The 10 Biggest Microsoft News Stories Of 2025 (So Far)

AI, security and partner program changes are part of the list.

Artificial intelligence reaches more users. Security innovations and missteps. And, of course, changes to the programs that serve more than 500,000 partners worldwide.

CRN has put together some of the biggest news involving the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant so far in 2025. Plenty of time remains on the calendar for Microsoft to find more ways to evangelize the AI wave of business technology and flex its channel muscle for taking users to another level of productivity and security.

Microsoft News 2025

The work of Microsoft’s partners helped fuel $281.7 billion in revenue reported for the vendor’s fiscal year ended June 30. That marked an increase of 15 percent year over year.

Microsoft’s moves in AI and the channel also helped land Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella as No. 4 on CRN’s 25 Most Influential Executives Of 2025 list.

This Microsoft news list is part of a CRN series on the biggest headlines of 2025 so far in a variety of areas of concern to the channel. Be sure to see lists on The 10 Biggest Cisco News Stories Of 2025 (So Far) and The 10 Biggest AWS News Stories Of 2025 (So Far).

Read on for some of the biggest Microsoft news to rock the channel so far in 2025.

10. Microsoft AI Spending, DeepSeek

The cost to Microsoft to help bring AI into the mainstream has fascinated industry analysts for the eye-popping billions of dollars spent on data centers and components to keep up with AI demand.

The tech giant maintaining healthy margins and ending the fiscal year with more than $90 billion in cash and cash equivalents has kept overspending concerns at bay for now.

The year started with the market-rattling release of a powerful model possibly built for less capital than expected by China-based AI lab DeepSeek. Microsoft CEO Nadella welcomed the lab’s innovations at the time, saying that those innovations will get commoditized by the vendors and anything to help bring down the cost of AI is good for adoption.

9. Mass Microsoft Layoffs

While Microsoft invests heavily in AI infrastructure, the vendor has let go 15,000-plus employees. So far, Microsoft has portrayed the layoffs more as resource allocation and reduction in management layers than a sign of needing less people to do business in a generative AI world. CEO Nadella publicly revealed in April that AI writes as much as 30 percent of the company’s code.

But a reduction in head count is likely one impact from AI that many organizations will want to see to justify going all in on the technology, with many eager eyes on Microsoft as its own AI customer zero and early use case provider for ways AI can take enterprises to another level.

As for the impact of layoffs on the channel, outside anecdotal tales of solution providers losing a preferred partner development manager, it’s been hard to tell whether resource allocation within Microsoft has been a net-negative, especially with the incentive increases Microsoft launched for the new fiscal year.

Based on CRN’s analysis of public posts by people saying they were let go from Microsoft, the targeted jobs have spanned software engineers, product managers and workers related to the tech giant’s flagship Windows, Copilot and Azure offers. Some of the employees had worked with Microsoft for more than 20 years.

Earlier in the year, posts showed program managers and solution architects among the targeted positions.

8. Microsoft Partner Organization Changes

One of the first big moves for Microsoft this year was a major overhaul of its partner organization, moving the president of the vendor’s Europe, the Middle East and Africa business to take over the new Small, Medium Enterprises and Channel organization as president Feb. 1.

SME&C President Ralph Haupter (pictured) reports to Microsoft Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff. SME&C includes Global Partner Solutions (GPS), headed by Corporate Vice President and Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen. Dezen reports to Haupter. Kevin Peesker retired in March as Microsoft president of worldwide small and medium business and corporate markets.

With the new fiscal year, Microsoft has made further changes to its partner organizations, including the introduction of an Enterprise Partner Solutions group that oversees ISVs—which Microsoft now also calls software development companies—plus systems integrators that lead with enterprises.

A new global channel partner sales team serves solution providers associated with small and midsize businesses.

7. Microsoft Partners Make Moves On Windows 11, AI PCs

Oct. 14 marks the end of support for Windows 10, more than 10 years after Microsoft released the operating system and just over four years after the release of its successor, Windows 11.

Solution providers have been busy migrating users to the new OS or calculating whether users should pay Microsoft for another year of Win10 security upgrades. Some partners tell CRN that the OS migration coupled with the age-out of computers bought during the height of the global pandemic to accommodate a larger remote workforce has created an opportunity to try to sell users on new AI PCs with NPUs.

The higher price point for AI PCs has so far made them more of a luxury compared with other devices on the market, but some job roles benefiting from AI processing at the endpoint—including developers, content creators and C-suite executives—are getting NPU PCs.

The impact of global tariff negotiations under President Donald Trump will become clearer as the year goes on, with a big question hanging over the channel of whether customers ordered PCs earlier than intended to avoid price increases or if new PCs will see sustained demand throughout 2025 and into 2026.

In July, Windows 11 finally surpassed Windows 10 in market share with about 54 percent of users compared with 43 percent of users, according to Statcounter.

As for device sales, research firm IDC said in a July report that AI PC sales generated nearly $2 billion in revenue during 2025’s second quarter. This showed a significant shift in the product mix over the past year, with AI PCs going from less than 10 percent to more than 25 percent.

6. Microsoft Security Hits And Misses

Microsoft continues to grow its security business—an opportunity for solution providers—while delivering on areas of its Security First Initiative and, on the other hand, staying in the headlines as a frequent target of cyberattacks.

The vendor has reached nearly 1.5 million security customers, as revealed in the July quarterly earnings report. Defender now secures nearly 2 million generative AI apps, and Microsoft’s Purview data governance and compliance offers are used by three-quarters of Microsoft 365 Copilot customers.

