Microsoft
- Rohit Sule
• Introduction
• Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft's best-
known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, and the
Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface
lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States
corporations by total revenue;[2] it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2022. It is considered one of the Big Five
American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, and Meta Platforms
(formerly Facebook, Inc.).
• Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to
dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows. The company's 1986
initial public offering (IPO) and subsequent rise in its share price created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among
Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of
corporate acquisitions, the largest being the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016,[3] followed by their acquisition of
Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in May 2011.[4]
• As of 2015, Microsoft is market-dominant in the IBM PC compatible operating system market and the office software suite market,
although it has lost the majority of the overall operating system market to Android.[5] The company also produces a wide range of other
consumer and enterprise software for desktops, laptops, tabs, gadgets, and servers, including Internet search (with Bing), the digital
services market (through MSN), mixed reality (HoloLens), cloud computing (Azure), and software development (Visual Studio).
• Steve Ballmer replaced Gates as CEO in 2000 and later envisioned a "devices and services" strategy.[6] This unfolded with Microsoft
acquiring Danger Inc. in 2008,[7] entering the personal computer production market for the first time in June 2012 with the launch of the
Microsoft Surface line of tablet computers, and later forming Microsoft Mobile through the acquisition of Nokia's devices and services
division. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has scaled back on hardware and instead focused on cloud computing
, a move that helped the company's shares reach their highest value since December 1999.[8][9]
• Earlier dethroned by Apple in 2010, in 2018, Microsoft reclaimed its position as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.[10]
In April 2019, Microsoft reached a trillion-dollar market cap, becoming the third U.S. public company to be valued at over $1 trillion after
Apple and Amazon, respectively. As of 2022, Microsoft has the fourth-highest global brand valuation.
• Microsoft has been criticized for its monopolistic practices and the company's software has been criticized for problems with ease of use,
robustness, and security.
• 1972–1985: Founding
• Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business using their skills in computer programming.[12] In 1972,
they founded Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data. Gates enrolled
at Harvard University while Allen pursued a degree in computer science at Washington State University, though he later
dropped out to work at Honeywell.[13] The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems's (MITS) Altair 8800 microcomputer,[14] which inspired Allen to suggest that
they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device. Gates called MITS and claimed that he had a working interpreter, and
MITS requested a demonstration. Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter, and it
worked flawlessly when they demonstrated it to MITS in March 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. MITS agreed to
distribute it, marketing it as Altair BASIC.[11]: 108, 112–114 Gates and Allen established Microsoft on April 4, 1975, with Gates as
CEO,[15] and Allen suggested the name "Micro-Soft", short for micro-computer software.[16][17] In August 1977, the company
formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office of ASCII Microsoft.[18] Microsoft
moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington, in January 1979.[15]
• Microsoft entered the operating system (OS) business in 1980 with its own version of Unix called Xenix,[19] but it was MS-DOS
that solidified the company's dominance. IBM awarded a contract to Microsoft in November 1980 to provide a version of
the CP/M OS to be used in the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC).[20] For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called
86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products which it branded as MS-DOS, although IBM rebranded it to IBM PC DOS. Microsoft
retained ownership of MS-DOS following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981. IBM had copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, so
other companies had to reverse engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles, but no such
restriction applied to the operating systems. Microsoft eventually became the leading PC operating systems vendor.[21][22]:
210
The company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as with a publishing
division named Microsoft Press.[11]: 232 Paul Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after developing Hodgkin's lymphoma.[23]
Allen claimed in Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-founder of Microsoft that Gates wanted to dilute his share in the company
when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease because he did not think that he was working hard enough.[24] Allen later
invested in low-tech sectors, sports teams, commercial real estate, neuroscience, private space flight, and more.[25]
• 1985–1994: Windows and Office
• Microsoft released Windows on November 20, 1985, as a graphical extension for MS-DOS,[11]: 242–243, 246 despite
having begun jointly developing OS/2 with IBM the previous August.[26] Microsoft moved its headquarters from
Bellevue to Redmond, Washington, on February 26, 1986, and went public on March 13,[27] with the resulting rise
in stock making an estimated four billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.[28] Microsoft
released its version of OS/2 to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) on April 2, 1987.[11] In 1990, the Federal
Trade Commission examined Microsoft for possible collusion due to the partnership with IBM, marking the
