Who founded microsoft corporation

In , the U. Department of Justice brought charges against Microsoft in an antitrust case, eventually ending with a ruling against the software giant.

They had three children: Jennifer b. Gates has received honorary doctorates from universities in the Netherlands, Sweden, Tokyo, and from Harvard. In , he and Melinda founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, donating billions to improve global healthcare, fight AIDS, improve educational opportunities and provide scholarships.

He also received an honorary Knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in and was named one of the most influential people of the 20th Century by Time magazine. It was registered in New Mexico in after being formed the year before by two childhood friends. Here's how Microsoft was founded and a brief summary of the company's history.

Before Paul Allen and Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft, they were avid computer geeks in an age when access to computers was hard to come by. Allen and Gates even skipped high school classes to live and breathe in their school's computer room.

Eventually, they hacked the school's computer and were caught, but instead of being expelled, they were offered unlimited computer time in exchange for helping to improve the school computer's performance. With the help of partner Paul Gilbert, Gates and Allen ran their own small company, Traf-O-Data, while in high school and sold a computer to the city of Seattle for counting city traffic.

In , Gates left Seattle to attend Harvard University as a pre-law student. However, Gates' first love never left him as he spent most of his time in Harvard's computer center, where he kept improving his programming skills. Soon Allen moved to Boston as well, working as a programmer and pressuring Gates to leave Harvard so they could work together full time on their projects. Gates was uncertain of what to do, but fate stepped in.

In January , Allen read an article in Popular Electronics magazine about the Altair microcomputer and showed it to Gates. The deal inspired Gates and Allen to form their own software company. On July 29, , Gates used the name "Micro-Soft"—which had been suggested by Allen—in a letter to Allen referring to their partnership.

The name, a portmanteau of "microcomputer" and "software," was registered with the New Mexico secretary of state on Nov. In August , less than a year later, the company opened its first international office. Microsoft operates in the software industry. It provides a lot of products and services that are aimed at satisfying the needs of customers in the software industry. In addition to this, the company has diversified its operations in other fields in an effort to enhance its competitive advantage.

This includes Microsoft games which have gained considerable application among people. The industry in which Microsoft operates is highly competitive mainly because of the effects of technological developments making it a necessity to be extremely alert to capture and implement everything new in order to satisfy the ever changing demand of the market. The industry is also characterized by new entries as people and groups wish to be as successful as Microsoft Company Kumar, To deal with the competition, Microsoft has engaged in production of products that are of high quality.

The company also engages in strategies that are geared towards improving the quality of its products every now and then to satisfy the changing demands of the market. This has been made possible through research and development programs. This is an effort that has bore positive fruits for example attraction of a lot of customers and maintaining their loyalty. Microsoft is involved in provision of a wide range of products and services to its customers.

The major line of business is however in the provision of software related products and services. The company is involved in the provision of servers, office, hardware, windows live, software, Microsoft store and mobile devices among others.

Apart from being involved in provision of products, Microsoft has also invested a lot in services provision. Some of the services include, Skype, Microsoft advertising and Microsoft Online services among others Microsoft, The provision of these products and services has been the main source of profit to the company. This in turn helps in placing the company in a good position in the market as it is an indication of good performance, an aspect that is desired by all organizations as well as customers.

Generally, Microsoft have performed relatively well over the past years. This has greatly increased the level of competition in the industry thus necessitating that Microsoft engage in even more strategic measures.

A major threat is for example the Linux program which has gained a lot of favour from the customers. This will be made possible through extensive research. Different companies have different competitive strategies and thus they secure different market positions in the market. Microsoft is competitive enough in its industry of operation and it has secured a good position in the market.

Various aspects have been attributed to it competitiveness. For instance, its management is a source of its competitive advantage. There is quality leadership at Microsoft. Election is usually fair. The share holders have the duty of electing the board of directors. The board of directors is then supposed to hire the presidents, vice-presidents, top executives, treasurer and the secretary. Neither company could have foreseen the value of this arrangement: as other manufacturers developed hardware compatible with the IBM PC, and as personal computing became a multibillion-dollar business, the fast and powerful MS-DOS became the industry's leading operating system, and Microsoft's revenues skyrocketed.

The year also saw the arrival of Steve Ballmer, a close friend of Gates from Harvard, who was hired to organize the non-technical side of the business. Ballmer later recalled the company's stormy beginnings under Gates's leadership: "Our first major row came when I insisted it was time to hire 17 people.

He claimed I was trying to bankrupt him. In the company was incorporated as Microsoft, Inc. Two years later Allen left Microsoft after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. He remained on the board of directors and continued to hold more than 10 percent of the company's stock. Also in Microsoft launched a word processing program, Word 1. Simpler to use and less expensive than WordStar, Word used a mouse to move the cursor and was able to display bold and italic type on the screen.

Nevertheless, some users felt that the product was too complex--designed for software engineers rather than business users--and it was quickly surpassed in the market by WordPerfect, released by the WordPerfect Corporation. Word did not become a success until its greatly improved version 3. Throughout its history, Microsoft has been known for releasing products that were initially unsuccessful but eventually grew to dominate their categories.

Many reviewers have been harsh in their criticism: David Kirkpatrick, writing in Fortune, described the first release of one product as a "typically unreliable, bug-ridden Microsoft mess," while Brent Schlender noted in the same magazine that "from its beginnings, Microsoft has been notorious for producing inelegant products that are frequently inferior and bringing them to the market way behind schedule.

Microsoft worked closely with Apple during the development of Apple's Macintosh computer, which was introduced in Revolutionary in its design, the Mac featured a graphical user interface based on icons rather than the typed commands used by the IBM PC, making its programs simple to use and easy to learn, even by computer novices. Convinced that the Mac's graphical user interface represented the future of end-user applications, Gates sought to develop an interface manager to work on top of MS-DOS that would convert the operating system to a graphical model that would be user-friendly and provide a single method for interacting with the many non-standardized programs designed to run on the system.

Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, Digital Equipment Corporation, and others announced their support for the project, called Microsoft Windows, while IBM, in the face of this opposition, threw its weight behind VisiOn, a similar product already being marketed by VisiCalc, while working to develop its own program, called TopView.

Plagued by delays in development, the release of Windows was repeatedly rescheduled throughout and , causing tensions at Microsoft and with other software publishers who were forced to delay releases of the applications they were designing for the system. Finally released in November , after some , hours of frantic work by programmers, Windows faced a disappointing reception. The system was slow, few applications were available to run on it, and customers delayed purchase decisions while waiting for the introduction of TopView.

In Microsoft also introduced Excel 1. In early Microsoft moved to a new acre corporate campus in Redmond, Washington, near Seattle. Designed to provide a refuge free of distractions for those whose job was, in Gates's words, to "sit and think," the campus was nestled in a quiet woodland setting and reflected huge expenditures for tools, space, and comfort.

Buildings were designed in the shape of an X to maximize light, with each programmer given a private office rather than a cubicle. The buildings featured many small, subsidized cafeterias, as well as refrigerators stocked with juice and caffeinated beverages.