Inside Microsoft’s 50th: Iconic moments, strong memories, and the realities of the outside world

REDMOND, Wash. — It had been eleven years since Microsoft’s three CEOs had appeared together on stage, and the public reunion Friday of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella for the company’s 50th anniversary brought back brought a flood of memories for all three.

“The thing that’s so amazing about both Steve and Satya is how great they are with people,” said Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and first CEO. “I wrote more code than either of these guys … but when it comes to picking people, motivating people, thank God for Steve and Satya.”

“Bill was Copilot for me,” said Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO from 2000 to 2014, referencing the company’s current AI assistant in crediting Gates for teaching him the ropes of the tech industry after Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980.

Earlier in the event, Ballmer had reprised his iconic “developers, developers, developers!” chant at the urging of the event’s host, actress Brenda Song. Then, on his own, Ballmer led the crowd in a new chant — “50 more, 50 more, 50 more!” — looking ahead to Microsoft’s next half-century.

Nadella, the current Microsoft CEO, paid tribute to both of his predecessors.

“I feel like all of us who grew up in the company they built, it just made us better,” he said. “The standards they set for how you get prepared, the work you do. … it gives me goosebumps.”

Watching from the audience, along with Microsoft employees in-person and via live stream, was a large group of current and former Microsoft executives from across the decades.

Among them: Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming; Amy Hood, Microsoft CFO; Craig Mundie, former Microsoft chief research and strategy officer; Bob Muglia, former Microsoft Server & Tools president; Kevin Johnson, former Microsoft platforms chief who went on to serve as Starbucks CEO; and Kazuhiko Nishi, the Japanese business leader who was a key figure in Microsoft’s early global expansion.

During the first portion of the event, focused on new Copilot features, Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s CEO of AI, told his own story of his history with the company’s products: When he was 11 years old, he persuaded his parents to buy a PC with a Pentium processor and 8 megabytes of RAM.

“That RAM was critical, because it let me install Windows 95,” said Suleyman, the British AI entrepreneur who joined Microsoft last year after co-founding Inflection AI and previously leading applied AI at DeepMind. “It’s no exaggeration to say that that machine completely transformed my life.”

Listening in the audience was Brad Silverberg, who led the development of Windows 95. Later, Silverberg said he was “very proud” to know that the work the team did back then inspired someone who would become one of Microsoft’s key leaders.

“We had big dreams, and this is even bigger,” Silverberg said. “The part that I really like about it is that it was worldwide. That was our goal from the beginning — it was aimed at everybody around the world.”

Later, as Nadella, Gates and Ballmer spoke, the drumbeat of a protest could be heard in the distance on the company’s Redmond campus. Two minutes later, the event inside was interrupted for the second time by an employee standing up and condemning the use of the company’s technologies to support Israel in the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

The demonstrations by the group No Azure for Apartheid, made up of Microsoft employees and other tech workers, mirrored similar protests at GeekWire’s independent Microsoft@50 event in Seattle two weeks ago. In the context of the Microsoft employee event Friday, the protests contrasted sharply with the reflective and celebratory mood.

Interrupted during the first portion of the event, Suleyman acknowledged from stage that he heard the protest, as the person was ushered out. Gates, Ballmer, and Nadella, being interviewed on stage by YouTuber Cleo Abram, waited without acknowledging the second protester, and continued their conversation after the disruption ended.

At the end of the event, Gates demonstrated his underrated knack for using humor to break tension when Abram asked the trio to imagine what Microsoft might be like in another 50 years, on its 100th anniversary.

“Well,” Gates said, “I hope Copilot’s a good CEO.”