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| Microsoft Corporation | |
| Type | Public |
| Slogan | N/A |
| Foundation | Albuquerque, New Mexico ( 1975) |
| Location | Redmond, Washington |
| Key people | William H. (Bill) Gates III, Chairman Steven A. (Steve) Ballmer, CEO Kevin R. Johnson , VP Marketing |
| Employees | 57,000 (2004) |
| Products | Microsoft Encarta Microsoft Money Microsoft Office Microsoft Project Microsoft Visio Microsoft Windows ( See full products listing. ) |
| Web site | http://www.microsoft.com/' class='external' title="http://www.microsoft.com/">www.microsoft.com
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Microsoft Corporation ( NASDAQ: [http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/SummaryQuote.asp?symbol= }&selected= } }]), headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, is the world's largest software company (with over 50,000 employees in various countries, as of May 2004). Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of software products for various computing devices. Its best known product is the Microsoft Windows operating system family, which has achieved near ubiquity in the desktop computer market.
The company's aggressive business practices have led to several government investigations, including a 19981998 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year of the Ocean''. Events January January 1998 A massive ice storm, caused by El Nino, strikes New England, southern Ontario and Quebec, resulting federal lawsuitMicrosoft was a widely publicized antitrust trial in which the US Department of Justice (DOJ), joined by twenty U. states, alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power in its handling of operating system sales and web browser sales. The DOJ and states fil in which it was found to have illegally leveraged its monopoly powerAlternate use: Monopoly (game In economics, a monopoly (from the Greek monos one + polein to sell) is defined as a market situation where there is only one provider of a product or service. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition fo to defeat its competitors; through appeals and negotiated settlements, Microsoft has mitigated the adverse effects of this ruling on its operations and financial status.
Main article: History of Microsoft WindowsEarly history This first independent version of Microsoft Windows, version 1. 0, released in 1985, lacked a degree of functionality and achieved little popularity. 0 did not provide a complete operating system, but rather extended MS-DOS and shared the la
Microsoft was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, under the company name Micro-soft, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters (initially for the MITS Altair 8800, whose manufacturer was already in Albuquerque). The name "Micro-soft" (short for microcomputer software) was used by Bill Gates in a letter to Paul Allen for the first time on November 29, 1975. "Microsoft" became a registered trademark on November 26, 1976. Microsoft's second (programming language) product was its Fortran compiler for CP/M, released in August 1977. The third was the MS COBOL compiler (for MS-DOS), released in April 1978. Both Gates and Allen ran a company called Traf-O-Data prior to starting Microsoft.
As the popularity of Microsoft BASIC shrunk, other manufacturers adopted its syntax to maintain compatibility with existing Microsoft BASIC implementations. Because of this, Microsoft BASIC became a de facto standard and the product dominated its market.
Microsoft's key moment came when in the late 1970s, IBM was planning to enter the personal computer market with its IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was released in 1981. IBM first approached Microsoft about its BASIC and asked them for an operating system. Since Microsoft did not have an OS, they suggested CP/M from Digital Research. IBM then approached Digital Research for a version of CP/M and spoke to Gary Kildall's wife Dorothy. IBM representatives wanted Dorothy to sign their standard non-disclosure agreement, which Dorothy considered overly burdensome. IBM then returned to talk to Microsoft. Microsoft licensed a cloned design of CP/M called Quick and Dirty Operating System, from Tim Paterson's Seattle Computer Products in order to sell it to IBM as the standard operating system for the IBM PC. Microsoft subsequently purchased all rights to QDOS for $50,000, and renamed it MS-DOS (for Microsoft Disk Operating System). Later, IBM discovered that Gates' operating system could have infringement problems with CP/M, contacted Kildall, and in exchange for a promise not to sue, made an agreement that CP/M would be sold along with IBMDOS when the IBM PC was released. The price set by IBM for CP/M was $250 and for MSDOS/IBMDOS it was $40. Obviously, MSDOS/IBMDOS outsold CP/M many times over, eventually becoming the standard. In contracting with IBM, however, Microsoft had retained the rights to license the software to other computer vendors as MS-DOS. The early 1980s saw a flood of IBM PC clones, and Microsoft was quick to leverage its position to dominate the operating system market. By marketing MS-DOS aggressively to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft gained unprecedented visibility in the microcomputer industry, even rivalling IBM.
During the following years, Microsoft used its growing resources to displace competitors such as WordPerfect, and Lotus 1-2-3, among many others. It is alleged (although never explained in detail) that Gates instructed Microsoft programmers to include special code in one of the MS-DOS versions to make Lotus 1-2-3 produce errors, making it appear to the users as if Lotus's software was the problem.
In the late 1980s, Microsoft and IBM partnered in the development of a more advanced operating system, OS/2. The operating system was marketed in connection with a new hardware design, the PS/2, that was proprietary and secret to IBM. On May 16, 1991 Bill Gates announced to Microsoft employees that the OS/2 partnership was over and Microsoft would henceforth focus its platform efforts on Windows and the NT kernel. In the ensuing years OS/2 fell to the side and Windows became the favored PC platform.
Software running on PC hardware was not necessarily technically better than the mainframe software that it replaced, but it was much less expensive. Microsoft's success rode on the PC boom.
Microsoft, now highly profitable, diversified into a wide variety of software products including:
In many cases, early versions of Microsoft software were buggy and inferior to their competition, but later versions improved rapidly and eventually overwhelmed their competitors by offering more features for a lower price. The best example of this is probably that of WordPerfect, which in the early 1990s appeared to have an unassailable dominance over the PC word processor market but eventually found itself in a distant second place.
Microsoft's focus on software usability was a large factor in its early successes. Some key aspects of this were:
Microsoft has devoted large amounts of money and effort to developing, integrating, and marketing its products and services. By the turn of the millennium, many of Microsoft's software products dominated their markets.
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