Can you name one single, solitary, success Microsoft had in 2025? Think hard. It sure ain’t easy.

In the years that PCWorld has catalogued Microsoft’s wins, failures, and head-scratching “WTF” moments, there’s always been a mix of high points and lows. I went through our list or stories, polled colleagues, even queried Copilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT. Microsoft’s strongest victory? It made money, and a lot of it, even if few liked what it was doing.

Boy, doesn’t that sound apropos for 2025?

If you’re a Microsoft hater, grab a fork and dive in, for there’s enough steaming schadenfreude for all. For everyone else, better go searching for some crumbs of the holiday’s desserts. There’s not much here to celebrate.

Xbox Game Pass price hike: FAIL

Microsoft has made some bad decisions, but aiming a Halo plasma rifle at its foot and then pulling the trigger had to be one of its most consequential. That shot was fired Oct. 1, when Microsoft decided to raise the price of its Game Pass Ultimate subscription from $19.99/mo to $29.99/mo, with a price increase to the Game Pass PC as well. And it came only months after the “Xboxalypse” saw Microsoft jack up prices on Xbox consoles and hardware, too.

Fans went berserk, with many swearing and then swearing off Game Pass entirely. (It sounds very much like what happened after Microsoft gutted its money-saving Microsoft Rewards in 2023 — which the company later backed off of.) Still, while Microsoft has raised its price, Amazon is still selling Game Pass at the old price at the time I was writing this, weeks after Microsoft’s price increase. So at least there’s a loophole?

Microsoft’s politics comes under fire: WTF

Politics continues to color nearly every aspect of public life, and Microsoft’s fiftieth anniversary celebration and Build conference became two very public venues to criticize Microsoft’s actions on the world stage. Protesters broke in twice to the Seattle anniversary celebration, with one employee, Ibtihal Aboussad, claiming that Microsoft was profiting by selling AI products to the Israeli military, and contributing to the genocide in Palestine.

In August, Microsoft employees were fired after a sit-in at Microsoft’s headquarters with a similar message. Protesters disrupted a Build keynote by CEO Satya Nadella as well. But pro-Palestinian groups continued to make their voices heard through November at various Microsoft events. It was a WTF moment in the true sense of the words, as tech’s relationship with authoritarian governments came under scrutiny.

Meanwhile, co-founder Bill Gates and Nadella kissed up to President Trump at dinners at the White House, a display of obeisance to a president who tried and succeeded in deporting even naturalized citizens like Nadella himself. Still, Microsoft couldn’t (and didn’t) really do anything about the Trump tariffs, which panicked American taxpayers, businesses, and investors alike.

AI exhaustion: FAIL

In 2025, Copilot was everywhere…and that was just too much for many people. Microsoft had to justify its enormous investment into AI and responded by, er, “encouraging” users to use Copilot in almost every aspect of their daily lives. Of course, Copilot is now in the Office apps, Edge, and even the Xbox app. Is it useful as a productivity tool? As a writer, I tend to avoid it — but to be fair, there are examples of Copilot being used productively.

Nevertheless, it’s exhausting to try and even document the ways in which Microsoft has tried to inject Copilot into our daily lives. Here are a few, ridiculous examples: Do we need Copilot to have a face? Do we want Copilot (or Teams) in our cars? Did we need Notepad to have Copilot type letter by letter? Who wants an “agentic Copilot” which can shop for you? “No one asked for this,” indeed.

It was bad enough that we even wrote a story on how to turn off AI inside your PC.

Recall is too risky: FAIL

Politics aside, Microsoft also navigated a sharp, fundamental divide on whether AI was truly safe, let alone helpful. On one hand, Microsoft injected Copilot into just about everything it could, from apps and services, even if users really weren’t taking advantage of it. But that was AI in the cloud; Microsoft also had to come up with some way to convince consumers that AI made sense on the PC, too. Recall, which stored searchable snapshots of what was stored on your PC, was the answer.

