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Happy Holidays from Microsoft

It’s been an incredible year for us at Microsoft. January started with our big Windows 10 launch, the product of a lot of late nights from Satya and Terry. It went great! We finally showed the world we’re serious about fixing Windows 8’s issues, while guaranteeing that the ungodly horrors of Windows 9 never see the light of day.

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Rudolph the Redmond Reindeer

Happy holidays to our friends and family!

It’s been an incredible year for us at Microsoft. January started with our big Windows 10 launch, the product of a lot of late nights from Satya and Terry. It went great! We finally showed the world we’re serious about fixing Windows 8’s issues, while guaranteeing that the ungodly horrors of Windows 9 never see the light of day.

On the mobile side, there’s been some heartbreak. We had a rough, expensive breakup with Nokia. But we’re coming out of it stronger and wiser from the heartbreak. (The new Adele album is great, by the way.) Panos pointed out the other day that we’ve been working on one phone OS or another for five years! Hard to believe, although we’re pretty sure we’ve nailed it with Windows 10 Mobile. Universal apps means it can do anything a Windows desktop can do. (That’s right, spreadsheets!) It still can’t run Android apps, but this was the year we finally got a beta version of Instagram. By next year, we might even have Snapchat. You gotta dream big!

Gaming has also been big, as we pressed reset on the Xbox One and took a big leap into VR with the HoloLens. It was a big hit at the keynote, but we’re still keeping pretty quiet about what it does and what it’s for. First-person shooters? Cloud data visualizations? We’re not allowed to say much, but if you’ve ever wanted to feel physically surrounded by emails, stay tuned.

And that’s not even getting into all the new hardware. We can chamfer things too, you know. This year, we put out a new fitness tracker, a bunch of phones, and a new Surface Book with a crazy hinge. I don’t want to jinx it, but people are saying it’s a shoo-in for Hinge of the Year.

Of course, it’s hard to stay focused, particularly during the holidays, so we’re taking time away from the daily grind to remember what got us into this in the first place: the cloud. The cloud has been great to us in 2015, and we think it will be even better in 2016. Thanks cloud! And thanks to all of you, for staying with us through it all.

With love,

Microsoft

P.S. Go Clippers!

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