Jun 21 2008
Turning Micro computing dreams into reality: Microsoft!
Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 with a dream to provide an edge to micro computing, Microsoft has been the greatest success stories of all times.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen studied together in Lakeside Prep School. Gates and Allen approached the manufacturer of Altair 8000, a small computer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) to launch a programming language for the computer. The interpreter worked at the demonstration and MITS agreed to distribute Altair BASIC.
With a huge potential in the software industry that time, Gates and Allen formed their own firm called Microsoft (microcomputers + software) in Albuquerque which became a registered trademark in 1975 itself.
Microsoft’s success turned into a thunderstorm after the development of MS DOS (The Disk Operating System), the most popular and the most widely used machine independent operating system developed during those times. It was a technical breakthrough. With IBM joining hands with Microsoft in 1980, to distribute this operating system with their machine, Microsoft was bound to gain immense popularity in the world market.
Besides this Microsoft gave itself a new look in 1986 by changing its name to Microsoft Inc. with Bill Gates being the president and Paul being the Executive vice president of the company. After a successful entry into the operating systems market, Microsoft started developing office products such as spreadsheets, word processors, database processors and their own versions of open source languages and software’s to be sold in the market.
In 1989 Microsoft developed its own office software package called Microsoft Office which had all the above features. In 1990, Microsoft created the world’s first graphical user interface based operating system called Microsoft Windows for micro computing devices. Microsoft Windows took over the whole software industry by selling millions of its copies in the world market days after its release. With different versions of windows released in the coming years, this operating system became a necessity for every computer user.
Microsoft today has more than 78,000 employees, spread across 105 countries and has revenues of $51.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007. From July 2008, Gates will hand over the entire responsibility of running the software giant with one of the world’s most aggressive CEO’s, Steve Ballmer.
Although Microsoft has been a really successful software story, it is criticized by loads of open source developers for its commercial policies. One of them wrote about Microsoft that:
“If it was not for him, Computers would have been cheaper and accessible for everyone. The greed that he started has been picked up by all in the software industry. Imagine paying UK one cent for every alphabet you use when you write in English. Yes that’s the atrocity of this person in the name of intellectual property (which also was purchased).
When you buy software you should have all the right to use it the way you want, the number of times you want and to share it with your friends or anyone anytime you want - just like when you buy a car. Imagine buying a car from Maruti and signing an agreement which does not allow you to have someone else drive the car, open the hood if something goes wrong, buy petrol only from Maruti and every 3 years you have to buy a new version.”
This is fairly justified on his part. And thus one can conclude that although Microsoft has been the most successful firms of all times, it has made software users its slave as one cannot do without its latest products once a person starts following this company from the start.
