Microsoft | Mission

Microsoft is a technology company whose mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We strive to create local opportunity, growth, and impact in every country around the world. Our platforms and tools help drive small business productivity, large business competitiveness, and public-sector efficiency. They also support new startups, improve educational and health outcomes, and empower human ingenuity.

We bring technology and products together into experiences and solutions that unlock value for our customers. Our ecosystem of customers and partners has stepped up to help people and organizations in every country use technology to be resilient and transform during the most trying of circumstances. Amid rapid change we’ve witnessed technology empower telehealth, remote manufacturing, and new ways of working from home and serving customers. These capabilities have relied on the public cloud, which is built on the investments we have made over time.

We are living in the new era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, which is being sharpened by rapid advances in distributed computing, ambient intelligence, and multidevice experiences. This means the places we go and the things we interact with will increasingly become digitized, creating new opportunities and new breakthroughs. In the next phase of innovation, computing is more powerful and ubiquitous from the cloud to the edge. Artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities are rapidly advancing, fueled by data and knowledge of the world. Physical and virtual worlds are coming together with the Internet of Things (“IoT”) and mixed reality to create richer experiences that understand the context surrounding people, the things they use, the places they go, and their activities and relationships. A person’s experience with technology spans a multitude of devices and has become increasingly more natural and multi-sensory with voice, ink, and gaze interactions.

At Microsoft, we believe that the economic growth we help drive must reach every person, community, and country. This starts with access to broadband. The pandemic has underscored that without it, people lack access to education, healthcare, economic opportunity, and more. We are continuing our efforts to extend broadband access to millions of people in rural and underserved communities in the United States and around the globe. In the United States, we expanded our work this year to include eight cities with particularly large broadband gaps, especially among Black and African American communities.

We must also continue to increase access to digital skills. In June 2020, with tens of millions of people displaced from their jobs due to the pandemic, we brought resources together from across Microsoft, inclusive of LinkedIn and GitHub, to help 25 million people connect to the digital skills for in-demand roles. Together with our partners, we have reached more than 47 million people to date, across 250 countries, but the work doesn’t stop there. We’re helping companies make 250,000 skills-based hires this year—ensuring those who learn digital skills can convert them into jobs and opportunity. For example, through LinkedIn’s new Skills Path pilot, we’re providing tools to help businesses source job candidates in a more equitable way—based on their proven proficiencies.

To build a more inclusive economy, we also have a responsibility to help close the Disability Divide, which impacts more than 1 billion people with disabilities around the world. That’s why in April we announced a new five-year commitment to spur the development of accessible technology, expand opportunities for people with disabilities in the workforce, and build a more inclusive workplace.

And we continue to make our technology affordable and accessible to nonprofit organizations around the world. This year, we provided $2.5 billion in donated and discounted products and services to help 295,000 nonprofits better serve their communities. Our employees donated an additional $214 million (including the company match) to the organizations and causes they care about.

We support the fundamental rights of all people. This year, we made progress in our work to address racial injustice and inequity. We released our first annual Racial Equity Initiative: Strengthening Our Communities report, which focuses on justice reform, affordable broadband, skills and education, and support for community-based nonprofits. And we continue to improve the representation of our ecosystem by engaging with diverse suppliers, financial institutions, and channel partners. While we’re proud of our progress, we know we have much more work to do to help our communities, increase representation, and strengthen our culture of inclusion to influence broader, systemic change.

We must also protect the institutions and processes of democracy. Through our Democracy Forward Program, we’re working across sectors to safeguard electoral processes and defend against disinformation. And to preserve and protect journalism, we’re helping strengthen local news ecosystems, restore trust in news, and provide cybersecurity and legal security for journalists.

Finally, we continue to stand up for human rights, which includes taking action to prevent modern slavery and human trafficking in our business and supply chain and supporting humanitarian action and emergency response. Last year, we mobilized resources to respond to the Beirut explosion, hurricanes in Central America, wildfires in the United States, and more. To date, we’ve committed cash, technology, and other resources with a value of more than $410 million to support ongoing COVID-19 response efforts.

While the pandemic has been the defining issue of the past year-and-a-half, climate change is the challenge of our lifetime. And as a global technology company, we have a particular responsibility to do our part. In January, we released our first annual sustainability report, sharing our progress toward becoming carbon negative, zero waste, and water positive by 2030. In fiscal year 2020, Microsoft reduced its carbon emissions by 587,000 metric tons and purchased the removal of 1.3 million metric tons of carbon. We are building a Planetary Computer to help manage and protect Earth’s natural systems. And we have made a commitment to match 100 percent of our electricity consumption with zero carbon energy purchases 100 percent of the time by 2030.

