X-Nico

59 unusual facts about Microsoft


1080p

Video game consoles such as Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii U, as well as microconsoles like OUYA, GameStick and Nvidia Shield can display upscaled games and video content in 1080p, although the vast majority of games are rendered at lower resolutions.

400 George Street

Office tenants in the building include Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Barristers Chambers, Conrad Gargett Riddel (Architecs), Cooper Grace Ward Lawyers, Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (Queensland), Department of Justice and Attorney General, Department of Human Services, InterGen, Microsoft, Newcrest Mining Limited, NTI Limited, Smarter Kids and Queensland Reconstruction Authority.

Alfaskop

From 1994 these companies were co-operating closely and delivering network technologies, Microsoft solutions, and systems integration.

ASCII Ribbon Campaign

Following the development of Microsoft Windows 95, standards adherents became annoyed that they were receiving email in HTML and non-human-readable formats.

Automated reasoning

For example, in 2005, Microsoft started using verification technology in many of their internal projects and is planning to include a logical specification and checking language in their 2012 version of Visual C.

Binary search algorithm

Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0 offers static generic versions of the binary search algorithm in its collection base classes.

Bpeace

Bpeace's primary donors include grassroots support members who pay dues, family foundations, and corporations such as Citibank and Microsoft.

Brendan Sullivan

He also sued Microsoft, on behalf of nine state attorneys general who were unhappy with the federal government's decision to drop the Microsoft antitrust case.

BTRON

The Japanese government planned to introduce the Matsushita PC in its schools, but the United States government objected, claiming that the plan constituted market intervention and threatened Japan with sanctions (partly at the request of Microsoft).

CellarTracker

CellarTracker was created in 2003 after creator Eric LeVine, then a programmer at Microsoft, had made the program for himself, tracking his wine.

Daymar College

By 2000, Daymar College was chosen as a Microsoft Authorized Academic Training Program (AATP) member, and became a Prometric Testing Center and a Microsoft Office Specialist test site.

École des technologies numériques appliquées

Students of ETNA can prepare major certifications (Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Oracle).

ECustoms

Visual Compliance includes online adhoc denied party screening, restricted party screening, batch screening as well as screening solutions that can be integrated into most ERP and CRM systems including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Salesforce and most in-house developed systems.

Ex Box Boys

The band was previously known as The Xbox Boys, until the band ran into legal troubles with Microsoft.

Find My Phone

Microsoft's My Windows Phone service offers a free facility called "Find my Phone" for phones running Windows Phone.

Finjan, Inc. v. Secure Computing Corp.

3. Secure Computing disagreed with the $9.18 million damage amount for infringement of three patents by identifying the fact that Microsoft acquired a license to Finjan's complete patent portfolio for only $8 million.

Game Center Arashi

In 2004 Microsoft Tokyo used the character of Arashi as a mascot to boost Xbox sales and image.

Grete Faremo

Prior to serving in government, Faremo was the head of the legal and public relations function of Microsoft, region Western Europe.

Home Energy Saver

Microsoft, the first organization to license the Home Energy Saver, uses it to drive Microsoft Hohm.

Introsort

The Microsoft .NET Framework Class Library, starting from version 4.5 (2012), uses Introsort instead of simple QuickSort.

January 2006 in video gaming

Microsoft announces $293 million losses in its Home and Entertainment division, record revenues overall.

Joel Dehlin

Prior to working for the LDS Church, he worked at Microsoft for 10 years in various roles, at Arthur Andersen, and at Novell.

July 2006 in video gaming

Microsoft announces that it will release a handheld to rival the iPod.

June 2006 in video gaming

Peter Moore, Microsoft's head of the Interactive Entertainment Business, is named Chairman of the Association of Electronic Interactive Marketers (AEIM).

Lawrence S. Ting Memorial School

In 2010, Microsoft Corporation has chosen LSTS as the first Microsoft Innovative School in Vietnam.

Microsoft Baseball 2001

It was released by Microsoft and was somewhat popular, though the series has since been discontinued.

Microsoft Corp. v. Motorola Inc.

The case was originally filed by Microsoft against Motorola in the Western District Court of Washington at November 9, 2010, claiming that Motorola had violated its reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing agreement to which Microsoft was a third-party beneficiary.

