Microsoft's Surprising Admission: Windows and Office Were Nurtured by Its Rivals

Microsoft today is known as a software giant with a market capitalisation exceeding 3 trillion US dollars. However, few would have guessed that the success of Windows and Office owes much to two of the company’s greatest rivals in the technology industry: Intel and Apple.

This surprising admission was made directly by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella whilst speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2026 earlier this month.

Nadella reflected on the company’s history, noting that past competition actually formed the foundation for Microsoft’s current success. He highlighted Microsoft’s close relationship with Intel, which gave rise to “Wintel” (Windows-Intel) dominance. According to him, without Intel’s chips, which served as the brains of IBM computers, Windows may never have been created or come to dominate the market.

Even more surprising, Nadella gave special credit to his eternal rival, Apple. “Without the Mac, I doubt whether Microsoft Office would ever have been created,” Nadella said, according to reports from Windows Central.

In fact, Microsoft’s flagship applications such as Excel and Word with graphical user interface (GUI) versions made their debut on Apple’s Mac computers, long before arriving on Windows. This occurred because Apple’s operating system at that time was far more visually appealing compared to Windows 1.0, which remained very rigid following the DOS era.

For Nadella, business is not a zero-sum game. The success of others does not mean failure for Microsoft, but rather an opportunity to “benefit” and add value to consumers.

The vision of a “software factory” left by founder Bill Gates, which has guided the company for decades, is recognised as no longer sufficient to address contemporary challenges. The company’s core focus now rests entirely on three new pillars: artificial intelligence (AI) transformation, security, and product quality improvement.

Speaking before Morgan Stanley investors, Nadella revealed that AI has transformed how office workers operate. He noted a massive surge in document creation on SharePoint and OneDrive thanks to the Copilot assistant. On the programming side, approximately 4 to 5 per cent of code now found in public GitHub repositories is claimed to be purely written by AI agents.