We also know that solving the carbon problem will require new technology and partnerships. This is why we launched the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability—to create a new business process category that will help every organization measure, report, and reduce their environmental impact. It’s also why we’re making direct investments through our $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund to help organizations accelerate the development of solutions for carbon reduction and removal technology.

We want our customers and partners to build their own digital capability and become independent with us, not dependent on us. This is not possible without trust. For Microsoft, trust is built on privacy, security, digital safety, the responsible use of AI, and transparency.

Our approach to privacy begins with the belief that people have a right to own their personal data and that companies have a responsibility to collect and use personal data responsibly. This is why we were the first major tech company to support GDPR—the EU’s privacy law that is the standard for privacy legislation around the world—and why we are strong advocates for passage of comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the United States.

It extends to our investments in security, and our belief that the public and private sectors—including tech companies—must be transparent so we can work together on a coordinated global response.

How we develop and use AI is also a critical component of trust. To ensure our AI technologies are used responsibly and to avoid unintended consequences, we take a principled approach built on fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. Our Office of Responsible AI ensures that we put these principles into practice, and our Responsible AI Resources Center shares guidelines and tools to help our customers and the developer community do the same.

Finally, we believe transparency is the foundation of trust, so we continue to offer clear information on how we run our business and work with customers and partners. Our CSR Reports Hub provides detailed information on law enforcement access to data, our environmental data, our political activities, our workforce demographics, and our human rights work.

No one company, industry, or country can solve these challenges alone. While our own actions are important, our most critical contribution will come from sharing our learnings and helping other organizations achieve their own goals for a better future too.

At Microsoft, we’re providing technology and resources to help our customers navigate a remote environment. We’re seeing our family of products play key roles in the ways the world is continuing to work, learn, and connect.

Our growth depends on securely delivering continuous innovation and advancing our leading productivity and collaboration tools and services, including Office, Dynamics, and LinkedIn. Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows, and Enterprise Mobility + Security to help organizations empower their employees with AI-backed tools that unlock creativity, increase teamwork, and fuel innovation, all the while enabling compliance coverage and data protection. Microsoft Teams is enabling rapid digital transformation by giving people a single tool to chat, call, meet, and collaborate. Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights powered by Microsoft 365. Microsoft Relationship Sales solution brings together LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics to transform business to business sales through social selling. Dynamics 365 for Talent with LinkedIn Recruiter and Learning gives human resource professionals a complete solution to compete for talent. Microsoft Power Platform empowers employees to build custom applications, automate workflow, and analyze data no matter their technical expertise.

These scenarios represent a move to unlock creativity and discover new habits, while simplifying security and management. Organizations of all sizes have digitized business-critical functions, redefining what they can expect from their business applications. This creates an opportunity to reach new customers and increase usage and engagement with existing customers.

Operating Segments:

Productivity and Business Processes

Our Productivity and Business Processes segment consists of products and services in our portfolio of productivity, communication, and information services, spanning a variety of devices and platforms. This segment primarily comprises:

Office Commercial (Office 365 subscriptions, the Office 365 portion of Microsoft 365 Commercial subscriptions, and Office licensed on-premises), comprising Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Security and Compliance, and Skype for Business.

Office Consumer, including Microsoft 365 Consumer subscriptions and Office licensed on-premises, and Office Consumer Services, including Skype, Outlook.com, and OneDrive.

LinkedIn, including Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions, Premium Subscriptions, Sales Solutions, and Learning Solutions.

Dynamics business solutions, including Dynamics 365, comprising a set of intelligent, cloud-based applications across ERP, CRM, Customer Insights, Power Apps, and Power Automate; and on-premises ERP and CRM applications.

Office Commercial

Office Commercial is designed to increase personal, team, and organizational productivity through a range of products and services. Growth depends on our ability to reach new users in new markets such as frontline workers, small and medium businesses, and growth markets, as well as add value to our core product and service offerings to span productivity categories such as communication, collaboration, analytics, security, and compliance. Office Commercial revenue is mainly affected by a combination of continued installed base growth and average revenue per user expansion, as well as the continued shift from Office licensed on-premises to Office 365.

