Microsoft

Microsoft was born in the garage of a young Bill Gates, but the real spark came from Paul Allen spotting the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975. The two friends promised MITS a BASIC interpreter for the machine, wrote it in eight weeks in a Harvard lab, and launched the company on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The name itself is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software. They moved to Bellevue, Washington in 1979, then to a permanent campus in Redmond in 1986, the same year the company went public on NASDAQ.

From those early days, Microsoft grew into the defining force of the personal computer revolution. The 1980 deal with IBM to provide MS-DOS for the IBM PC put the company on a trajectory that would lead to Windows, launched in 1985. Windows 95, released on August 24, 1995, turned the operating system into a cultural event, with lines snaking around stores and the Rolling Stones' Start Me Up blasting from speakers. By the early 1990s, Microsoft controlled roughly 90 percent of the computer operating systems market worldwide. Today, the company is one of the most valuable in the world, with a market capitalization that regularly exceeds $2 trillion and annual revenue of approximately $245 billion in fiscal year 2024.

Under Satya Nadella, who became CEO in February 2014, Microsoft has reinvented itself around cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Azure has become a major rival to Amazon Web Services, and the company has invested heavily in OpenAI, integrating AI into products like Copilot for Office and Windows. The Xbox gaming division, launched in 2001, has grown into a pillar of the business, while the acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016 added a professional networking giant to the portfolio. Microsoft now employs more than 128,000 people across offices in over 100 countries, and its products touch billions of lives daily. [edit]