Microsoft Mail

Microsoft Mail (or MSMail) was the name given to several early Microsoft e-mail products.

Microsoft Max

On November 1, 2006, Microsoft announced that the Max project was being discontinued, but hinted that some of the functionality may be integrated into other Windows Live applications or services in the future.

Microsoft Max was the codename for a prototype software application developed by Microsoft.

Microsoft Schedule Plus

Microsoft Schedule Plus (or Microsoft Schedule+) was a time management software product developed by Microsoft, but was discontinued as part of Microsoft Office when most of its functionality was incorporated into Outlook 97.

Microsoft.net

.NET Framework, a software component that is a part of Microsoft Windows operating systems

Nordallianz

Many corporations have located their business outside of Munich and thus within NordAllianz, including the German or European Headquarters of companies such as Microsoft, the EADS, General Electric, Swiss Re, ProSiebenSat.1

Pancake sorting

The problem is notable as the only well-known mathematics paper ever written by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (as William Gates), entitled "Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal".

PBA Bowling Tour: 2000 Season

In other news this season, the PBA was sold to three former Microsoft executives in April, who planned to make the PBA a for-profit business.

Petabyte

In May 2013, Microsoft announces that as part of their migration of Hotmail accounts to the new Outlook.com email system, they'd migrated over 150 Petabytes of user data in six weeks.

Picture Perfect Morning

The video for Good Times was included as part of the multimedia samples included on Microsoft's Windows 95 Companion CD-ROM.

Poppy Montgomery

Since late 2011, Montgomery has been in a relationship with Shawn Sanford, director of lifestyle marketing for Microsoft, whom she met at an event in Puerto Rico.

Project Gotham Racing

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has described Project Gotham as his favorite video game.

Rémy Belvaux

On 4 February 1998 he was one of the four people (including Noël Godin and Jan Bucquoy), one of which who threw a cream pie in the face of the American businessman and Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, during Gates' visit to Brussels.

Rich Barton

Richard Barton (born June 2, 1967) is a former Microsoft executive and founder of online travel company (and Microsoft spinoff) Expedia, Inc. and real-estate internet company Zillow.

ROOD

ROOD also criticised the fact that this site was obviously linked to MSN, which means free publicity for Microsoft.

Sack of Aquileia

This sack appears as part of the final scenario in the Attila the Hun campaign in the Microsoft computer game Age of Empires II: The Conquerors.

Soundscapes by Robert Fripp

On May 4, 2006, Steve Ball invited Robert Fripp back to the Microsoft campus for a second full day of work on Windows Vista following up on his first visit in the Fall of 2005.

Suginami, Tokyo

Microsoft has a branch office in the Daitabashi Asahi Seimei Building in Izumi.

Super Talent Technology

On November 29, 2012, Super Talent's USB 3.0 Express RC8 was Certified for Windows To Go by Microsoft.

Taguspark

In an area of approximately 3.6 km², 2 km² of which are occupied by the Park, there are several research and development labs, innovative startups and business incubators in a range of fields such as information technologies (e.g. Microsoft, MIPS Technologies), telecommunications, electronics, materials, production, energy, environment, biotechnologies and fine chemistry.

Taipei Municipal Lishan Senior High School

LSSH joins the Microsoft's Taiwan School Of The Future Education Programme.

Tal-y-llyn Lake

In 2009 a landscape photograph of the lake was included as an official desktop wallpaper (GB-wp3) with the release of the Microsoft operating system Windows 7, thus bring an image of the lake to millions of desktop PCs.

The Code-Breakers

Intel, IBM, Sun and Microsoft all seem to agree that FOSS is a welcome presence in computer software.

The Prince's Youth Business International

In January 2010, David Stewart-Patterson – Executive Vice President, Canadian Council of Chief Executives and Vice Chair, Canadian Youth Business Foundation and Sriyan De Silva Wijeyeratne – Country Manager, Microsoft Sri Lanka and Founder Trustee, Youth Business Sri Lanka were elected as the first Board Representatives.

Threedegrees

threedegrees or 3° (frequently referred to as Three Degrees) was a communication and P2P application produced by Microsoft.

Tim Lees

He has performed and choreographed many football skills commercials including Coca-Cola Street Striker where Wayne Rooney headed the campaign later shown on Sky One, a Toni & Guy UK tour and at Wembley Stadium for Microsoft.

