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Microsoft Corporation Essay

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Microsoft Corporation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MICROSOFT HISTORY 1 EARLY INFLUENCES 2 FIRST BUSINESS VENTURE 3 EDUCATION ATTEMPT 3 THE MOTIVATIONAL SIDE OF FEAR 4 A JAPANESE CONNECTION 5 IBM INFLUENCE 5 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 6 A CRUCIAL DEAL 6 COMPETITION ERRORS 7 BIRTH OF WINDOWS 7 MISSION STATEMENT AND ANALYSIS 8 INDUSTRY AND COMPETITVE ANALYSIS 9 DOMINANT ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS 9 Market Differentiation 9 Pace of technological change 10 Advances to the Printed Word 11 DRIVING FORCES 12 The Internet 13 The Information Highway 14 KEY SUCESS FACTORS 14

Microsoft History

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. . an $18,000 personal computer which occupied a rack two feet square and six feet high and had about as much computing capacity as a wristwatch does today . . .
Despite its limitations, it inspired us to indulge in the dream that one day millions of individuals could possess their own computers.@ (11-12)

In the summer of 1973, Paul Allen, who knew more about computer hardware than
Bill Gates, shared an article with Gates buried on page 143 in Electronics
Magazine. The article described the invention of the 8008 micro-processor chip by a young company called Intel. Paul was surprised to receive the technical manual for the chip in the mail simply upon request. Immediately, he went to work analyzing its capabilities. Due to the lack of transistors, the 8008 chip was very limited in its use, but Allen discovered despite the limitations, the chip was good for repetitive tasks and mathematical data.

First Business Venture

When Paul Allen entered college at Pullman, Washington, a town on the east side of the state, sixteen-year-old Bill Gates traveled frequently by bus to visit him. On these long trips across the state, Gates wrote a program that facilitated the reading of traffic information gathered by municipalities through a device set up on the side of certain intersections. A long, rubber tube stretched across the road from one of these devices, and each time a vehicle ran over the tube a punch was made in the roll of paper within the device. People

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