Microsoft: Brief Organizations History

Bill Gates made a lot of changes to the way the world operates through technology and made life at lot easier for other people around the world. Bill Gates (also known as William Henry III or Trey) is an American entrepreneur, business mogul, investor, philanthropist, and one of the most richest and influential people in the world. He was also known as the best businessman in the 20th century. In his years as a child, he had the attitude for math and science as well as showing interest in computer programming in his teenage years.

After Gates graduated high school, with a perfect 800 on the SAT, he went to Harvard law school in 1973 (“Gates, Bill” 2) (“Gates, William Henry, III” 1). In 1975 his friend Paul Allen came up to him while Bill was in college and showed him a Popular Mechanics article about a $350 microcomputer, Gates read this article and was convinced that he wanted to be in the computer industry (“Gates, William Henry, III” 1). As a sophomore in college he and Paul Allen made the computer language BASIC compatible to microcomputers, this took much skill and he was the first to do it (Leaders of info 2). He did this for a company called MITS (Leaders of info 2). This shows his motivation to do well in the world, and to be successful. With this new success in the BASIC software, he dropped out of Harvard and went to pursue his new career (“Gates, Bill 1). He went to Albuquerque, New Mexico with Paul and they both founded a new company called Microsoft to mass produce their new software (Leaders of Info 2).

Meanwhile, IBM, who was Intel’s star customer, decided to produce own proprietary components. This was an inflection point for Intel. It partnered with Compaq and Microsoft, to break the hegemony of IBM. Though Microsoft products did not

Windows, a program that was created in 1983, but did not change the market significantly until 1990, has grown to control 94.1% of the operating system market (Newman). This has required other companies in the software industry to make all of their applications Windows compatible. Critics claim that Microsoft systematically eliminated all competition of other operating systems and software manufacturers. Microsoft also controls a large part of the software industry. According to sales from April 2002, Microsoft sold 89% of office software to consumers (Washington Post). Microsoft bundles these applications with the Windows operating system, which is, according to them, an effective technique. Critics assert that this forces other makers of office software, like Corel, to lose business, because consumers will not buy another application if one is already pre-installed. Critics point to the proposed 1995 merger between Microsoft and Inuit which ultimately failed. Inuit is the maker of the best-selling money management

Microsoft has grown into an enormous and powerful corporation by a combination of aggressive business practices and having written operating systems (DOS and Windows) for personal computers. From operating systems it branched out into other software which has, along with the operating system, become something of an industry standard.

Microsoft is the world’s leading producer of computer software. It was established in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Microsoft was the case, which was investigated for antitrust behavior. The article that’s going to be focused on is Unites States vs Microsoft: Ill-Considered Antitrust by Mark Furse.

The first desktop all-in-one personal computer was the HP 9830 (1972) the first known PC was IBM’s 5150 introduced in 1981. The PC was known for its CUI , it required the Disk Operating System (DOS) to operate it and it offered a broad list of business software solution such as word processors, spreadsheets, calendars etc.

had to buy, Microsoft also would sing contracts with the vendors for long periods of time

By the late 1970s the computing giant IBM had plans for marketing a personal computer for home use. They approached Microsoft to develop the standard operating system for their home computer models. Gates and Allen then went out and purchased for $50,000 an operating system called Q-Dos,

Microsoft had to split their operating system company from the rest of their organization. Another action Microsoft took was its relations with Java. They licensed a version of Java that worked mainly with windows where they tried to drive out the competitors and in later years they didn’t even allow Java to work with Windows XP (Rivkin 4). Microsoft tried to basically kill Java and with this the producers of Java sued Microsoft. Last, Microsoft took actions toward their competition in open-source software: Lunix. Microsoft responded by opening up into own server OS code like Lunix did. They actually sold stripped-down versions of the code to emerging economies and they also set up a lab that’s sole purpose was to find competitive weaknesses in the Lunix OS (Rivkin 5).

The beginning of Microsoft Inc. started with Bill Gates and Paul Allen writing computer program code for local businesses and municipalities. In 1975 they were inspired by an issue of Popular Electronics that showed the new Altair microcomputer kit, manufactured by MITS Computer. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a version of BASIC, a computer programming language, for the machine. Later that year Bill Gates left Harvard University to work full time developing programming languages for the Altair, and he and Paul Allen relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be near MITS Computer, where Paul Allen took a position as director of software development. Bill Gates and Paul Allen named their partnership Micro-soft (Microsoft

As Microsoft and the software industry grew, the computer hardware manufacturers no longer saw the opportunity to exploit Bill Gates= company, as they had done initially with BASIC, one of the first programs Microsoft

Micosoft was founded on 4th April 1975 by Bill Gates & Paul Allen and is headquartered in Redmond, Washington (USA). The company provides employment to more than 89000 people. Microsoft recorded revenues of $62000 million in the financial Year 2010 (Microsoft, 2011).

Compaq and Dell stole IBM’s PC market with the right price and the right message.

All started when Bill Gate and Paul Allen, two friends that as early as 13 years old started to mess around with computers, drop out of college to create their own business. This business founded April 4, 1975 is known today as Microsoft Corporation. Allen and Gates created a basic interpreter for computers, that was rejected by Digital Research, but later on IBM made a contract with them. The creation of the MS-DOS for IBM in mid-80’s gave Microsoft the high rock success that still last till this day, making them the dominant operating system for personal computers. Likewise, Microsoft became at a later time the leading business in office suite software better known as Microsoft Office.