Mary Jo Foley looks back on an important 16 years of covering Microsoft for ZDNET

When Mary Jo Foley began writing for ZDNET in 2006, Bill Gates was still Microsoft’s CEO, Windows and Office software were the company’s nexus, and Microsoft was the world’s fourth-largest business by market capitalization — trailing giants like Exxon, General Electric and Walmart.

Today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella runs a much different company that has cloud services as the heart of the enterprise.

Microsoft is now the world’s third-largest company by market capitalization, but tech companies now dominate five of the top six spots — with Apple, Google, Amazon and Tesla in the mix.

Microsoft generated revenue of $44 billion in 2006. This will more than quadruple to over $198 billion in 2022.

Also: Office corporate vice president Joe Belfiore is leaving Microsoft after 32 years

Accounting for all the Microsoft product changes, business changes, executive changes, and company culture changes over the years, Foley is perhaps the most reliable, consistent, and valuable source of Microsoft information in the world.

It was an amazing run. Of course, all good things come to an end and Mary Jo’s time at ZDNET comes to an end as she heads to the consultancy Microsoft guidance in November to become its editor-in-chief.

ZDNET is very grateful to have been the platform for Mary Jo’s outstanding reporting over the past decade and a half, and we’re excited for her in her exciting new role at Directions on Microsoft. Of course, we will continue to follow her reports, as will many of you!

Also: Microsoft warns that the Raspberry Robin USB worm has affected nearly 1,000 organizations this month

To put a final exclamation point on all of her great work at ZDNET, I interviewed Mary Jo to talk about the amazing timeline she covered in Microsoft’s transformation. The video is at the top of this article: If you’re a Mary Jo Foley fan, you don’t want to miss this!