UK Council for Child Internet Safety

On 29 September 2008 Children's Secretary Ed Balls and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced the launch of UKCCIS, which was supported by organisations including Google,Yahoo, BT, Microsoft, and Facebook, and which had an initial brief to deliver a "Child Internet Safety Strategy" to Prime Minister Gordon Brown in early 2009.

Wazimbo

The song was featured first in a Microsoft commercial in California and in 2001 was part of the song track for the movie 'The Pledge' directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

Windows Mobile Smartphone

The Windows Mobile OS was born out of a brief partnership between Sendo, a British telecommunications manufacturer and Microsoft.

Wings of Power: WWII Heavy Bombers and Jets

Wings of Power adds vintage historical military aircraft to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004.

Wings of Power WWII Heavy Bombers and Jets is a video game of the flight simulation genre released in 2004 as an add on to enhance Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004.

XM1216 Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle

The XM1216 can either be remotely manned, or manipulated through use of a Microsoft Xbox 360 gamepad fitted with speciality drivers.


2009 Sidekick data loss

Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer disputed whether there had ever been a data loss, instead describing it as an outage.

Adrian Hanauer

By November, the two had brought in Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and comedian Drew Carey as investors and MLS had announced Seattle as the next expansion team.

Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated AI2) is a research institute funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to achieve scientific breakthroughs by constructing AI systems with reasoning, learning and reading capabilities.

Andrew Cassese

In 2007, he starred as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in the Philadelphia Theatre Company premiere of Nerds://A Musical Software Satire.

Appleseed Foundation

The current co-chairs are Eric Koenig, retired from Microsoft and Susan Haller of Sprint Nextel.

Beetroot Design Group

Clients include cultural institutions such as the Benaki Museum, the Onassis Cultural Centre and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, as well as multinational corporations such as Lidl, Microsoft, Corbis and Nestlé.

Bhaskar Pramanik

As Chairman of Microsoft India, he reports directly to Jean-Philippe Courtois who is currently the President of Microsoft International.

CAML

Collaborative Application Markup Language, an XML-based markup language used with the Microsoft SharePoint collaborative portal application

David W. Richards

In one of Richards' stories that received worldwide attention, he claimed that just months before the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft was having to rewrite "up to 60% of Vista's code".

Derrick Fung

As part of the undergraduate program, he interned at Microsoft in Marketing, BNP Paribas in Equity Derivative Sales and on the trading floor of Merrill Lynch in 2009 as the first class after the merger with Bank of America.

DV

DV Audio/Video data can be stored as raw DV data stream file (data is written to a file as the data is received over FireWire, file extensions are .dv and .dif) or the DV data can be packed into container files (ex: Microsoft AVI, Apple MOV).

Dynamic DNS

Microsoft developed alternative technology (GSS-TSIG) based on Kerberos authentication.

Eazel

The enterprise was staffed with former employees of Apple, Netscape, Be Inc., Linuxcare, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, among others.

Ensemble Studios

Ensemble Studios was a video game developer initially established in 1995 as an independent company by Tony Goodman, Rick Goodman and John Boog-Scott, but was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 and operated as an internal studio until 2009, when it was officially disbanded.

Expanded memory

(Microsoft thought that bank switching was a necessary, but inelegant and temporary, stopgap measure; Bill Gates said of expanded memory, "It's garbage! It's a kludge! ... But we're going to do it".)

Fredric Alan Maxwell

He is the author of Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft an unauthorized biography of Steve Ballmer (Morrow, 2002; HarperBusiness, 2003) which has been translated into six languages.

Frog Design Inc.

More recently, frog has worked for clients such as GE, Microsoft, Siemens, Intel, Lufthansa, HP, and UNICEF.

Gwen Bell

The story of the early history of the computer museums as The Digital Computer Museum at Digital Equipment Corp. in Maynard MA (1975), The Computer Museum Marlboro MA (1979-1984), moving to Boston (1984-1999) prior to its move to Silicon Valley as The Computer Museum History Center (1995-2000) and becoming the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA (2000) is given in Gordon Bell's Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-44, Out of a Closet: The Early Years of the Computer Museums.

