Providing ubiquitous desktop software for decades, Microsoft has come in for jibes, mockery and even loathing even as it has helped millions of people get things done.
Every design decision is felt around the world for better or worse — often staying with people for years as a fond memory or a meme.
A fixture since the very first versions of Windows — if mercifully much rarer these days — the Blue Screen of Death, or BSOD, is displayed when Microsoft’s operating system encounters a fatal error in a programme, or the application becomes unresponsive.
It has most commonly been a full blue screen with white text — originally composed by Steve Ballmer, who later went on to head the company — warning of the problem.
Some versions of the screen include error codes to help power users figure out what has gone wrong.
More recent editions of Windows have added a sad-face smiley in an apparent bid to sympathise.
While it has often offered the option to continue working by closing the programme or restarting the computer, many users have found the only way to escape it is by manually turning the machine off and on again.
Blissful background
In a breath of fresh air from previous versions of Windows, users booting up the 2001 “XP” edition were presented with a vision of lush, sun-dappled hills under a vivid blue sky.
For many who grew up using computers in the 1990s and 2000s, the idyllic desktop background now recalls a simpler time of after-school gaming or using still-novel online chat programmes to talk with friends.
Wine industry photographer Chuck O’Rear took what has been called “the world’s most-viewed picture” in 1996, after driving by a spot in California’s Sonoma County where vines had been torn up to fight the phylloxera pest.
Dubbed “Bliss”, the background can still be spotted in the wild today on systems that have not been updated in a while, and has spawned endless memes, parodies and now AI imaginings of what the rest of the scene might look like.
Inviting melodies
2001 was far from the beginning of Microsoft’s attempts to craft a soothing environment for PC users.
The 1995 edition of the operating system played ethereal startup chimes as the machine laboured into life.
Windows 95’s enchanting startup sound was crafted by electronic music legend Brian Eno, who told news site SFGate in 1996 that the piece was like “a tiny little jewel”.
Commissioned to make it “inspiring, universal, blah-bah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” Eno composed 84 clips before selecting the best — which was twice as long as the original three-and-a-quarter-second brief.
‘Helpful’ Clippy
Long before ChatGPT was helping to write essays or generate emails, Microsoft tried to back up users of its Office productivity suite with smart software.
From the late 1990s, an “Office Assistant” interactive animated character would pop up to offer help with the task it believed was at hand.
The best-remembered is chirpy paperclip “Clippy”, whose often mistaken assumption that Word users needed help writing letters spawned a million memes.
Assistant emerged from research suggesting that users experienced interactions with a computer like working with human colleagues.
It was a “truly tragic misunderstanding” of the study, interaction designer Alan Cooper later said.
“If people are going to react to computers as though they’re humans, the one thing you don’t have to do is anthropomorphise them,” he told broadcaster G4TV.
Nevertheless, nostalgics can find Clippy as the face of a ChatGPT-powered assistant for Windows 11 built by developers FireCube.
Secret flight simulator
Microsoft produces a highly detailed and well-loved series of games simply called “Flight Simulator” with recreations of real locations and aircraft.
Office workers without a joystick or high-end graphics card, though, could escape into a bizarre neon-tinged hilly landscape that they could fly around using only the mouse via a series of hidden inputs in Excel 97.
The scene, which also included the credits for the spreadsheet programme, is just one of dozens of hidden “Easter eggs” scattered through the company’s software over the decades.
Thailand, along with the rest of Southeast Asia, got some temporary relief when the U.S. President Donald Trump chose to delay his “Liberation Day” tariffs by 90 days. Now, the country’s U.S.-bound exports only have a 10% tariff, as opposed to the 36% threatened by Trump.
Asian markets have gone on a wild ride since Trump first unveiled his reciprocal tariffs on April 2, falling and rising according to the president’s statements. Thailand’s benchmark SET index fell by 9% between April 2 and April 9, only to rally after Trump announced his tariff pause. Still, the index has yet to recover from the “Liberation Day” hit.
