Microsoft

Amazon plans to get to net-zero emissions by 2040, Microsoft vowed to go carbon negative by 2030, and Lyft plans to have an entirely electric fleet of vehicles by 2030.
Other U.S. companies that might make a retaliatory short list include Amazon Web Services, which has a cloud services joint venture in China; Apple, which has huge markets and supply chains in China; and Microsoft, which has major markets, research and development, and supply chains in China.
Microsoft launched 'Transform to Net-Zero' - a new corporate alliance which will provide businesses with the roadmaps they need to achieve net-zero emissions by or before 2050.
The global edge computing market is set to be worth $6.72 billion by 2022, with blue chip companies such as Microsoft investing billions more into the rapidly emerging edge computing revolution.
By the end of 2020, several types of quantum computer will be available through cloud services hosted by Amazon and Microsoft.
Several large technology firms, such as IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, are heavily invested in blockchain technology development, and the World Economic Forum estimates that, by 2025, 10% of the global gross domestic product will be stored on blockchain technology.
Indonesia and India will be crucial to Tencent's ambition to expand its cloud footprint and chip away at the dominance of Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud.
Cloud platforms, including software as a service (SaaS), data platforms as a service and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), will be a $250 billion market in 2020, with top providers, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, duking it out.
The global demand for Microsoft Windows laptops has grown significantly in early 2020 and will surge further all through March and later in 2020.
The next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft will launch at the end of 2020, ushering in a new phase of growth for the market.
In 2020, the cloud giants, Amazon, Microsoft and Google will continue to roll out a variety of features and APIs that advanced SDWAN solutions can leverage to enhance their functionality.
The growth of technologies like AI-as-a-service (from Microsoft, IBM Watson, etc.), more training data for models, and hardware like Intel's on-device AI chips will ensure that AI continues to expand its dominance.
New consoles from Sony and Microsoft will go head-to-head with new entrants using entirely different methods of distribution.
In the video game industry, 2020 is expected to see the launch of the next generation of video game consoles, with both Microsoft and Sony Interactive Entertainment poised to release the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles near the end of the year, respectively.
With the local Microsoft Azure cloud officially live as well as the Huawei cloud being available locally, the AWS and Oracle clouds coming soon, and VMWare partnering with everyone, cloud is rapidly gaining pace in South Africa and is set to grow to R23.6 billion by 2023.
Five of the most valuable companies in the U.S. economy-Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft - have all faced regulatory action in Europe, and that's likely where the most pressure will continue to come from.
Imagine a Google or Apple or Microsoft twice the size it is today, exceeding a quarter of a billion dollars of revenue a year.
With cloud software proving to be a booming new trend in the tech space, that will lead to even more competition between big players, such as for the $10 billion Pentagon JEDI contract earlier this year, where Microsoft won out on the deal over Amazon.
2019 will be the year where hyper scale infrastructure companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook will increase the investments in custom chips based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and application specific integrated circuits.
Expect more investment in technology from Starbucks, which this year announced a partnership with Microsoft; inked a deal with Brightloom; and put $100 million in Valor's tech-focused Siren Ventures Fund.
Google will pump more than $10bn into offices and data centres across the US this year as it gears up for a fight with rival clouds Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure.
If AWS makes SageMaker Studio and SageMaker Autopilot generally available this year while porting the ML platform to AWS Outposts as a managed service, there are bright chances that Amazon will be positioned alongside Google and Microsoft.
Microsoft has promised to remove as much carbon as it has put into the atmosphere by 2050 - a goal critics say is undermined by the tech-giant' s ongoing contracts with some of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

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Last updated: 13 September 2020