Other milestones revealed during the year include Microsoft’s Entra identity offering now has more than 900 million monthly active users.

On the innovation front, this summer Microsoft began a series of security and resilience services and updates that aim to help Windows device users that experience unexpected events such as 2024’s faulty CrowdStrike update that downed more than 8 million Windows devices. The services and updates leverage learnings and feedback provided by vendor rivals and partners in the space, including CrowdStrike itself.

The updates include a private preview of the Windows endpoint security platform, allowing those partners to build products and services to run outside the Windows kernel and run in user mode as if they were applications.

And as the company behind some of the most popular applications in workplaces, perhaps the biggest negative headline around the security of Microsoft products came in July with a cyberattack campaign known as “ToolShell,” where threat actors are exploiting a pair of vulnerabilities that impact on-premises SharePoint servers.

More than 400 systems have been compromised in the widespread cyberattacks, including the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration.

5. Microsoft Surpasses $4 Trillion With Help From Cloud Surge, VMware Migrations

Interest in the cloud as the vehicle for achieving AI results and a major migration opportunity for Microsoft users looking to move legacy workloads from companies including VMware to Microsoft Azure have given the tech giant and its partners renewed opportunities to grow a cloud business that some analysts described as mature and fully penetrated before the AI hype cycle.

Azure’s 39 percent growth year over year, beating expectations, helped Microsoft break a milestone in becoming the second in history to hit a $4 trillion market capitalization. This came weeks after Nvidia became the first company to achieve the milestone and a year and a half after Microsoft reached $3 trillion.

Plenty of solution providers have told CRN about the surge in activity by VMware users looking for alternatives due to price changes enacted in the wake of Broadcom’s November 2023 purchase of the virtualization vendor. Microsoft has been one of those popular alternative options, along with Nutanix and IBM’s Red Hat.

4. Agentic AI Catches On

Some AI watchers believe that agents—AI software running autonomously and making decisions on behalf of the user—are a key component for bringing the emerging technology to the mainstream.

Microsoft CEO Nadella has kept the public updated on growth in the vendor’s agentic offers, including a milestone of tens of thousands of organizations already using Microsoft researcher and analyst deep-reasoning AI agents in the first weeks of availability and customers creating 3 million agents using SharePoint and Copilot Studio.

More than 10,000 organizations have used Microsoft’s Azure AI Agent Service to build, deploy and scale agents. And the code review agent in GitHub Copilot has reviewed more than 8 million requests, among other signifiers that Microsoft customers are interested in agentic AI.

3. Microsoft AI Apps Growth

Pulling back from AI agents and just asking how far along is the broader AI era—and what’s the net impact of AI on businesses and organizations—depends on who you ask and your sports metaphor of choice. The answers can range from second quarter to middle innings since AI chatbot ChatGPT first dazzled the world in November 2022.

But Microsoft’s frequent updates throughout the year on growing usage and consumption of its AI products is one indicator that AI is making an impact. Consultative engagements with customers around where AI can hurt and where AI can harm an organization, plus the piloting of AI projects and promise of continual tweaking of AI once in production, all signal revenue opportunities for solution providers that are able to navigate this next great technological wave.

Microsoft’s latest quarterly earnings report included such milestones as 100 million monthly active users for the broader Copilot AI product portfolio and more than 800 million monthly active users using AI functionality through a product that isn’t GenAI-specific, such as AI-powered summarizations in the Teams collaboration application.

2. Spotlight On Partner Program ‘Execution,’ Vendor Digital Sales Concerns

Even with all the partner opportunities from AI, cloud migrations and users investing in cybersecurity, execution in Microsoft’s channel motion caused enough concern with the tech giant’s leaders to warrant rare public comments by CFO Amy Hood (pictured) on quarterly earnings calls this year.

In January, Hood said that non-AI Azure sales saw “go-to-market execution challenges” in the vendor’s “scale motion.” Hood said that “primarily, these are customers we reach through partners and through more indirect methods of selling.”

Although she was describing issues that started in 2024, April’s earnings call saw Hood tell analysts that “we still have some work to do in our scale motions,” but “things were a little better” in the quarter ended March 31.

While Microsoft has denied an increase in activity by the Vendor Digital Sales program that “identifies upsell and cross-sell opportunities with small and medium businesses” and “connects those opportunities to partners,” CRN has heard anecdotal examples from solution providers during the year of a perceived ramp-up by VDS—an indicator to partners about the importance of increasing spending by existing customers.

1. Microsoft’s Partner Program Changes

Solution providers have told CRN time and time again that Microsoft’s yearly tweaks to its partner programs can be hard to keep up with and hard to understand.

Partners will be assessing over the coming months the net effect of new and more incentives Microsoft has made available in AI, security and other parts of the portfolio while navigating new eligibilityrequirements and other changes to the program.

Microsoft’s new fiscal year started July 1, and with it came a host of new incentives ranging from increased funding for Copilot offerings by 50 percent and a 15 percent funding boost to security offerings.

Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to make new incentive eligibility requirements for Cloud Solution Provider authorization go into effect Oct. 1.

Some of those requirements include a minimum of $1,000 billed revenue at the reseller tenant level over the trailing 12 months for “indirect reseller” partners plus mandatory Partner Center security score requirements and caps on a variety of partner benefits including a cap on Signature Cloud Support benefit at 50 technical cloud support tickets per partner, per year, which went into effect in June.