But Recall was delayed while Microsoft worked out privacy issues, which then reserved it exclusively for Snapdragon processors before laptops powered by AMD and Intel chips finally received Recall, too. But by that time, the damage was done: an authoritarian government had come to power, consumers were suspicious of AI and resentful of Microsoft’s relentless Copilot marketing, and privacy issues were simply a very real concern. I recommended you remove Recall and I’m glad I did, but even then Microsoft’s AI efforts on the PC weren’t particularly impressive.

Windows 11’s 2025 improvements: FAIL

Recall aside, what was Microsoft’s greatest AI accomplishment on the PC for 2025? In October, I asked Microsoft technical fellow Steven Bathiche what it might be. His suggestion: Semantic search. And that might be right…but it’s not a real show-stopper, either.

Both Windows 11 24H2 and Windows 11 25H2 (whose differences were still confusing) introduced a revamped Start menu and tighter integration with Phone Link. To be fair, Microsoft added a number of smaller features to Windows, too: Click to Do, improvements to Windows Share, some tweaks to the Widget screen and so on… while removing more loopholes that allowed local accounts. Again: largely forgettable.

Microsoft did take some big swings: Copilot Vision did manage to help me through some unfamiliar applications, and my hope is that it continues to improve. But Copilot Vision and Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot both sounded much better in concept than what they actually achieved in practice.

Windows 11 Insider Program: FAIL

ZDNet’s Ed Bott spelled out what I’ve felt for most of 2025 but never actually put pen to paper: the Windows Insider program is a mess, and that’s being generous. There are four channels to roll out code, and none of those supply guarantees that the code they test will arrive on your PC in a timely fashion. Half the time it’s a coin flip over whether you’ll actually get it. That leaves everyone involved unsure whether Microsoft’s announcement of new features and new builds can even be tested.

Both Ed and I have also noted that basically the entire Windows Insider team, the people that helped found and shape the program, have recently moved on to other positions within Microsoft. With the oft-cited rumor that Microsoft axed its quality-assurance teams many moons ago, the fact that Microsoft’s beta teams have now given up (?) means that that a critical user-facing organization is being led by who, exactly? At some point Microsoft is going to have clean this up before moving on to Windows 12.

I’m not going to mark Microsoft down for Windows 12, incidentally. Users expected it, but Microsoft stayed silent. It also looks like Windows 11 26H1 won’t be testable unless you’re on a Snapdragon X2 Elite chip, which implies that Windows 12 may not land in 2026, either.

Copilot+ PCs: FAIL

Microsoft began with the AI PC, then moved to Copilot+ PCs. Neither particularly mattered, as sales of Copilot+ PCs plunged in early 2025 and Intel publicly acknowledged that customers were interested in older hardware, rather than their latest processors with NPUs inside.

The reasons, though, appear to be nuanced. Laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors inside them sold poorly, though Qualcomm’s market share was always far behind AMD or even Intel. For its part, Intel never really specified if customers preferred older processors because of poor “Arrow Lake” sales, or if they didn’t see the appeal of either the Core Ultra 100 or 200-series processors. Either way, it’s not like consumers have a choice when it comes to laptops; if virtually all laptop processors contain NPUs, end users will end up buying Copilot+ PCs anyway.

Still, the Copilot+ brand doesn’t have much to offer. AI features like Microsoft Recall never had much impact, and Microsoft pushed features like Copilot Vision, to all PCs, not just Copilot+ users. The biggest impact may come from Windows ML, designed to route “AI” tasks to a CPU, GPU, or NPU — whatever’s available and is best for the job.

Windows 10 transition: WIN

I’m giving Microsoft a win here, in part because what was advertised as a sharp, major transition between the (relatively) beloved Windows 10 and the (relatively) mediocre Windows 11 wasn’t the hard landing Microsoft originally made it out to be. Microsoft offered numerous avenues to remain on Windows 10 for another year, from paying a small fee to setting up Windows Backup, to, well, being forced to by the European Union. It could have been worse.

