Microsoft
 | |
| Type: | Publicly held |
| Industry: | Software |
| Founded: | 1975 |
| Founder(s): | Bill Gates |
| Headquarters: | Redmond, Washington |
| Country: | USA |
| Employees: | 89,000 as of 7/30/10 [1] |
| Revenue: | $ 62.5 billion (2010)[2] |
| Website: | www.microsoft.com |
| LinkedIn: | Microsoft |
| Key People | |
| Steven Ballmer, CEO Peter S. Klein, Chief Financial Officer | |
Microsoft Corporation is a multi-national company which develops, license, manufacture and support a wide range of products and services such as operating systems for personal computers, servers, intelligent devices, server applications for distributed computing, environments information worker productivity applications, business solutions applications, high performance computing applications, software development tools and video games. The company is trading at NYSE and NASDAQ under the ticker symbol "MSFT." Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington and it has offices in more than 100 countries worldwide.
Mission
Microsoft's mission is to enable people and businesses worldwide to realize their full potential. The company is trying to achieve its objective by creating technology that transforms the way people work, play and communicate.[3]
Company Values
The entire company value integrity, honesty, openness, personal excellence, constructive self-criticism, continual self-improvement and mutual respect. Microsoft is committed to its customers and partners with a passion for technology. Furhermore, the corporation takes big challenges and holds accountable to its customers, employees, partners and shareholders by honoring to its commitments and striving to provide results with the highest quality.[4]
History
Traf-O-Data
The idea of establishing Microsoft began in 1971 when Paul Allen found an article in an electronics magazine about Intel's 4004 chip, the world's first microprocessor. Allen thought that this microprocessor will become better and better. After a year, Intel came up with 8008. That gave Allen and Gates the idea on How Moore's Law really worked-each generation of microprocessor chip was twice as fast as the previous.They decided to buy the 8008 microprocessor which became the core of a special computer designed to do traffic volume count analysis and which they would to traffic departments. Allen and Gates formed Traf-O-Data, their first company.[5]
=Altair Basic
In 1973, Allen read an article from a popular electronics magazine about Altair 8800, the world's first microcomputer kit. Allen and Gates took it as a big opportunity. They wrote Altair BASIC, a true programming language, and the first commercial Microsoft computer product.[6] In 1975, the two persuaded MITS to sell Altair Basic. Allen and Gates signed their first contract with MITS as "Paul Allen & Bill Gates doing business as Micro-Soft.</ref>Micro-Soft</ref> Allen and Gates moved their headquarter from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Bellevue, Washington and hired Steve Ballmer as Manager in 1979.
Q-DOS
In 1980, Paul Allen negotiated the purchase of an obscure operating system called Q-DOS from Seattle Computer. The two licensed Q-DOS to IBM which became the deal of the decade. This transaction paved the way for Microsoft to dominate the PC Software Industry.[7] Microsoft developed a new operating system called MS-DOS (
The company was officially incorporated as Microsoft, Inc. in 1981 and subsequently in 1982, Microsoft, U.K., Ltd. was incorporated.[8]