Artificial intelligence. Copilots. Layoffs. And, of course, plenty of service outages.

So far, 2023 has been a landmark year in Microsoft’s nearly 50-year history as a tech vendor.

With a market capitalization of about $2.5 trillion and $198.3 billion in revenue for the 2022 fiscal year, the tech giant has the coffers and the manpower to continue its reign as a leader in generative AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity and all the most talked about enterprise technology.

[RELATED: The Top 10 Biggest Google Cloud News Stories Of 2023 (So Far)]

Microsoft Top News Of 2023

Satya Nadella, CEO of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, has kept generative AI at the forefront of the vendor’s strategy this year and frequently publicly mentioned offerings from Microsoft and OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed organization behind text-generator ChatGPT and image-generator Dall-E.

“We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth, with powerful copilots designed to remove the drudgery from our daily tasks and jobs, freeing us to rediscover the joy of creation,” Nadella said in March.CRN has ranked the biggest news items from Mcirosoft so far this year in order of importance to the channel.

This recap touches on some of the biggest news items from Microsoft this year, including:

*The post-pandemic business slowdown

*Layoffs at HoloLens, GitHub and other teams

*AI-powered Bing

*Microsoft 365 Copilot

*Microsoft Fabric

*Google calling Microsoft anti-competitive

Here’s what else you need to know about Microsoft’s 2023 so far.

CRN has also recapped the biggest news stories so far for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Cisco.