You could argue that Microsoft just delayed the inevitable, pushing out the Windows 11 transition to another year. But in a sense, it already occurred. If Microsoft is dead set on you using AI, but doesn’t care that much about AI beyond Copilot, and Copilot is already part and parcel of Microsoft 365 as well as the Copilot app, then it doesn’t really matter which OS you actually use.

Microsoft’s “Handheld Xbox”: FAIL

This was a tough call. I consulted my colleagues Adam Patrick Murray and Michael Crider for this one, both of who are more in touch with the handheld gaming scene than I am.

Adam: “The handheld itself was awesome, but the Xbox fullscreen experience was a fail.”

Crider: “Also, Microsoft already spread that UI to other handhelds, giving up its one real advantage right away.”

Adam: “Other than the fact that this is not an Xbox, it just doesn’t have the basic usability of either an Xbox or SteamOS, which is the real issue here.”

So, to recap: Microsoft’s “handheld Xbox” actually turned out to be third-party hardware (the Asus ROG Ally X) made by the Asus ROG team. Since the hardware was officially credited to Asus, I have to give them the victory here, while kind of wondering what all the Windows UI fuss was about. Bringing in other storefronts’ games was certainly nice, though, as was Microsoft’s attempt to streamline shaders in games.

Microsoft’s Surface desert: WTF

For the first time in well over a decade, I didn’t personally review a Surface device in 2025 — possibly because I became fed up with Microsoft’s pricing strategy and called it a ripoff, at least where the Surface Pro is concerned. To be fair, Microsoft suffered a self-inflicted Surface shortage: first refreshing the otherwise stellar Surface Laptop 7 as well as the Surface Pro 11 with Intel Core Ultra 200 (“Lunar Lake”) processors to appease businesses, and then offering smaller, fanless versions of both devices with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Plus chips inside. Our Swedish colleagues simply decided to buy the smaller Surface Pro and test it rather than wait for Microsoft’s offer to review it. Smart decision.

Then there was the revamped Surface Laptop with 5G, which felt like an afterthought. And adios, Surface charger — probably not the worst thing in the world.

I don’t really know what to make of Microsoft’s Surface strategy at the moment. I absolutely prefer an X86 chip for gaming, but Microsoft’s commitment to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips seems perfectly justified. The problem? I’m one of the few who believes it. With Panos Panay now drafting new devices for Amazon, and Microsoft absolutely fixated on AI software and services, Surface seems to be in limbo. Memo to Microsoft: start telling the world what Surface stands for in 2026.

Microsoft Making Money: WIN

The bottom line (ahem) is that Microsoft continues to rake in the cash, in part by upselling every organization it can into Azure and related services contracts. As you can see from the chart below, Microsoft annual revenue and net income continues to increase, and Microsoft’s share price (which we don’t care about, but others do) finished higher than when it began. In the past ten years, Microsoft’s share price has increased about 9 times versus 2015.

It must be noted, however, that I generated the above chart using Anthropic’s Claude AI, not Copilot.

Copilot drew me a nice line graph of Microsoft’s quarterly results, then crashed when I asked it for a bar chart instead. The resulting chart (below) looks nice, until you zoom in; Microsoft made $76.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 on $27.2 billion of net income. That’s way off from what Microsoft provided. It does make you wonder what people are paying for.

Let’s hope that 2026 isn’t worse

Insiders have been saying for years that Microsoft has stopped caring about the consumer, and is focused on businesses instead. Keep in mind that PCWorld focuses on the end users and mainly consumers. (Our sister business-to-business applications like Computerworld dive deeper into Microsoft’s successes there…and its failures, too.) Microsoft’s sales teams have convinced enterprises to pay big bucks for its cloud services, and those cloud services are worth far more than a bunch of cranky consumers.

Really, though, does anyone think that Microsoft is headed in the right direction? No one seems to be happy with Microsoft’s plans, decisions, and rollout schedule. The PC market is dealing with ongoing component shortages and price hikes, and the always looming threat of tariffs. In years past, initiatives like Surface have been the torch that Microsoft carried, illuminating the way forward. This year, it seems that Microsoft was as lost as everyone else.