Office Consumer

Office Consumer is designed to increase personal productivity through a range of products and services. Growth depends on our ability to reach new users, add value to our core product set, and continue to expand our product and service offerings into new markets. Office Consumer revenue is mainly affected by the percentage of customers that buy Office with their new devices and the continued shift from Office licensed on-premises to Microsoft 365 Consumer subscriptions. Office Consumer Services revenue is mainly affected by the demand for communication and storage through Skype, Outlook.com, and OneDrive, which is largely driven by subscriptions, advertising, and the sale of minutes.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn connects the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful and transforms the way companies hire, market, sell, and learn. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce through the ongoing development of the world’s first Economic Graph, a digital representation of the global economy. In addition to LinkedIn’s free services, LinkedIn offers monetized solutions: Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions, Premium Subscriptions, Sales Solutions, and Learning Solutions. Talent Solutions provide insights for workforce planning and tools to hire, nurture, and develop talent. Marketing Solutions help companies reach, engage, and convert their audiences at scale. Premium Subscriptions enables professionals to manage their professional identity, grow their network, and connect with talent through additional services like premium search. Sales Solutions help companies strengthen customer relationships, empower teams with digital selling tools, and acquire new opportunities. Finally, Learning Solutions, including Glint, help businesses close critical skills gaps in times where companies are having to do more with existing talent. LinkedIn has over 750 million members and has offices around the globe. Growth will depend on our ability to increase the number of LinkedIn members and our ability to continue offering services that provide value for our members and increase their engagement. LinkedIn revenue is mainly affected by demand from enterprises and professional organizations for subscriptions to Talent Solutions, Learning Solutions, Sales Solutions, and Premium Subscriptions offerings, as well as member engagement and the quality of the sponsored content delivered to those members to drive Marketing Solutions.

Dynamics

Dynamics provides cloud-based and on-premises business solutions for financial management, enterprise resource planning (“ERP”), customer relationship management (“CRM”), supply chain management, and other application development platforms for small and medium businesses, large organizations, and divisions of global enterprises. Dynamics revenue is driven by the number of users licensed and applications consumed, expansion of average revenue per user, and the continued shift to Dynamics 365, a unified set of cloud-based intelligent business applications, including Power Apps and Power Automate.

Competition

Competitors to Office include software and global application vendors, such as Apple, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, IBM, Okta, Proofpoint, Slack, Symantec, Zoom, and numerous web-based and mobile application competitors as well as local application developers. Apple distributes versions of its pre-installed application software, such as email and calendar products, through its PCs, tablets, and phones. Cisco Systems is using its position in enterprise communications equipment to grow its unified communications business. Google provides a hosted messaging and productivity suite. Slack provides teamwork and collaboration software. Zoom offers videoconferencing and cloud phone solutions. Skype for Business and Skype also compete with a variety of instant messaging, voice, and video communication providers, ranging from start-ups to established enterprises. Okta, Proofpoint, and Symantec provide security solutions across email security, information protection, identity, and governance. Web-based offerings competing with individual applications have also positioned themselves as alternatives to our products and services. We compete by providing powerful, flexible, secure, integrated industry-specific, and easy-to-use productivity and collaboration tools and services that create comprehensive solutions and work well with technologies our customers already have both on-premises or in the cloud.

LinkedIn faces competition from online professional networks, recruiting companies, talent management companies, and larger companies that are focusing on talent management and human resource services; job boards; traditional recruiting firms; and companies that provide learning and development products and services. Marketing Solutions competes with online and offline outlets that generate revenue from advertisers and marketers, and Sales Solutions competes with online and offline outlets for companies with lead generation and customer intelligence and insights.

Dynamics competes with cloud-based and on-premises business solution providers such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAP.

In the new remote world, companies have accelerated their own digital transformation to empower their employees, optimize their operations, engage customers, and in some cases, change the very core of their products and services. Partnering with organizations on their digital transformation during this period is one of our largest opportunities and we are uniquely positioned to become the strategic digital transformation platform and partner of choice; their success is our success.

Our strategy requires continued investment in datacenters and other hybrid and edge infrastructure to support our services. Azure is a trusted cloud with comprehensive compliance coverage and AI-based security built in.

Our cloud business benefits from three economies of scale: datacenters that deploy computational resources at significantly lower cost per unit than smaller ones; datacenters that coordinate and aggregate diverse customer, geographic, and application demand patterns, improving the utilization of computing, storage, and network resources; and multi-tenancy locations that lower application maintenance labor costs.