“Reciprocal tariffs, we thought, were excessively high,” said Victor Cheng, the CEO of Delta Electronics Thailand, last week before Trump announced his tariff pause.
U.S. actions were causing “anxiety and great concern,” Cheng said, but noted that customers had yet to change or cancel any orders due to the tariffs and were instead adopting a wait-and-see attitude. Cheng added later, after Trump paused his tariffs, that customers are using the 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs to “stock up”.
The CEO also explained why his U.S. customers, and not his company, “will have to bear the extra tariff on top of the original selling price.” He points out that most of Delta Electronics Thailand’s products are classed as “free on board”, which means responsibility passes from the seller—his company—to the buyer—the U.S. customer.
Who pays for tariffs is a major political point in the debate around Trump’s trade policy, with the president and his supporters claiming that the foreign government or company pays for the tariffs. Most trade professionals note that, in fact, it’s the importer that pays: it may then pass some, if not all, of the extra cost to end-consumers. (Large importers, like Walmart, might also be able to force foreign suppliers to take a haircut on price)
Still, Cheng was concerned that steep U.S. tariffs would still indirectly affect his company, by placing additional burdens on his customers and spurring inflationary pressures.
“Tariffs will definitely have some impact. A mild level will be OK…but high tariffs beyond 15% will be difficult to take by any single party and will cause disruption,” Cheng said in a follow-up conversation after Trump’s tariff pause.
Chen noted that, in the days since “Liberation Day,” Thailand’s government had reached out to industry associations and individual companies to understand how tariffs would affect their business. He predicted that Thailand will lower tariffs on U.S. goods and purchase more U.S. commodities, while coordinating with its fellow Southeast Asian governments to negotiate with the U.S. as a bloc.
Thailand will send a delegation to the U.S to start trade negotiations next week, the government said on Monday.
Focusing on EVs and data centers
Delta Electronics Thailand makes and distributes electronics, namely power components, that are used in items including electric vehicles and data centers. The company currently works with European and U.S.-based carmakers, but Cheng said Delta Electronics Thailand is starting to explore working with Chinese EV makers that have set up manufacturing capacity in Thailand.
EV adoption is growing in countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, in part due to government incentives and the debut of affordable Chinese-made cars. Southeast Asia is proving to be an attractive market for Chinese carmakers, due to its proximity to China and its more Beijing-friendly policy stance.
Electric cars made up 33.6% of all new car registrations in Singapore last year, up from 18% in 2023, according to government data. In neighboring Malaysia, EV sales jumped 19% to break 45,000; EV sales more than doubled in Indonesia to reach 43,000 units.
Cheng was optimistic that Delta Electronics Thailand was going to be able to tap into that expanding demand.
“Here in Southeast Asia, we’ve seen some success with EV chargers. We’re seeing the sales of that—whether it’s AC or DC—gradually growing here,” Cheng explained.
Regarding its data center business, Delta Electronics Thailand said U.S. companies are a significant customer base but declined to give specific names beyond AI chip leader Nvidia.
What is Delta Electronics Thailand?
Delta Electronics Thailand is a subsidiary of Delta Electronics, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. A booming EV industry helped drive up revenues, profits and share prices, which at one point helped make the subsidiary more valuable than its parent company.
Delta Thailand Electronics also spent much of 2024 as Thailand’s most valuable company, with a peak market value of around $64.1 billion last November.
Yet Delta’s share price has been on the slide since then, particularly after the company reported lower-than-exported earnings in mid-February. The company’s shares have lost more than 50% of their value since the November peak. The SET has fallen just over 27% over the same period.
Yugi Takeshima, an equity research analyst at Maybank Securities, warned in a March report that rising costs and the uncertainty over how a new global minimum tax on corporate earnings could serve as a headwind to earnings growth.
The global minimum tax is meant to discourage multinational companies from booking excessive profits in low-tax jurisdictions, by ensuring companies pay a minimum level of tax on their income in each jurisdiction that they operate in.
