The history and growth of Microsoft starts with its co-founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Gates and Allen met each other at the prime age of their youth where they studied at Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington. Allen was in tenth class and Gates in class eight. It all started when they worked together at the single computer terminal at Lakeside because computer terminals were rare at that time and also really expensive to use. They were also kicked out of school for exploiting a bug in the system. But this was the thing that made its way into their partnership to work for a company, and it continued after high school. In 1973, they graduated from Lakeside. Allen, with good scores, went to Washington State University and dropped out in 2 years. In 1975, he began to work as a programmer at Honeywell. After seeing a personal computer design in 1974 on the cover of a magazine, Allen convinced Gates to drop out of Howard and join him to develop an operating system.
This was the basis for the startup of the history and growth of Microsoft. They believed that they could develop an implementation of BASIC for the system. After many struggles, they finally made the interpreter work and MITS finally agreed to provide Altair BASIC. In 1975, Allen and Gates started Microsoft in Albuquerque, a city in New Mexico. It should be noted that Allen proposed the name Microsoft, which derives from the words microcomputer and software. The pair had success by selling their first product, MS-Basic, a computer language that was designed to suite the under-developed personal computers. It developed many programming languages by making changes to BASIC. And the breakthrough happened when IBM (International Business Machines) approached Microsoft to design and provide the operating system for its first personal computer. Taking this up, the duo bought a system from another firm in Seattle and renamed it MS-DOS, modified it to fit with IBM’s hardware, and released it in 1981. It was a reverberating success for Microsoft, and it was marked as a success point in the history and growth of Microsoft. Thereafter, most of the manufacturers of personal computers licenced MS-DOS as their operating system. Therefore, Microsoft achieved great revenue in 1990. 100 million copies of the programmes were sold out and it defeated the existing operating systems CP/M and DOS.
Microsoft increased its position in operating systems with Windows with its third version, released in 1990. Microsoft released Word and Windows. After some time, Allen and Gates had clashes as they sought differences of opinions, and eventually Allen discovered he had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. All of this made him leave Microsoft. As a part of restructuring, Microsoft was keen on rephrasing its structure and reconstructed on June 25th, 1981, to become an incorporated business in Washington and also changed its name from Microsoft to Microsoft Corporation, Inc., and as a part of changing its structure, Bill Gates became president of the firm and chairman of the board, and Paul Allen became executive vice president. Even after leaving the company, he remained as a vice president. In 1990, Bill Gates presented a future plan for Microsoft with Windows 3.0. By selling 60 million copies, it attained a real PC software standard. From the supplier of software to hardware manufacturers, acknowledging the bulk sale of personal computers, its revenue was generated from sales to consumers. It is to be said that it was the first software company to reach $1 billion in revenues. It has attained the highest market share as it launches more and more versions of Windows.
In 1995, the selling rate of personal computers was amazingly high, and Windows 95 made its debut. Seven million copies were sold in just five weeks. Following the ’90s, to replace many of Microsoft’s previous operating systems, development of Windows Vista was started by Project Longhorn in 2001. It was released in 2007 to the general public and stopped supporting it in April 2017. In 2007, Microsoft also acquired aQuantive and GitHub. Later in 2009, Windows 7 was released to replace Vista. Apart from selling software and accessories, it also placed its footprints in the gaming and mobile phone markets and became successful. The Xbox and Xbox Live in 2001 and 2002 placed Microsoft second in the video gaming market. Gates was the chairman and CEO of the company until the post of CEO was succeeded by Steve Ballmer, in 2000, but he remained as the chairman and chief software architect. He stepped down as chairman in 2014, and Satya Nadella was appointed as the CEO. In the same year Microsoft acquired Mojang the game application. Nowadays it was played on Windows and Xbox platforms, iOS, play station etc., Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011, to compete with Apple’s Facetime and Google’s Voice, and also added Skype to its product list. Also, its famous products such as SQL Server 2012 and DSP-Explorer added success to this firm. Digital marketing has become trend now and over the past few months Microsoft also provides platform to manage your marketing activities called Digital Marketing Center across paid social advertising and organic media management. The introduction of the web browser, Internet Explorer, in 1995 was a huge success in the history and growth of Microsoft. It also faced lawsuit problems for violating antitrust laws by using its dominance to drive out its business competitors, and despite its failures, it still stands as the wealthiest firm. Currently in 2021, it acquired ZeniMax Media and Nuance Communications in pending. Microsoft has a market capitalization of more than $200 billion, which puts it among the largest companies on the stock market.