Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 (codenamed Office 14) is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite for Microsoft Windows. Office 2010 was released to manufacturing on April 15, 2010, and was later made available for retail and online purchase on June 15, 2010. It is the successor to Office 2007 and the predecessor to Office 2013. Research and development of Office 2010 began in 2006, before the release of its predecessor.

Office 2010 introduces user interface enhancements including a Backstage view that consolidates document management tasks into a single location. The ribbon introduced in Office 2007 for Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word is the primary user interface for all apps and is fully customizable in Office 2010. Other new features include extended file format support;co-authoring features that enable multiple users to share and simultaneously edit documents;OneDrive and SharePoint integration; and security improvements such as Protected View, a read-only, isolated sandbox environment to protect users from potentially malicious content. It also debuted Office Online—formerly Office Web Apps—a collection of free web-based versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word. Office Starter 2010, a new edition of Office, replaced Microsoft Works.Office Mobile 2010, an update to Microsoft’s mobile productivity suite, was released on May 12, 2010 as a free upgrade from the Windows Phone Store for Windows Mobile 6.5 devices with a previous version of Office Mobile installed.

Office 2010 is the first version of Office to ship in two variants for IA-32 and x64, but the x64 version is not compatible with Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. It is also the first version to require product activation for volume license editions. Office 2010 supports Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Vista SP1 or a later version, though it could be installed on older service packs of XP through a registry exploit. It is the last version of Office compatible with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 as its successor, Office 2013, does not support these operating systems.

Reception to Office 2010 was generally positive, with critics praising the new Backstage view interface, the new customization options for the ribbon, and the incorporation of the ribbon into all apps. While sales were initially lower than those of its predecessor, Office 2010 was a success for Microsoft and surpassed the company’s previous records for adoption, deployment, and revenue. As of December 31, 2011, approximately 200 million licenses of Office 2010 were sold, before its discontinuation on January 31, 2013.

Mainstream support for Office 2010 ended on October 13, 2015, extended support will end on October 13, 2020.

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.