THE STORY OF MICROSOFT
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| MICROSOFT |
Microsoft odds are that if you have used a computer played video games made a video call or just gone on the Internet then at some point in your life you have used a Microsoft product it is this ubiquity of its products in everyday society that has led Microsoft to becoming a trillion dollar company today but like with most large companies this story started out with very humble beginnings in fact it started out with a couple of teenagers in high school this is the story of Microsoft 1968 lakeside school Seattle for teenagers at this school had drawn interest towards their school's new computers one of these computers was called the teletype model 33 they wanted to use this new machine to build computer programs that could potentially allow them to do things like play tic-tac-toe or even make their own class schedules the trouble was that you needed to rent computer usage time which was a hefty $40 an hour so instead of paying that $40 an hour they decided to exploit some bugs in these computer systems in order to use the computers for free and for a while things were great and these students were able to freely program whatever they wanted but eventually the computer center corporation caught them stealing computer usage time and the company immediately banned these students from using their computer systems the four students that were banned were named Kent Evans Rick Weiland Paul Allen and Bill Gates soon after they were banned they decided to form their own group called the lakeside programmers club in order to make some money from their programming abilities while helping companies fix bugs in their computer systems and the club's first customer was the computer center corporation the very same company that banned them the previous year for exposing bugs in their computer systems several years later a 17-year old Bill Gates and a 19-year old Paul Allen made a new venture together called truffaut data which used the newest Intel processor to turn raw traffic data into comprehensive and easy to read reports the business didn't last very long because Bill Gates left to Harvard University to enroll in a pre-law program and Paul Allen left for Washington State University to pursue a computer science degree in 1975 popular electronics magazine featured a new computer called the Altair 8800 microcomputer this was a revolutionary product that was viewed as the first commercially successful personal computer now both Paul Allen and Bill Gates had caught a glimpse of the Altair issue of the popular electronics magazine so the two called each other up and discussed making a basic programming language interpreter for the computer and soon after this call ended they ended up talking to the inventors of the Altair who were MIT s where Gates and Allen claimed to have a working interpreter for the computer ready to go even though this wasn't true at all but MIT s was quite interested and wanted this interpreter so Gates immediately started working on the interpreter while Paul Allen built a simulator for the interpreter on the way to presenting their product to MIT s the boot up system for the interpreter still wasn't ready so the last bit of code was actually written on the way to the meeting with MIT s and by the time they arrived at the meeting with MIT s they still hadn't run a full test of the interpreter that they had just built so during the actual meeting they ran their first full test where it worked perfectly after the meeting MIT s agreed to sell gates and Alan's interpreter product as Altair basic little did the two college students know that this would be the very first product that was created by their newly named company called microcomputer software known today as Microsoft over the next couple of years the success of the Altair basic made Microsoft a multi-million dollar company in 1980 Microsoft's revenue was nearing 30 million dollars when they decided to open up their first international office in Japan a year later Gates and Allen began negotiating with the giant of the computer industry IBM in order to try and make Microsoft the main operating system on IBM's upcoming personal computer both sides agreed to a deal but there was a problem once again Gates and Allen did not have an operating system ready before making the actual deal so what they ended up doing was buying out operating system from a local computer company called Seattle computer products and as they bought this operating system for $75,000 and promised to pay a small royalty to the company as well the operating system that Microsoft had bought from Seattle computer products was called 86-dos which was quickly renamed by Microsoft to ms-dos about a year later in 1981 IBM launched its personal computer which became an immediate success and made ms-dos the dominant operating system in the world and Microsoft didn't just license its operating system to IBM it also licensed the operating system to over 70 other computer companies including Compaq computers the only real computer company that didn't use ms-dos at the time was another medium-sized startup computer company run by two other young men that company was Apple computers now the dominance of ms-dos ended up propelling Microsoft's revenue and valuation however there was one major setback in 1983 just as Microsoft passed 1 million installs of ms-dos Paul Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and decided to leave the company allegedly Bill Gates thought that Allen stock and Microsoft should be diluted at the time because he was not working hard enough and would no longer be able to contribute to the company regardless Gates didn't have too much time to focus on problems outside of Microsoft as the company was working on a word processing program called word a spreadsheet program called Excel in a graphical user interface called Windows now in 1983 Apple was the only major computer company that had a graphical user interface for its computers and Microsoft knew they needed to make their own so two years later Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in order to compete with Apple's operating system however Windows 1.0 wasn't a complete product and gained very little popularity at the time and it would take many years before Windows would begin to pay dividends for the company both figuratively and literally but we will come back to that in a little bit on march 13th of 1986 Microsoft had its initial public offering where the company was valued at 350 a million dollars this made Bill Gates net worth jumped to about a hundred and fifty million dollars overnight while making many of his employees millionaires and after the IPO Microsoft kept adding to its software products lineup by acquiring company called forethought who are known for their one key product called PowerPoint after the acquisition of forethought Microsoft finally felt like they had enough individual software products to launch a package of these products called Microsoft Works which would later inspire what is known today as Microsoft Office this package would include Microsoft Word Excel PowerPoint and a few other applications this package was also the first Microsoft product that was truly cross-platform and was available on a variety of computers like Apple computers describe your ideal relationship with Apple well we'll be selling our software independently so the key thing is that Apple gets a lot of consistent standard machines out there quickly the success of Microsoft Office along with the growth of Windows and Microsoft as a whole made Bill Gates a billionaire in fact he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in history at 32 years of age in 1987 over the next several years Microsoft would continue to grow expand its product line and release new versions of Windows every single year and this all came to a head in 1995 when Microsoft released Windows 95 to the public Windows 95 was viewed as a revolutionary software product for its time and it is known by many as the birth of modern day operating systems it was also responsible for one of the largest marketing campaigns in computer history Microsoft spent three hundred million dollars leading up to the launch of Windows 95 and some of their advertisements were very unique to say the least for example they bought 1.5 million copies of the times and were giving them away for free they spent money to turn the Empire State building's lights into the colors of the windows 90 logo they hung a 328 foot banner from the CN Tower in Toronto they created a 30 minute sitcom with Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry while making Windows 95 a primary plot point of the sitcom and they also spent quite a bit of money licensing the song start me up from the Rolling Stones and paying Jay Leno to appear at one of the most memorable product launches in history and all of this marketing was a success as the company sold 1 million copies of the operating system within four days while doubling the company's valuation overthe next couple of months this explosion of capital allowed Microsoft to start venturing out into other areas during the 1990s for example one year after the launch of Windows 95 Microsoft launched a news channel that most of you probably don't know was 50% owned by Microsoft the Microsoft national broadcasting channel also known as MSNBC was launched in 1996 they then created an internet browser called Internet Explorer as their standard internet browser they invested five hundred million dollars in a new and unproven startup company called DreamWorks they bought out nearly 10% of Apple while making Microsoft products available on Apple computers once again the era of of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned this is about getting Apple healthy and this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry to get healthy and prosper
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