Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebrations tainted by the company’s role in the genocide in Gaza

Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and in honour of this milestone, Bill Gates has published a blog post about the first code the company ever wrote.

In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home.

Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new ways to make life easier and work more productive. Making it 50 years is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn’t have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella—along with the many people who have worked at Microsoft over the years.
↫ Bill Gates

There’s obviously no denying the impact Microsoft has had on the computer industry and the world as a whole, and a lot of that impact is not exactly what you would call positive. I find the fact that the blog post by Gates is nothing but JavaScript that slows down some browsers and devices, breaks page up/page down navigation for some people, does not allow for text selection, and whose source code is just a bunch of scripts without any of the actual text is a biting metaphor for the role Microsoft has played in the industry.

Making today’s celebrations even more biting is the fact that Microsoft’s role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza is causing a lot of unrest within the company. Twice now today, presentations and talks by Microsoft’s current and former CEOs have been interrupted by Microsoft employees protesting Microsoft’s contributions to the genocide in Gaza, and before the day’s over there will probably be more incidents like these. One of the Microsoft employees who protested, Ibtihal Aboussad, also sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees, detailing why Microsoft employees are protesting today.

My name is Ibtihal, and for the past 3.5 years, I’ve been a software engineer on Microsoft’s AI Platform org. I spoke up today because after learning that my org was powering the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice. This is especially true when I’ve witnessed how Microsoft has tried to quell and suppress any dissent from my coworkers who tried to raise this issue. For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil. There was simply no other way to make our voices heard.
↫ Ibtihal Aboussad

It goes without saying that Ibtihal Aboussad can probably go and clean out her desk after this, but giving up what must be a high-paying job – and possibly risking worse under the current Trump regime – for standing up and protesting an ongoing genocide is nothing but praise-worthy and noble. It obviously won’t stop the genocide or make Microsoft even blink, but it’s better than doing nothing, and it does painfully highlight how many other Microsoft employees remain silent while the company they work for does an IBM.

I don’t really care about Microsoft’s 50th anniversary. Look at any of the company’s current products – Office, Windows, the “AI” stuff – and there’s clearly nothing left. They’re empty shells of what they used to be, hollowed out, their contents replaced with upsells, dark patterns, cruft, and “AI” nonsense nobody wants. But hey, at least Microsoft is creating synergies to make eradicating Gazans easier.

Here’s your party popper.