Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation, leading developer of personal computer software systems and applications. The company also publishes books and multimedia titles, produces its own line of hybrid tablet computers, offers e-mail services, and sells electronic game systems and computer peripherals (input and output devices). It has sales offices throughout the world. In addition to its main research and development centre at its corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, United States., Microsoft operates research labs in Cambridge, England (1997); Beijjing, China (1998); Bengaluru, India (2005); Cambridge, massachusetts (2008); New York (2012); and Montreal, Canada (2015).

In 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen, two boyhood friends from Seattle, on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. A popular mainframe computer programming language, for use on an early personal computer, the Altair. Shortly afterward, Gates and Allen founded Microsoft, deriving the name from the words microcomputer and software. During the next few years, they refined BASIC and developed other programming language. In 1980 Internation Business Machines Corporation (IBM) asked Microsoft to produce the esential software, or operating system, for its first personal computer, the IBM PC. Microsoft Purchased an operating system from another company, modified it, and renamed it MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System). MS-DOS was released with the IBM PC in 1981. Thereafter, most manufacturers of personal computers licensed MS-DOS as their operating system, generating vast revenues for Microsoft. By the early 1990s it had sold more than 100 million copies of the program and defeated rival operating system such as CP/M, which it displaced in the early 1980s and later IBM OS/2. Microsoft depended its position in operating system with windows, a graphical user interface whose third version, release in 1990, gained a wide following. By 1993, Windows 3.0 and its subsequent versions were selling at a rate of one million copies per month, and nearly 90 percent of the world's PCs ran a Microsoft operating system. In 1995 the company released Windows 95, which for the first time fully integrated MS-DOS with Windows and effectively matched in ease of use Apple Computer's Mac OS. Microsoft also became the leader in productivity software such as word-processing and spreadsheet programs, outdistancing longtime rivals Lotus and WordPerfect in the process.

The company's 1986 initial public offering(IPO), and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. As a result, by the mid-1990s Microsoft, which became a publicly owned corporation in 1986, had become one of the most powerful and profitable comapanies in American history. It consistently earned profits of 25 cents on every sales dollar, an astonishing record. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acqisitions. In the company's 1996 fiscal year, it topped $2 billion in net income for the first time, and its unbroken string of profits continued, even during th Great Recession of 2007-09(its net income had grown to more than $14 billion by fiscal year 2009). However, its rapid growth in a fiercely competitive and fast-changing industry spawned resentment and jealousy among rivals, some of whom complained that the company's practices violated U.S laws against unfair competition. Microsoft and its defenders countered that, far from stifling comepetition and technical innovation, its rise had encouraged both and that its software had consistently become less expensive and more useful. A U.S. Justice Department investigation concluded in 1994 with a settlement in which Microsoft changed some sales practices that the government contended enabled the company to unfairly discourage OS customers from trying alternative programs. The following year the Justice Department successfully challenged Microsoft's proposed purchase of Intuit Inc., then the leading maker of financial software for PCs. Their largest being the acqisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016, followed by their acquisition of Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in May 2011.

Steva Ballmer replaced Gates as CEO in 2000, and later envisioned a "devices and services" strategy. This unfolded with Microsoft acquiring Danger Inc. in 2008, entering the personal computer production market for the first time in June 2012 with the launch of the Microsoft Surface line of tablet computers, and later forming Microsoft Mobile through the acquistion of Nokia's devices and services division. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has scaled back on hardware and has instead focused on cloud computing, a move that helped the company's shares reach its highest value since 1999.

Technical reference for developers and articales for various Microsoft magazines such as Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ) are available through the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN). MSDN also offers subscriptions for companies and individuals, and the more expensive subscriptions usually offer access to pre-release beta versions of Microsoft software. In April 2004, Microsoft launched a community site for developers and uesrs, titled Channel 9 that provides a wiki and an Internet forum. Another community site that provides daily videocasts and other services, On10.net, launched on March 3, 2006. Free technical support is traditionally provided through online Usenet newsgroups and CompuServe in the past, monitored by Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status, which entitles them to a sort of special social status and possibilities for awards and other benefits.