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Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and services. Its best-known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems.Today we explain about this company.
Microsoft Corporation
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, computer peripherals, and portable media players. It has sales offices throughout the world. In addition to its main research and development center at its corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, U.S.
Microsoft operates research labs in Cambridge, England (1997); Beijing, China (1998); Sadashivnagar, Bangalore, India (2005); Santa Barbara, California. Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); New York, New York and Montreal, Canada.
Founder
Childhood friends Paul Allen and Bill Gates sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills in computer programming. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data. Which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data. While Gates enrolled at Harvard, Allen pursued a degree in computer science at Washington State University, though he later dropped out of school to work at Honeywell.
At The First
The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems’s (MITS) Altair 8800 microcomputer. Which inspired Allen to suggest that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device. After a call from Gates claiming to have a working interpreter, MITS requested a demonstration. Since they didn’t yet have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter. Although they developed the interpreter on a simulator and not the actual device, it worked flawlessly when they (in March 1975) demonstrated the interpreter to MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Microsoft dramatically expanded its electronic publishing division, created in 1985 and already notable for the success of its multimedia encyclopedia, Encarta. It also entered the information services and entertainment industries with a wide range of products and services, most notably the Microsoft Network and MSNBC (a joint venture with the National Broadcasting Company, a major American television network.
The Gaming And Mobile Phone Markets
In 2001 Microsoft released the Xbox, an electronic game console that quickly captured second place in the video gaming market. In 2002 it launched Xbox Live, a broadband gaming network for its consoles. A more powerful gaming console, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005. In an intensely competitive market, where the Xbox faced strong pressure from the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation, Microsoft struggled through the years to make consistent profits from its console.
For example, in 2009 the company cut the price of the Xbox 360 Elite by as much as 25 percent in order to pick up market share. The move was successful; by 2010 the Xbox 360 was the most-used game console in the American home. But at the same time, the price cuts also led to a 6 percent drop in revenue in Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division (EDD).
Further Developments In Windows OS
Microsoft began planning a major replacement for all of its operating systems in 2001. The project, code-named Longhorn, encountered numerous delays, in part because of efforts to address the public’s growing concern with computer security and consumers’ desire for PCs to have greater integration with a full range of entertainment equipment within the modern electronic home. The company started over, and the new operating system renamed Vista, was released to other software developers late in 2006 and to the general public in 2007. Like most new operating systems, Vista met with initial problems involving incompatibilities with older computer peripherals.
More problematic for the new operating system was its “bloated” structure, which required a very fast microprocessor and large amounts of dedicated computer memory for proper functioning. Its high threshold for adequate system resources deterred many companies and individuals from upgrading systems from earlier, and perfectly serviceable, systems such as Windows XP (derived from the term Windows Experience). In addition, consumers were baffled by the numerous Vista options—Home (Basic or Premium), Ultimate, Business, and others—while business users (Microsoft’s core market) balked at its major change to the user interface and were unwilling to port their internal applications to the new system.
Microsoft vs. Google
Microsoft’s continued OS dominance and its quick recovery in the “browser wars” did not repeat itself in the search-engine market. Where Microsoft’s search engine, Live Search, trailed well behind those of Google Inc., the new industry giant, and Yahoo! Inc., the durable Internet portal site.
Microsoft hoped to change the market dynamics with the release in 2009 of Bing, a “decision engine” designed to display more retrieved information in search pages than was typical, thus enabling better-informed decisions concerning what links to follow or, in some cases, displaying enough information to satisfy the original query.
After Bill Gates
In 2000 company cofounder Gates relinquished his role as CEO of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer. Whom Gates had met during his brief tenure at Harvard University in the 1970s. He handed over the title of the chief software architect in 2006 to Ray Ozzie. A chief developer of the computer networking package Lotus Notes in the 1990s. In 2008 Gates left the day-to-day running of the company to Ballmer, Ozzie.
And other managers, though he remained as chairman of the board. Ozzie stepped down in 2010, and longtime Microsoft executive Satya Nadella replaced Ballmer as CEO in 2014.