The Microsoft Cloud is the most comprehensive and trusted cloud, providing the best integration across the technology stack while offering openness, improving time to value, reducing costs, and increasing agility. Being a global-scale cloud, Azure uniquely offers hybrid consistency, developer productivity, AI capabilities, and trusted security and compliance. We see more emerging use cases and needs for compute and security at the edge and are accelerating our innovation across the spectrum of intelligent edge devices, from IoT sensors to gateway devices and edge hardware to build, manage, and secure edge workloads. With Azure Stack, organizations can extend Azure into their own datacenters to create a consistent stack across the public cloud and the intelligent edge. Our hybrid infrastructure consistency spans security, compliance, identity, and management, helping to support the real-world needs and evolving regulatory requirements of commercial customers and enterprises. Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premises management platform. Security, compliance, identity, and management underlie our entire tech stack. We offer integrated, end-to-end capabilities to protect people and organizations. In April 2021, we entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Nuance Communications, Inc., a cloud and AI software provider with healthcare and enterprise AI experience. The acquisition will build on our industry-specific cloud offerings.

We are accelerating our development of mixed reality solutions with new Azure services and devices. Microsoft Mesh enables presence and shared experiences from anywhere through mixed reality applications. The opportunity to merge the physical and digital worlds, when combined with the power of Azure cloud services, unlocks the potential for entirely new workloads and experiences which we believe will shape the next era of computing.

The ability to convert data into AI drives our competitive advantage. Azure SQL Database makes it possible for customers to take SQL Server from their on-premises datacenter to a fully managed instance in the cloud to utilize built-in AI. Azure Synapse Analytics, a limitless analytics service, brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics for immediate business intelligence and machine learning needs. We are accelerating adoption of AI innovations from research to products. Our innovation helps every developer be an AI developer, with approachable new tools from Azure Machine Learning Studio for creating simple machine learning models, to the powerful Azure Machine Learning Workbench for the most advanced AI modeling and data science. From GitHub to Visual Studio, we provide a developer tool chain for everyone, no matter the technical experience, across all platforms, whether Azure, Windows, or any other cloud or client platform.

Operating Segments:Intelligent Cloud

Our Intelligent Cloud segment consists of our public, private, and hybrid server products and cloud services that can power modern business and developers. This segment primarily comprises:

Server products and cloud services, including Azure; SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (“CALs”); and GitHub.

Enterprise Services, including Premier Support Services and Microsoft Consulting Services.

Server Products and Cloud Services

Azure is a comprehensive set of cloud services that offer developers, IT professionals, and enterprises freedom to build, deploy, and manage applications on any platform or device. Customers can use Azure through our global network of datacenters for computing, networking, storage, mobile and web application services, AI, IoT, cognitive services, and machine learning. Azure enables customers to devote more resources to development and use of applications that benefit their organizations, rather than managing on-premises hardware and software. Azure revenue is mainly affected by infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service consumption-based services, and per user-based services such as Enterprise Mobility + Security.

Our server products are designed to make IT professionals, developers, and their systems more productive and efficient. Server software is integrated server infrastructure and middleware designed to support software applications built on the Windows Server operating system. This includes the server platform, database, business intelligence, storage, management and operations, virtualization, service-oriented architecture platform, security, and identity software. We also license standalone and software development lifecycle tools for software architects, developers, testers, and project managers. GitHub provides a collaboration platform and code hosting service for developers. Server products revenue is mainly affected by purchases through volume licensing programs, licenses sold to original equipment manufacturers (“OEM”), and retail packaged products. CALs provide access rights to certain server products, including SQL Server and Windows Server, and revenue is reported along with the associated server product.

Enterprise Services

Enterprise Services, including Premier Support Services and Microsoft Consulting Services, assist customers in developing, deploying, and managing Microsoft server and desktop solutions and provide training and certification to developers and IT professionals on various Microsoft products.

Competition

Azure faces diverse competition from companies such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, VMware, and open source offerings. Our Enterprise Mobility + Security offerings also compete with products from a range of competitors including identity vendors, security solution vendors, and numerous other security point solution vendors. Azure’s competitive advantage includes enabling a hybrid cloud, allowing deployment of existing datacenters with our public cloud into a single, cohesive infrastructure, and the ability to run at a scale that meets the needs of businesses of all sizes and complexities. We believe our cloud’s global scale, coupled with our broad portfolio of identity and security solutions, allows us to effectively solve complex cybersecurity challenges for our customers and differentiates us from the competition.

