Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company. It was founded in 1975 by Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They started the company to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.
The History
Bill Gates became the CEO of Microsoft and the name was derived from the words microcomputer and software. They refined BASIC and developed other programming languages for a few years. The company first entered the operating system with its own version of Unix caller Xenix.
Then in 1980 International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) asked Microsoft to produce the essential software or operating system, for its first personal computer, the IBM PC. So the company purchased the operating system from somewhere and modified and renamed that as MS-DOS which was released with the IBM PC in 1981. The company released the Microsoft Mouse and a publishing division named Microsoft Press in 1983.
Microsoft Expansion
Microsoft released Microsoft Windows in 1985 with a graphical user interface with many other features and went public in 1986 at $21 a share, raising $61 million. It became the world’s biggest personal-computer software company, based on sales. In 1995, Windows 95 made its debut which included innovations such as the Start menu (TV commercials for Windows 95 featured the Rolling Stones singing “Start Me Up”) and 7 million copies of the new product were sold in the first five weeks. Microsoft also introduced its web browser, Internet Explorer in the same year.
In 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice and 20 state attorneys general charged Microsoft with violating antitrust laws by using its dominance to drive competitors out of business; in 2001, the company imposed restrictions on its corporate practices as settlement. Microsoft released an update to its business line of software in Windows 2000 which provided a high level of stability, matching features in the consumer line of the Windows operating system including a DOS emulator that could run many legacy DOS applications.
The company released Xbox and entered the videogame console market in 2001. In 2006, it released the Zune series of digital media players. In 2007 the company sold the wired keyboard; Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000), mouse; IntelliMouse, and desktop webcam; LifeCam in the United States and also launched the Surface “digital table”, later renamed PixelSens.
Microsoft Moved Into Cloud Computing
Microsoft moved into cloud computing with the Windows Azure platform in 2008. In 2008 Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion, but Yahoo! rejected the deal but the negotiations continued and in 2009, they reached an agreement in which Yahoo! would use Bing for its Web site and would handle premium advertisements for Microsoft’s Web site.
Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 Billion to compete with Apple’s Facetime and Google Voice. This was the largest acquisition in Microsoft history. Microsoft rebranded its product range- corporation’s logos, products, services, and websites adopted the principles and concepts of the Metro design language in 2011-12.
I Want To Become Good Better Best In Life
In 2012 Microsoft sold its 50% stake in MSNBC.com, which it had run as a joint venture with NBC since 1996 and launched Windows 8 and opened many “holiday stores” in the U.S. to complement the increasing number of “bricks-and-mortar” Microsoft Stores that opened in 2012. In 2013, Microsoft suffered poor showings of both Windows 8 and the Surface tablet; which concerned the investors. Microsoft suffered a loss of more than US$32 billion.
New Ventures
In 2014, Microsoft acquired Nokia Devices and Services for $7.2 billion. In 2015, Windows 10 was released featuring Cortana which is a digital personal assistant capable of responding to voice commands (as did the iPhone’s Siri). It also released Microsoft Edge which replaced Internet Explorer. In 2016 Microsoft acquired career-focused social networking company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion.
In 2018, Toyota Tsusho started a partnership with Microsoft to create fish farming tools using the Microsoft Azure application suite for Internet of things (IoT) technologies related to water management.
In 2019 Microsoft Corp announced it will offer its cybersecurity service AccountGuard to 12 new markets in Europe, to close security gaps and protect customers in political space from hacking. Hundreds of Microsoft employees protested the company’s war profiteering from a $480 million contract to develop virtual reality headsets for the United States Army. In 2020, Microsoft released the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S video game consoles.
COVID -19 had a good impact on Microsoft Corporation. Its valuation came to near $2 trillion. The increased necessity for remote work and distance education drove up the demand for cloud-computing services and grew the company’s gaming sales.
