The media and scientific community are busy with the new Microsoft announcement, following their paper published in Nature. As very often happens, the media reports are very different from the real scientific paper (I assume some marketing people are involved...).
Unlike Google and IBM, Microsoft chose a more risky and ambitious path to their quantum computer: topological materials. Instead of using a comparatively simple superconducting circle, they use very thin layers of materials connected, whose behavior as a qubit is supposed to be 100 to 1000 times more resilient to noise. These are called Majorana quasi-particles.
What Google and IBM are doing is to correct the noise in their system with various physical and software solutions, and Google's big announcement back in November was just about that. The Majorana announcement is that Microsoft is getting closer to their first single Majorana qubit (they are still not there). If they manage to have 1 qubit it may be equivalent to 100 or 1000 of the other qubits, because it is more immune to noise. 1000 "regular" qubits is at the front of what we can make today, but IBM is promising a bigger computer this year.
The physics' community is still skeptical about this announcement (read Prof. John Preskill on LinkedIn) and people are debating it. In any case, this is a long-term battle, and Microsoft still faces the challenge of growing its chip and scaling it to thousands of Majorana qubits to have a useful quantum computer.
The race to the first fault-tolerant computer is still open, and there may well be more than one winner. Microsoft technology is more on the exotic side but has its advantages. Other modalities (like Google's superconducting qubit or Quera Neutral Atom qubit) still seem to be more advanced.
You can watch this simple and fun video to understand the Majorana qubit: