Microsoft Corp

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics and personal computers. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite and Internet Explorer web browser. The company also publishes books (through its Microsoft Press) and video games (through its Xbox Game Studios).

The history of Microsoft begins on April 4th 1975 when Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded their own business to develop a BASIC interpreter for Altair 8800 microcomputer. They renamed it to “Micro-Soft” which was later shortened simply to “Microsoft”. In 1980 they released their first commercial product—the Multiplan spreadsheet program —and by 1981 had already sold over one million copies worldwide. After releasing several versions of MS-DOS between 1982 – 1988 as well as Word for DOS in 1983 , Excel for Macintosh in 1985 , PowerPoint 1987 , Access 1992 , Outlook 1997 etc., they launched Windows 95 which included many improvements such as 32 bit support that changed the way people interacted with PCs forever .

Throughout late 1990s – early 2000s under Steve Ballmer’s leadership at CEO position the growth continued due to strong sales from desktop services & applications like Office XP 2002 or Exchange Server 2003 . In 2006 he announced his strategy called “People Ready Business” where he shifted focus towards cloud computing platforms & services like Azure 2007 or Dynamics CRM 2011 . This shift enabled them not only capture new markets but also enter into console gaming market with Xbox 360 2005 followed by Kinect 2010 .

More recently Satya Nadella took helm at CEO position bringing forth changes including refocusing efforts on mobile development resulting into launch of Surface tablet 2012 along with unified mobile app platform called Universal Windows Platform 2015 allowing developers create apps across all device types running any version of windows OS since 10 onwards 2016 while simultaneously expanding presence into enterprise solutions space through products such Cloud Computing 2017 & Hololens 2018 thus setting stage up future success going forward 2019+.