What is Microsoft?

The Microsoft Corp. is a multinational corporation whose major business is computers and software. The company is credited with bringing revolution to the computing industry (more specifically the personal computing) and helping shape it over the years to what it is today. The best answer to ‘what is Microsoft’, therefore, cannot be complete without an outline of the company’s developments since inception all the way to where it is today. Let’s delve right into it.

The Birth of Microsoft
We will begin answering what is Microsoft by discovering how the software giant came to be.
The name ‘Microsoft’ was coined from ‘Micro-soft’ which was the name Paul Allen thought up for the company. Paul Allen was Bill Gates’ friend from childhood, a fellow computer enthusiast and programmer with whom Gates teamed up to found the company. What is Microsoft today was a venture that was conceived in 1975 by Gates and Allen as a platform for creating and marketing interpreters of BASIC, one of the earliest computer programming languages, for the MITS Altair 8800 computer. Gates was immediately installed as CEO of the company. Gates and Allen had contacted MITS and declared that they had an interpreter that would work on the Altair 8800. When MITS demanded that they present it, they sat down and created a simulator of the Altair 8800 and an interpreter that worked on it almost overnight leading to their winning the contract. After some time developing interpreters for MITS, they hit the OS industry in 1980 with Xenix which was Microsoft’s version of UNIX.

If there was a product and more specifically an operating system that put the company on the roadmap, though, it was MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System). MS-DOS was born when Gates and Co. landed a contract to create an OS for the IBM PC following the collapse of negotiations with other providers. The operating system registered a lot of success due to ability to support lots of applications. After MS-DOS, Microsoft never looked back.

What Is Microsoft- cont..

Paul Allen quit the company in 1983 for health reasons and Bill Gates championed the way for Microsoft to become one of the largest companies in the world. Presently, the Microsoft’s flagship operating system, Windows, runs on nearly 80% of the world’s personal computers and the company remains the biggest software developer in the world. Gates has not missed from the top ten richest men list for decades.

The Tempestuous Rise, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Today and Beyond
Microsoft launched windows in 1984 whilst on a joint venture to develop OS/2 for the IBM PC. Windows was created to add a graphical user interface to MS-DOS. Windows is said to have borrowed (or copied) many ideas from OS/2 leading to and end of the partnership of IBM and Microsoft. 2 years later, main company headquarters was firmly established in Redmond, Washington and Microsoft was put on the stock market. The value of the stock was so great that it created billionaires and millionaires instantly.

The rise of Microsoft to glory was not a smooth one and many people have questioned if the company observed ethics on one too many occasions. The result of this that Microsoft has been engaged in numerous court battles for unfair practices, most of which the company has won due to lack of direct evidence though the lack of ethics seemed quite apparent.

What Is Microsoft- conclusion

Microsoft Office was unveiled in 1990 and Windows users took to it instantly. The popularity of Windows and the obvious compatibility of the office suite with Windows were the main pillars of success for the product though it did have innovative features not available on most of the competitors’ offerings. It was alleged by Novell that Microsoft left some of its API’s not registered in order to have ungainly advantage over other software developers. For this reason, Novell’s Word Perfect failed to gain ground over Microsoft Word, a package that is part of the Microsoft Office suite and a household name in word processing. Similar grudges have been shared by many of Microsoft’s competitors. Allegedly, Microsoft has taken aggressive measures to make it as hard as possible for other developers to create applications to run on Windows. Microsoft on their part, have vehemently denied these claims. Microsoft Windows and Office remain household names in their respective departments. Microsoft has diversified into mobile OS with Windows Phone, the gaming console market with the Xbox and Xbox 360 and the digital player market with the Zune player. For online services, the Windows Live portal has been created to compete with Yahoo! and Google.

Lessons?
Perhaps the most obvious lesson we can take from this story is that great things start from humble beginnings. Also, a successful endeavour is as a result of being willing to do anything to achieve.

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