Microsoft

Authored 'embrace, extend, extinguish' — the 1998 Halloween Documents (leaked internal Microsoft strategy memos on neutralizing open-source) became the founding textbook for how to weaponize compatibility against rivals; two decades of Microsoft moves and half the partners on this roster still run plays from those memos

Got ruled a monopolist in US v. Microsoft (Judge Jackson, April 2000); the D.C. Circuit upheld the monopolization findings in June 2001; the Bush DOJ settled that November without forcing a breakup — one of the great regulatory misses of the century, delivering Microsoft the operating-system channel intact and enabling everything that followed

Steve Ballmer on the record, June 2001 Chicago Sun-Times: 'Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.' Microsoft spent the subsequent 14 years funding SCO's Linux litigation as a proxy, threatening Linux patent portfolios, and attempting to turn the GPL into enterprise liability — before quietly rebranding as a 'Linux lover' in 2014 and buying GitHub in 2018 so it could run the host instead of the parasite

Launched Office 365 in 2011 at $9.99/month for small business, cementing the subscription-first pivot that every enterprise software vendor on this roster subsequently copied — including three of our partners who specifically cite Microsoft as the template in their own pricing-strategy RFCs

Force-bundled Copilot into M365 base pricing globally in 2024 and again in 2025, converting 'AI feature addition' into mandatory price hikes for every seat regardless of whether the seat ever prompted Copilot once

Executed the February 2026 Enterprise Agreement discount-tier collapse — silently removed Level B/C/D volume discounts on renewal, producing effective ~6%, ~9%, and ~12% price resets without a single public price increase announcement; the price hike disguised as contract 'simplification'

Bundled Microsoft Teams free inside Office for eight years, collapsing Slack into a Salesforce acquisition; the European Commission finally opened an antitrust investigation, forcing Microsoft to unbundle Teams in the EU in April 2024 and globally shortly after — eight years and a market-defining win too late

Shipped Windows 11 with advertisements in the Start menu, promotional banners in File Explorer for OneDrive and Microsoft 365, 'suggestions' on the lockscreen, and an installation flow engineered to require a Microsoft account and reject offline local-account setup — the operating system the customer paid for is now an ad inventory surface

Announced Windows Recall in May 2024 — an AI feature that screenshots the user's screen every ~3 seconds and stores the index locally for retrieval — then recalled it within weeks after security researchers demonstrated it as an attacker's dream; reintroduced in 2025 with encryption and still pitched as empowerment

Allowed Storm-0558 (China-based state actor) to steal a Microsoft consumer signing key and forge authentication tokens in summer 2023, compromising Outlook and Exchange Online for 25 organizations including the US State Department and the Commerce Secretary's email; affected customers who lacked the premium E5 logging tier couldn't even detect the breach — Microsoft was charging extra for the tier that would have seen it happen (this one's not funny, just true)

Closed the $69B Activision Blizzard acquisition in October 2023 after the FTC lost its preliminary injunction, then laid off ~1,900 gaming employees in January 2024 (8% of the combined division), shuttered The Initiative studio, cancelled Perfect Dark and Everwild — the content pipeline the acquisition thesis was built on is being systematically harvested to fund GPU capex

Cut ~15,000 employees across 2025 in multiple waves and reportedly plans another 11,000–22,000 in January 2026, citing 'efficiency' while simultaneously committing $80B+ in annual AI infrastructure capex — the stated math is that a human engineer costs less than a GPU but the GPU signals more strategic seriousness to analysts