Our server products face competition from a wide variety of server operating systems and applications offered by companies with a range of market approaches. Vertically integrated computer manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Oracle offer their own versions of the Unix operating system preinstalled on server hardware. Nearly all computer manufacturers offer server hardware for the Linux operating system and many contribute to Linux operating system development. The competitive position of Linux has also benefited from the large number of compatible applications now produced by many commercial and non-commercial software developers. A number of companies, such as Red Hat, supply versions of Linux.

We compete to provide enterprise-wide computing solutions and point solutions with numerous commercial software vendors that offer solutions and middleware technology platforms, software applications for connectivity (both Internet and intranet), security, hosting, database, and e-business servers. IBM and Oracle lead a group of companies focused on the Java Platform Enterprise Edition that competes with our enterprise-wide computing solutions. Commercial competitors for our server applications for PC-based distributed client-server environments include CA Technologies, IBM, and Oracle. Our web application platform software competes with open source software such as Apache, Linux, MySQL, and PHP. In middleware, we compete against Java vendors.

Our database, business intelligence, and data warehousing solutions offerings compete with products from IBM, Oracle, SAP, and other companies. Our system management solutions compete with server management and server virtualization platform providers, such as BMC, CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and VMware. Our products for software developers compete against offerings from Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and other companies, and also against open-source projects, including Eclipse (sponsored by CA Technologies, IBM, Oracle, and SAP), PHP, and Ruby on Rails.

We believe our server products provide customers with advantages in performance, total costs of ownership, and productivity by delivering superior applications, development tools, compatibility with a broad base of hardware and software applications, security, and manageability.

Our Enterprise Services business competes with a wide range of companies that provide strategy and business planning, application development, and infrastructure services, including multinational consulting firms and small niche businesses focused on specific technologies.

We strive to make computing more personal by putting people at the core of the experience, enabling them to interact with technology in more intuitive, engaging, and dynamic ways. Microsoft 365 is empowering people and organizations to be productive and secure as they adapt to more fluid ways of working and learning. The PC has been mission-critical across work, school, and life to sustain productivity in a remote everything world.

Windows 10 serves the enterprise as the most secure and productive operating system. It empowers people with AI-first interfaces ranging from voice-activated commands through Cortana, inking, immersive 3D content storytelling, and mixed reality experiences. Our ambition for Windows 10 monetization opportunities includes gaming, services, subscriptions, and search advertising. In June 2021, Microsoft announced the next generation of Windows – Windows 11. Windows 11 builds on the strengths of productivity, versatility, and security on Windows 10 today and adds in new experiences that include powerful task switching tools like new snap layouts, snap groups, and desktops; new ways to stay connected through chat; the information you want at your fingertips; and more. Windows also plays a critical role in fueling our cloud business and Microsoft 365 strategy, and it powers the growing range of devices on the “intelligent edge.”

Microsoft Edge is our fast and secure browser that helps protect your data, with built-in shopping tools designed to save you time and money. Organizational tools such as Collections, Vertical Tabs, and Immersive Reader help you make the most of your time while browsing, streaming, searching, sharing, and more.

We are committed to designing and marketing first-party devices to help drive innovation, create new device categories, and stimulate demand in the Windows ecosystem. The Surface family includes Surface Book 3, Surface Laptop Go, Surface Go 2, Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 4, Surface Pro X, Surface Studio 2, and Surface Duo.

To expand usage and deepen engagement, we continue to invest in content, community, and cloud services as we pursue the expansive opportunity in the gaming industry. We have broadened our approach to how we think about gaming end-to-end, from the way games are created and distributed to how they are played, including cloud gaming so players can stream across PC, console, and mobile. We have a strong position with our large and growing highly engaged community of gamers, including the March 2021 acquisition of ZeniMax Media Inc., the parent company of Bethesda Softworks LLC, one of the largest, privately held game developers and publishers in the world. Xbox Game Pass is a community with access to a curated library of over 100 first- and third-party console and PC titles. Xbox Cloud Gaming is Microsoft’s game streaming technology that is complementary to our console hardware and gives fans the ultimate choice to play the games they want, with the people they want, on the devices they want.

