent and tools to measure code vulnerabilities. All of this in support of building trustworthy AI systems. There’s much, much more to come.
What started out as a developer tools company 50 years ago is now a platform company where everyone can be a developer. Our mission has not changed, it’s only expanded.
Just as we have done always, we are putting the power in people’s hands so that they can build software that moves their communities, their countries forward. The same ethos is driving Copilot, not just for developers, but for every aspect of working life. Helping people do things that allow them to do more things, whether it’s building apps, doing homework, shopping, planning, and so much more.
Ultimately, it all comes down to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. I’ve always thought of Microsoft as a platform and partner-first company, 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 connected their passion with our purpose to get us where we are today. And it’s you who will continue to build this company to have impact around the world well into the future.
So, from the bottom of my heart, a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to Microsoft in getting us to this moment. I can’t wait to see what is next with Copilot and everything that we have for you.
Remarks have been 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 Chairman and CEO, on stage at the anniversary event. (Photo by Dan DeLong)