Microsoft Office 2000

Microsoft Office 2000 is a release of Microsoft Office, an office suite developed and distributed by Microsoft for the Windows family of operating systems. Office 2000 was released to manufacturing on March 29, 1999, and was made available to retail on June 7, 1999. It is the successor to Office 97 and the predecessor to Office XP.

New features in Office 2000 include HTML document creation and publishing, Internet collaboration features such as integration with NetMeeting, roaming user profile support, COM add-in support; an updated version of the Office Assistant, improved compliance with the year 2000, and interface improvements including personalized menus and toolbars that omit infrequently used commands from view. Office 2000 introduces PhotoDraw, a raster and vector imaging program, as well as Web Components. It is also the first version of Office to use Windows Installer for the installation process. It also comes with Internet Explorer 5 and uses its technologies as well.

Microsoft released five main editions of Office 2000 globally: Standard, Small Business, Professional, Premium, and Developer. An additional Personal edition exclusive to Japan was also released. All retail editions sold in Australia, Brazil, China, France, and New Zealand, as well as academic copies sold in Canada and the United States, required the user to activate the product via the Internet. Microsoft extended this requirement to retail editions sold in Canada and the United States with the availability of Office 2000 Service Release 1. However, product activation is no longer required as of April 15, 2003. Product activation would become a requirement for all editions of Office from Office XP onward.

Office 2000 is incompatible with Windows NT 3.51. Office 2000 requires Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 SP3 at the minimum. It is the last version of Office to support Windows 95 as its successor, Office XP, is not compatible with it.

Microsoft released three service packs for Office 2000 throughout its life cycle. The first update was called Service Release 1 (SR-1), while subsequent updates were referred to as service packs. Mainstream support for Office 2000 ended on June 30, 2004, and extended support ended on July 14, 2009.

Five main editions of Office 2000 were available, with an additional Personal edition with Word, Excel, and Outlook exclusive to Japan. A similar Basic edition for Office 2003 would later be released to all markets.

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. In 2016, it was the world’s largest software maker by revenue (currently Alphabet/Google has more revenue). The word “Microsoft” is a portmanteau of “microcomputer” and “software”. Microsoft is ranked No. 30 in the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company’s 1986 initial public offering (IPO), and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions, their largest being the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016, followed by their acquisition of Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in May 2011.

As of 2015, Microsoft is market-dominant in the IBM PC compatible operating system market and the office software suite market, although it has lost the majority of the overall operating system market to Android. The company also produces a wide range of other consumer and enterprise software for desktops, laptops, tabs, gadgets, and servers, including Internet search (with Bing), the digital services market (through MSN), mixed reality (HoloLens), cloud computing (Azure), and software development (Visual Studio).

Steve Ballmer replaced Gates as CEO in 2000, and later envisioned a “devices and services” strategy. This unfolded with Microsoft acquiring Danger Inc. in 2008, entering the personal computer production market for the first time in June 2012 with the launch of the Microsoft Surface line of tablet computers, and later forming Microsoft Mobile through the acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services division. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has scaled back on hardware and has instead focused on cloud computing, a move that helped the company’s shares reach its highest value since December 1999.

Earlier dethroned by Apple in 2010, in 2018 Microsoft reclaimed its position as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. In April 2019, Microsoft reached the trillion-dollar market cap, becoming the third U.S. public company to be valued at over $1 trillion after Apple and Amazon respectively.