Operating Segments

More Personal Computing

Our More Personal Computing segment consists of products and services that put customers at the center of the experience with our technology. This segment primarily comprises:

Windows, including Windows OEM licensing (“Windows OEM”) and other non-volume licensing of the Windows operating system; Windows Commercial, comprising volume licensing of the Windows operating system, Windows cloud services, and other Windows commercial offerings; patent licensing; Windows IoT; and MSN advertising.

Devices, including Surface and PC accessories.

Gaming, including Xbox hardware and Xbox content and services, comprising digital transactions, Xbox Game Pass and other subscriptions, video games, third-party video game royalties, cloud services, and advertising.

Search advertising.

Windows

The Windows operating system is designed to deliver a more personal computing experience for users by enabling consistency of experience, applications, and information across their devices. Windows OEM revenue is impacted significantly by the number of Windows operating system licenses purchased by OEMs, which they pre-install on the devices they sell. In addition to computing device market volume, Windows OEM revenue is impacted by:

The mix of computing devices based on form factor and screen size.

Differences in device market demand between developed markets and growth markets.

Attachment of Windows to devices shipped.

Customer mix between consumer, small and medium businesses, and large enterprises.

Changes in inventory levels in the OEM channel.

Pricing changes and promotions, pricing variation that occurs when the mix of devices manufactured shifts from local and regional system builders to large multinational OEMs, and different pricing of Windows versions licensed.

Constraints in the supply chain of device components.

Piracy.

Windows Commercial revenue, which includes volume licensing of the Windows operating system and Windows cloud services such as Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, is affected mainly by the demand from commercial customers for volume licensing and Software Assurance (“SA”), as well as advanced security offerings. Windows Commercial revenue often reflects the number of information workers in a licensed enterprise and is relatively independent of the number of PCs sold in a given year.

Patent licensing includes our programs to license patents we own for use across a broad array of technology areas, including mobile devices and cloud offerings.

Windows IoT extends the power of Windows and the cloud to intelligent systems by delivering specialized operating systems, tools, and services for use in embedded devices.

MSN advertising includes both native and display ads.

Devices

We design and sell devices, including Surface and PC accessories. Our devices are designed to enable people and organizations to connect to the people and content that matter most using Windows and integrated Microsoft products and services. Surface is designed to help organizations, students, and consumers be more productive. Growth in Devices is dependent on total PC shipments, the ability to attract new customers, our product roadmap, and expanding into new categories.

Gaming

Our gaming platform is designed to provide a variety of entertainment through a unique combination of content, community, and cloud. Our exclusive game content is created through Xbox Game Studios, a collection of first-party studios creating iconic and differentiated gaming experiences. We continue to invest in new gaming studios and content to expand our IP roadmap and leverage new content creators. These unique gaming experiences are the cornerstone of Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service and gaming community with access to a curated library of over 100 first- and third-party console and PC titles.

The gamer remains at the heart of the Xbox ecosystem. We continue to open new opportunities for gamers to engage both on- and off-console with both the launch of Xbox Cloud Gaming, our game streaming service, and continued investment in gaming hardware. Xbox Cloud Gaming utilizes Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology to allow direct and on-demand streaming of games to PCs, consoles, and mobile devices, enabling gamers to take their favorites games with them and play on the device most convenient to them.

Xbox enables people to connect and share online gaming experiences that are accessible on Xbox consoles, Windows-enabled devices, and other devices. Xbox is designed to benefit users by providing access to a network of certified applications and services and to benefit our developer and partner ecosystems by providing access to a large customer base. Xbox revenue is mainly affected by subscriptions and sales of first- and third-party content, as well as advertising. Growth of our Gaming business is determined by the overall active user base through Xbox enabled content, availability of games, providing exclusive game content that gamers seek, the computational power and reliability of the devices used to access our content and services, and the ability to create new experiences through first-party content creators.

Search Advertising

Our Search business, including Bing and Microsoft Advertising, is designed to deliver relevant online advertising to a global audience. We have several partnerships with other companies, including Verizon Media Group, through which we provide and monetize search queries. Growth depends on our ability to attract new users, understand intent, and match intent with relevant content and advertiser offerings.

Competition

Windows faces competition from various software products and from alternative platforms and devices, mainly from Apple and Google. We believe Windows competes effectively by giving customers choice, value, flexibility, security, an easy-to-use interface, and compatibility with a broad range of hardware and software applications, including those that enable productivity.