Delta Electronics Thailand was previously subject to a 5.5% tax in 2023. That will rise to 15% starting this year as Thailand imposed a “top-up” tax in January as the country seeks entry into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Cheng has previously commented that Delta Electronics Thailand’s share prices may have been overvalued, noting that the price-to-earnings ratio had “gone through the roof.”
He reaffirmed that sentiment in his conversation with Fortune and noted that share prices had gotten “a little bit too speculative.”
Cheng said he was focused on “business fundamentals” amid the tariff situation. Delta Electronics Thailand’s revenue is still at a healthy level, he said, and still growing year-on-year. Revenue for 2024 reached 164.7 billion baht ($4.9 billion), a 12.5% increase from the year before. The company’s 2023 revenue of 146.4 billion baht ($4.4 billion) was 23.5% higher than 2022 and was driven by its Mobility Group (EV) segment.
But even as EV growth moderates, Cheng remains positive on AI-related infrastructure. At the start of the year, the company projected “double-digit revenue growth” driven by investments.
“AI build out is a big impetus for revenue support this year and we also see some positive benefit for profits as well,” he said.
Good morning! Blue Origin’s flight takes off, married women could be disenfranchised by new legislation, and there’s power in starting from scratch in the WNBA.
– Fresh start. The 2025 WNBA draft is today, and choosing players for the first time in a collegiate draft will be the Golden State Valkyries, the new expansion team starting play this season. It’s one of the only things the Valkyries are doing traditionally. The Bay Area-based team sold 10,000 season tickets—the first team in the league to do so. They signed a multi-year deal with Sephora, including naming rights for the team’s Oakland practice center, which will feature Sephora branding and products throughout its courts, locker room, and player lounge.
It’s been both harder and easier to achieve those milestones as a team building from scratch—the first to do so since 2008.
Valkyries GM Ohemaa Nyanin has seen the difference between a rebuild and a fresh start in action; she came to the Valkyries from the New York Liberty, an original WNBA franchise that was rescued from a near-death in 2019. “Recreating ‘What is Liberty basketball now?’ was really hard because people just wanted to see what they knew,” she says. “The difference here is we are creating what we want people to know. What is Valkyries basketball? We’re taking our sweet time to define that, because once you define it—coming from experience—it’s really hard to change it.”
Golden State Valkyries General Manager Ohemaa Nyanin, left, announces their new head coach Natalie Nakase, formerly a first assistant coach with the 2-time WNBA Champions, the Las Vegas Aces, at Chase Center in San Francisco on Thursday, October 10, 2024. Nakase joined the Aces in February 2022 to help head coach Beck Hammon led their team to back-to-back WNBA championships in 2022 and 2023 as well as the 2022 Commissioner’s Cup title. Nakase is the first Asian coach to lead a WNBA team. (Photo by Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Rather than focusing solely on basketball or business skills in hiring, Nyanin says her top priorities have been finding people with an entrepreneurial mindset and aptitude for problem-solving—although those skills have some overlap with the grit required in sports. “To be an entrepreneur is to create, to either thrive or fail, and regardless of the results, continue,” she says.
On the business side, president Jess Smith has been thinking equally creatively (see: that Sephora deal, plus another new one with United Airlines). Last year, she told me she was thinking about how the team can be bigger than basketball. Before the team had players, it had violet t-shirts and a partnership with the sports media brand Togethxr. Smith was considering a podcast. “What do those moments feel like when our brand is bigger than sport?” Smith said.
The Valkyries drafted most of their roster through an expansion draft in December, and with today’s collegiate draft (featuring projected No. 1 draft pick Paige Bueckers, who is expected to go to the Dallas Wings) will fill out the team. And they haven’t had to building everything from zero—the team has the same owners as the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
Nyanin and Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase know what they don’t want to replicate: “treating athletes as just athletes,” and not full people, is the worst habit they’ve seen elsewhere, Nyanin says.
“We can write our own story now, right?” Nyanin says. “We don’t have to inherit anything.”
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
Entertainment8 years ago