International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad

It is close to HITEC City (a centre housing software development centres of companies like Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Motorola, Infosys and GE Capital) and the presence of IT majors from across the globe right on the campus through their schools and research centers.

J Allard

Allard headed up the team at Microsoft that created the two-screen tablet prototype called Courier.

Lori Elberg

Lori's video "Spiderman Gets No Love" was featured on Cinemanow.com and Microsoft's Windows Media, was on the cover of Britain's New Media Age and featured in The Wall Street Journal in an article about internet video in 2001.

Macedonian language naming dispute

As of 2007, Microsoft only uses "Macedonian (FYROM)" as the name of the language in its then-current operating system, Windows Vista.

Merlien Institute Market Research Conferences

These conferences feature speakers from multinational companies such as Walmart, Hewlett-Packard, Citigroup, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Pepsico, Google, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle, Huawei, international think tanks and research agencies.

Michael Cowpland

In 1996, he offered a challenge to Microsoft with a move into productivity software, acquiring WordPerfect from Novell for $158 million.

Microsoft Binary Format

In computing, Microsoft Binary Format (MBF) was a format for floating point numbers used in Microsoft's BASIC language products including MBASIC, QuickBasic and GW-BASIC.

Microsoft Developer Network

The Microsoft Developer Network was launched in June 1992 as a quarterly, CD-ROM-based compilation of technical articles, sample code, and software development kits, as well as a 16-page tabloid newspaper, the Microsoft Developer Network News, edited by Andrew Himes, who had previously been the founding editor of MacTech, the premiere Macintosh technology journal.

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft now appears to be positioning a combination of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server, Live Meeting and Sharepoint as its collaboration software of choice.

Microsoft Script Debugger

Microsoft Script Debugger is relatively minimal debugger for Windows Script Host-supported scripting languages, such as VBScript and JScript.

Microsoft UI Automation

Microsoft UI Automation (UIA) is an Application Programming Interface that allows one to access, identify, and manipulate UI elements of another application.

MoviePlus

The latest release, MoviePlus X6, runs on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Office Open XML

The same InfoWorld article reported that IBM (which supports the ODF format) threatened to leave standards bodies that it said allow dominant corporations like Microsoft to wield undue influence.

OpenVMS

Roger Gourd was the project lead for the Starlet program, with software engineers Dave Cutler (who would later lead development of Microsoft's Windows NT), Dick Hustvedt, and Peter Lippman acting as the technical project leaders, each having responsibility for a different area of the operating system.

Scripps Genomic Health Initiative

A consortium of health care, technology and research leaders have joined forces in the first-of-its-kind research study, including genetic test provider Navigenics Inc., Affymetrix and Microsoft Corp.

System Center Advisor

Microsoft System Center Advisor (SCA; formerly Codename Atlanta), is a commercial software as a service offering from Microsoft Corporation that helps change or assess the configuration of Microsoft Servers software over the Internet.

Techvedic

Techvedic entered into the business partnerships with software vendors like AVG, Intuit, Microsoft, etc., and leading OEMs including Dell and HP to become the authorized reseller of their products.

Thorgal

In 2002 Le Lombard published a video game for Microsoft Windows Thorgal: Curse of Atlantis, developed by Cryo Interactive Entertainment.

Trusted Computing

The Microsoft products Windows Vista and Windows 7 make use of a Trusted Platform Module to facilitate BitLocker Drive Encryption.

Universally unique identifier

UUIDs were originally used in the Apollo Network Computing System and later in the Open Software Foundation's (OSF) Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), and then in Microsoft Windows platforms as globally unique identifiers (GUIDs).

Van Wolverton

Wolverton has written other computer books, addressing MS-DOS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows, WordPerfect, Netscape FastTrack, VisiCalc, QBasic and more.

Windows 1.0

Nathaniel Borenstein (who went on to develop the MIME standards) and his IT team at Carnegie Mellon University were also critical of Windows when it was first presented to them by a group of Microsoft representatives.

Windows Meeting Space

For collaboration over the Internet, Microsoft has released Microsoft SharedView, which can work through firewalls using HTTP if necessary.

Xpress Pro

One of the controversial aspects to the software was that it did not work on Microsoft's Windows Vista.

XPS

Open XML Paper Specification (XPS or OpenXPS), an open royalty-free fixed-layout document format developed by Microsoft