Devices face competition from various computer, tablet, and hardware manufacturers who offer a unique combination of high-quality industrial design and innovative technologies across various price points. These manufacturers, many of which are also current or potential partners and customers, include Apple and our Windows OEMs.

Xbox and our cloud gaming services face competition from various online gaming ecosystems and game streaming services, including those operated by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Tencent. We also compete with other providers of entertainment services such as video streaming platforms. Our gaming platform competes with console platforms from Nintendo and Sony, both of which have a large, established base of customers. We believe our gaming platform is effectively positioned against, and uniquely differentiated from, competitive products and services based on significant innovation in hardware architecture, user interface, developer tools, online gaming and entertainment services, and continued strong exclusive content from our own first-party game franchises as well as other digital content offerings.

Our search business competes with Google and a wide array of websites, social platforms like Facebook, and portals that provide content and online offerings to end users.

OPERATIONS

We have operations centers that support operations in their regions, including customer contract and order processing, credit and collections, information processing, and vendor management and logistics. The regional center in Ireland supports the European, Middle Eastern, and African region; the center in Singapore supports the Japan, India, Greater China, and Asia-Pacific region; and the centers in Fargo, North Dakota, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Puerto Rico, Redmond, Washington, and Reno, Nevada support Latin America and North America. In addition to the operations centers, we also operate datacenters throughout the Americas, Europe, Australia, and Asia, as well as in the Middle East and Africa.

To serve the needs of customers around the world and to improve the quality and usability of products in international markets, we localize many of our products to reflect local languages and conventions. Localizing a product may require modifying the user interface, altering dialog boxes, and translating text.

Our devices are primarily manufactured by third-party contract manufacturers. For the majority of our products, we have the ability to use other manufacturers if a current vendor becomes unavailable or unable to meet our requirements. However, some of our products contain certain components for which there are very few qualified suppliers. For these components, we have limited near-term flexibility to use other manufacturers if a current vendor becomes unavailable or is unable to meet our requirements. Extended disruptions at these suppliers could lead to a similar disruption in our ability to manufacture devices on time to meet consumer demand.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Product and Service Development, and Intellectual Property

We develop most of our products and services internally through the following engineering groups.

Cloud and AI, focuses on making IT professionals, developers, and their systems more productive and efficient through development of cloud infrastructure, server, database, CRM, ERP, management and development tools, AI cognitive services, and other business process applications and services for enterprises.

Experiences and Devices, focuses on instilling a unifying product ethos across our end-user experiences and devices, including Office, Windows, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Surface.

AI and Research, focuses on our AI innovations and other forward-looking research and development efforts spanning infrastructure, services, applications, and search.

LinkedIn, focuses on our services that transform the way customers hire, market, sell, and learn.

Gaming, focuses on developing hardware, content, and services across a large range of platforms to help grow our user base through game experiences and social interaction.

Internal development allows us to maintain competitive advantages that come from product differentiation and closer technical control over our products and services. It also gives us the freedom to decide which modifications and enhancements are most important and when they should be implemented. We strive to obtain information as early as possible about changing usage patterns and hardware advances that may affect software and hardware design. Before releasing new software platforms, and as we make significant modifications to existing platforms, we provide application vendors with a range of resources and guidelines for development, training, and testing. Generally, we also create product documentation internally.

We protect our intellectual property investments in a variety of ways. We work actively in the U.S. and internationally to ensure the enforcement of copyright, trademark, trade secret, and other protections that apply to our software and hardware products, services, business plans, and branding. We are a leader among technology companies in pursuing patents and currently have a portfolio of over 65,000 U.S. and international patents issued and over 21,000 pending worldwide. While we employ much of our internally-developed intellectual property exclusively in our products and services, we also engage in outbound licensing of specific patented technologies that are incorporated into licensees’ products. From time to time, we enter into broader cross-license agreements with other technology companies covering entire groups of patents. We may also purchase or license technology that we incorporate into our products and services. At times, we make select intellectual property broadly available at no or low cost to achieve a strategic objective, such as promoting industry standards, advancing interoperability, supporting societal and/or environmental efforts, or attracting and enabling our external development community. Our increasing engagement with open source software will also cause us to license our intellectual property rights broadly in certain situations.

While it may be necessary in the future to seek or renew licenses relating to various aspects of our products, services, and business methods, we believe, based upon past experience and industry practice, such licenses generally can be obtained on commercially reasonable terms. We believe our continuing research and product development are not materially dependent on any single license or other agreement with a third party relating to the development of our products.