Microsoft

Microsoft began in 1975, it was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its current best-selling products are the Windows Operating System and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software for business and home. In order to understand the success of the company one must look at thier defining history. The idea that would spawn Microsoft came from the January 1, 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800. The two founders offered their services to the computer company called MITS, the makers of Altair. After rewriting the companys programming language and agreeing with the company to market and distibute it, Gates and Allen decided to form their own software company and on April 4th, 1975 Microsoft became a company. Allen came up with the original name of Micro-Soft a combination of Microcomputer and Software. On November 26, 1976 the company was registered under that name with the Secretary of State of New Mexico. The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan now called "Microsoft Japan”, and on November 29, 1979, the term, "Microsoft" was first used by Bill Gates. On January 1, 1979, the company moved from Albuquerque to a new headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Steve Ballmer joined the company on June 11, 1980, and would later succeed Bill Gates as CEO. The company restructured on June 25, 1981, to become an incorperated business in the state of Washington with a change of its name to Microsoft, Inc. Microsoft's early products were different variants of Microsoft Basic which was the dominant programming language in late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1980 Microsofts first Operating System product Xenix was released, it was a variant of Unix acquired from AT&T through a distribution license. In order to distribute Xenix Microsoft hired Santa Cruz Operation to adapt the operating system to several platforms. This Unix variant would become home to the first version of Microsoft's word processor, Microsoft originally titled this "Multi-Tool Word".
Word was also the first application with features like the ability to display bold text. It was first released in the spring of 1983, and free demonstration copies of the application were bundled with the November 1983 issue of PC World. It grew to become the most popular version of Unix, measured by the number of machines running it. By the mid-1980s Microsoft had gotten out of the Unix business. This success was followed up by Microsoft Disk Operating System or MS-DOS. MS-DOS was Microsofts big success it was written for IBM and gave birth to a partnership that allowed them to bundle Microsoft's operating system with IBM computers, paying Microsoft a royalty for every sale. In 1985, IBM requested that Microsoft write a new operating system for their computers called OS-2 Microsoft wrote the operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in competition with OS-2. Microsoft Windows eventually overshadowed OS-2 in terms of sales. Around 1983, in collaboration with numerous companies, Microsoft created a home computer system, MSX, which contained its own version of the DOS operating system, entitled MSX-DOS. Later, the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones after Columbia Data Products successfully cloned the IBM BIOS, quickly followed by Eagle Computer and Compaq. The deal with IBM allowed Microsoft to have control of its own creation MS-DOS, and through aggressive marketing of the operating system to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones Microsoft rose from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry. With the release of the Microsoft Mouse on May 2, 1983, Microsoft continued to expand its product line in other markets. The company began to expand it product line which lead to the release of Microsoft Office in 1989. The software package included a word processor (Word), a