Microsoft in 2012, a year in review

During this past year, Microsoft has gone from a struggling monotonous giant, to a really exciting company with a fresh approach towards technology.

The Redmond company has had a tremendous year with launches across all of its major product lines. On the consumer side of things, this was the year of Windows 8. The new OS brought to market a radically different UI and improved core functionality and along with it came Windows RT, Microsoft’s tablet OS that brings the same new UI to the ARM architecture.

Microsoft also launched Windows Phone 8 that bring lots of important new features to users as well as great scalability for future enhancements. WP8 has launched on terrific hardware such as the Lumia 920 and the HTC 8X and by most accounts, it’s selling very well.

A new version of Office, Microsoft’s core business product, has also made an appearance this year. And even though it’s not yet on the market, users can go and try it out for free right now. The new version brings improvements across the board as well as better integration with Microsoft’s other products and a different licensing scheme for more flexibility.

2012 has been the year in which Microsoft has made some fundamental strategy shifts. It is now moving away from being just a software company and it’s transforming itself into a devices and services company. We’ve seen the first step in this direction with the launch of Microsoft’s first tablet: the Surface RT. This tablet comes with an awesome build quality, great design and true innovation in the form of the thin detachable keyboard that doubles as a protective cover.

Microsoft has also focused a lot on its existing services that received major upgrades during the year. Such is the case with SkyDrive that has received numerous enhancements over the year transforming it into a premier cloud storage service that has great integration with Microsoft’s other products. Xbox Music is another service that Microsoft has high hopes for. It launched a few weeks back and it brings users the ability to stream music over the internet as well as the ability to purchase tracks for their personal collection; it’s an all in one music solution from Microsoft.

Outlook.com is the last service we’ll mention, but it’s a great one. Microsoft has completely revamped their e-mail strategy scraping Hotmail and starting from scratch. They have managed to create a very clean, secure and easy to use webmail service, and users have responded in a great way to all of these improvements.

Be sure to check out the video below for a few of the things we've missed and stay with us as next year will probably be even better.