Microsoft the company history

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft retained the right to sell the operating system to other companies and to consumers, while IBM could not. Neither company could have foreseen the value of this arrangement: as other manufacturers developed hardware compatible with the IBM PC, and as personal computing became a multibillion-dollar business, the fast and powerful MS-DOS became the industry's leading operating system, and Microsoft's revenues skyrocketed.

The year also saw the arrival of Steve Ballmer, a close friend of Gates from Harvard, who was hired to organize the non-technical side of the business. Ballmer later recalled the company's stormy beginnings under Gates's leadership: "Our first major row came when I insisted it was time to hire 17 people.

He claimed I was trying to bankrupt him. In the company was incorporated as Microsoft, Inc. Two years later Allen left Microsoft after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.

He remained on the board of directors and continued to hold more than 10 percent of the company's stock. Also in Microsoft launched a word processing program, Word 1. Simpler to use and less expensive than WordStar, Word used a mouse to move the cursor and was able to display bold and italic type on the screen. Nevertheless, some users felt that the product was too complex--designed for software engineers rather than business users--and it was quickly surpassed in the market by WordPerfect, released by the WordPerfect Corporation.

Word did not become a success until its greatly improved version 3. Throughout its history, Microsoft has been known for releasing products that were initially unsuccessful but eventually grew to dominate their categories.

Many reviewers have been harsh in their criticism: David Kirkpatrick, writing in Fortune, described the first release of one product as a "typically unreliable, bug-ridden Microsoft mess," while Brent Schlender noted in the same magazine that "from its beginnings, Microsoft has been notorious for producing inelegant products that are frequently inferior and bringing them to the market way behind schedule. Microsoft worked closely with Apple during the development of Apple's Macintosh computer, which was introduced in Revolutionary in its design, the Mac featured a graphical user interface based on icons rather than the typed commands used by the IBM PC, making its programs simple to use and easy to learn, even by computer novices.

Convinced that the Mac's graphical user interface represented the future of end-user applications, Gates sought to develop an interface manager to work on top of MS-DOS that would convert the operating system to a graphical model that would be user-friendly and provide a single method for interacting with the many non-standardized programs designed to run on the system. Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, Digital Equipment Corporation, and others announced their support for the project, called Microsoft Windows, while IBM, in the face of this opposition, threw its weight behind VisiOn, a similar product already being marketed by VisiCalc, while working to develop its own program, called TopView.

Plagued by delays in development, the release of Windows was repeatedly rescheduled throughout and , causing tensions at Microsoft and with other software publishers who were forced to delay releases of the applications they were designing for the system. Finally released in November , after some , hours of frantic work by programmers, Windows faced a disappointing reception. The system was slow, few applications were available to run on it, and customers delayed purchase decisions while waiting for the introduction of TopView.

In Microsoft also introduced Excel 1. In early Microsoft moved to a new acre corporate campus in Redmond, Washington, near Seattle. Designed to provide a refuge free of distractions for those whose job was, in Gates's words, to "sit and think," the campus was nestled in a quiet woodland setting and reflected huge expenditures for tools, space, and comfort. Buildings were designed in the shape of an X to maximize light, with each programmer given a private office rather than a cubicle.

The buildings featured many small, subsidized cafeterias, as well as refrigerators stocked with juice and caffeinated beverages. The self-contained, collegiate surroundings were carefully designed to promote the company's distinctive culture, which one commentator described as a close approximation of "math camp. Employees were hired on the basis of sheer intelligence, with the company selecting only a small fraction of applicants from the more than , resumes it received each year, and were expected to work brutal schedules to bring products to market as quickly as possible.

Microsoft paid salaries that were distinctly lower than elsewhere in the industry, even to their senior executives, but compensated with generous stock options that made thousands of Microsoft employees millionaires. At the same time, the company tried to maintain a small company mentality, in which executives traveled coach class, the necessity of additional staff positions was closely scrutinized, and other unnecessary expenditures were vigilantly avoided.

The following year Microsoft released its first CD-ROM product, Microsoft Bookshelf, a collection of ten reference works, as well as Excel for Windows, its first application for the new operating system. Microsoft also purchased Forethought, Inc.

In November Microsoft introduced Windows 2. On April 3, , a judgment was handed down in the case of United States v. Department of Justice in The company released the Xbox later that year, entering the game console market dominated by Sony and Nintendo.

Released in January , the next version of Windows, Windows Vista, focused on features, security, and a redesigned user interface dubbed Aero.

Relatively strong sales of both titles helped to produce a record profit in Bill Gates retired from his role as Chief Software Architect on June 27, , while retaining other positions related to the company in addition to being an advisor for the company on key projects.

On February 12, , Microsoft announced its intent to open a chain of Microsoft-branded retail stores, and on October 22, , the first retail Microsoft Store opened in Scottsdale, Arizona; the same day the first store opened, Windows 7 was officially released to the public. As the smartphone industry boomed beginning in , Microsoft struggled to keep up with its rivals Apple and Google in providing a modern smartphone operating system.

Microsoft is a founding member of the Open Networking Foundation started on March 23, The nonprofit organization is focused on providing support for a new cloud computing initiative called Software-Defined Networking.

The initiative is meant to speed innovation through simple software changes in telecommunications networks, wireless networks, data centers and other networking areas. On July 31, , Microsoft launched the Outlook. On September 4, , Microsoft released Windows Server On October 1, Microsoft announced its intention to launch a news operation, part of a new-look MSN, at the time of the Windows 8 launch that was later in the month. Three days later, Windows Phone 8 was launched. On March 29, , Microsoft launched a Patent Tracker.

The Kinect sensor device was upgraded for the release of the eighth-generation Xbox One and its capabilities were revealed in May Microsoft filed a patent application in that suggests that the corporation may use the Kinect camera system to monitor the behavior of television viewers as part of a plan to make the viewing experience more active.

On July 19, , Microsoft stocks suffered its biggest one-day percentage sell-off since the year after its fourth-quarter report raised concerns among the investors on the poor showings of both Windows 8 and the Surface tablet; with more than 11 percentage points declining Microsoft suffered a loss of more than USD 32billion. In line with the maturing PC business, in July Microsoft announced that it would reorganize the business into 4 new business divisions by function: Operating System, Apps, Cloud and Devices.

All previous divisions will be diluted into new divisions without any workforce cut. In it, he says that there is a common link forming between the civil rights and In the dream, Lincoln asked a soldier standing guard President William Henry Harrison dies after serving only 32 days in office on this day in Harrison holds the unfortunate presidential record of shortest term in office.

Ironically, the man with the shortest White House tenure delivered the longest inaugural address in Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother went to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. When she Setting an Oscar record, the film swept 11 of the On April 4, , a dirigible crashes in New Jersey, killing 73 people in one of the first air disasters in history.

The Akron was the largest airship built in the United States when it took its first flight in August In its short life of less than two years, it was NATO stood as the main U. After the successful siege of Boston, General George Washington begins marching his unpaid soldiers from their headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, toward New York in anticipation of a British invasion, on April 4, In a letter to the president of Congress, General