beginning of more than a decade of legal clashes with the government.[29] : 243–244 Meanwhile, the company was at
work on Microsoft Windows NT, which was heavily based on their copy of the OS/2 code. It shipped on July 21,
1993, with a new modular kernel and the 32-bit Win32 application programming interface (API), making it easier
to port from 16-bit (MS-DOS-based) Windows. Microsoft informed IBM of Windows NT, and the OS/2 partnership
deteriorated.[30]
• In 1990, Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Office suite which bundled separate applications such as
Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.[11]: 301 On May 22, Microsoft launched Windows 3.0, featuring streamlined
user interface graphics and improved protected mode capability for the Intel 386 processor,[31] and both Office and
Windows became dominant in their respective areas.[32][33]
• On July 27, 1994, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division filed a competitive impact statement that said:
"Beginning in 1988 and continuing until July 15, 1994, Microsoft induced many OEMs to execute anti-competitive
'per processor licenses. Under a per-processor license, an OEM pays Microsoft a royalty for each computer it sells
containing a particular microprocessor, whether the OEM sells the computer with a Microsoft operating system or
a non-Microsoft operating system. In effect, the royalty payment to Microsoft when no Microsoft product is being
used acts as a penalty, or tax, on the OEM's use of a competing PC operating system. Since 1988, Microsoft's use
of per processor licenses has increased."[34]
• 1995–2007: Foray into the Web, Windows 95, Windows XP, and
Xbox
• Following Bill Gates' internal "Internet Tidal Wave memo" on May 26, 1995, Microsoft began to redefine its offerings and expand its product line into
computer networking and the World Wide Web.[35] With a few exceptions of new companies, like Netscape, Microsoft was the only major and established
company that acted fast enough to be a part of the World Wide Web practically from the start. Other companies like Borland, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM and
Lotus, being much slower to adapt to the new situation, would give Microsoft market dominance.[36] The company released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995,
featuring pre-emptive multitasking, a completely new user interface with a novel start button, and 32-bit compatibility; similar to NT, it provided the Win32
API.[37][38]: 20 Windows 95 came bundled with the online service MSN, which was at first intended to be a competitor to the Internet,[dubious – discuss] and (for
OEMs) Internet Explorer, a Web browser. Internet Explorer has not bundled with the retail Windows 95 boxes, because the boxes were printed before the
team finished the Web browser, and instead were included in the Windows 95 Plus! pack.[39] Backed by a high-profile marketing campaign[40] and what
The New York Times called "the splashiest, most frenzied, most expensive introduction of a computer product in the industry's history",[41] Windows 95
quickly became a success.[42] Branching out into new markets in 1996, Microsoft and General Electric's NBC unit created a new 24/7 cable news channel,
MSNBC.[43] Microsoft created Windows CE 1.0, a new OS designed for devices with low memory and other constraints, such as personal digital assistants.[44]
In October 1997, the Justice Department filed a motion in the Federal District Court, stating that Microsoft violated an agreement signed in 1994 and asked
the court to stop the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.[11]: 323–324
• Microsoft released the first installment in the Xbox series of consoles in 2001. The Xbox, graphically powerful compared to its rivals, featured a standard PC's
733 MHz Intel Pentium III [Link] January 13, 2000, Bill Gates handed over the CEO position to Steve Ballmer, an old college friend of Gates and
employee of the company since 1980, while creating a new position for himself as Chief Software Architect.[11]: 111, 228 [15] Various companies including Microsoft
formed the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance in October 1999 to (among other things) increase security and protect intellectual property through
identifying changes in hardware and software. Critics decried the alliance as a way to enforce indiscriminate restrictions over how consumers use software,
and over how computers behave, and as a form of digital rights management: for example, the scenario where a computer is not only secured for its owner
but also secured against its owner as well.[45][46] On April 3, 2000, a judgment was handed down in the case of United States v. Microsoft Corp.,[47] calling the
company an "abusive monopoly."[48] Microsoft later settled with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2004.[27] On October 25, 2001, Microsoft released
Windows XP, unifying the mainstream and NT lines of OS under the NT codebase.[49] The company released the Xbox later that year, entering the
video game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo.[50] In March 2004 the European Union brought antitrust legal action against the company,
citing it abused its dominance with the Windows OS, resulting in a judgment of €497 million ($613 million) and requiring Microsoft to produce new versions
of Windows XP without Windows Media Player: Windows XP Home Edition N and Windows XP Professional N.[51][52] In November 2005, the company's
second video game console, the Xbox 360, was released. There were two versions, a basic version for $299.99 and a deluxe version for $399.99.[53]
• Increasingly present in the hardware business following Xbox, Microsoft 2006 released the Zune series of digital media players, a successor of its previous
software platform Portable Media Center. These expanded on previous hardware commitments from Microsoft following its original Microsoft Mouse in
1983; as of 2007 the company sold the best-selling wired keyboard (Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000), mouse (IntelliMouse), and desktop webcam (
LifeCam) in the United States. That year the company also launched the Surface "digital table", later renamed PixelSense.[54]
• Versions of Microsoft Xboxes
300LX
