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Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in
Redmond, Washington. Microsoft's best-known software products are the Windows line
of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet
Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are
the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup
of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 14 in the
2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations
by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker
by revenue as of 2022. It is considered as one
of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet
(parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, and Meta (formerly Facebook).
Microsoft
was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April
4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the
Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating
system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows.
The company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), and subsequent rise
in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated
12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has
increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made
a number of corporate acquisitions, their largest being the acquisition
of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016, followed by
their acquisition of Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in May
2011.As of 2015, Microsoft is market-dominant in the IBM PC
compatible operating system market and the office software suite market,
although it has lost the majority of the overall operating
system market to Android. The company also produces a wide
range of other consumer and enterprise software for desktops, laptops,
tabs, gadgets, and servers, including Internet search (with Bing), the
digital services market (through MSN), mixed reality (HoloLens), cloud computing
(Azure), and software development (Visual Studio).
Steve Ballmer replaced Gates as
CEO in 2000, and later envisioned a "devices and services"
strategy. This unfolded with Microsoft acquiring Danger Inc. in 2008,
entering the personal computer production market for the first time
in June 2012 with the launch of the Microsoft Surface
line of tablet computers, and later forming Microsoft Mobile through
the acquisition of Nokia's devices and services division. Since Satya
Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has
scaled back on hardware and has instead focused on cloud
computing, a move that helped the company's shares reach its
highest value since December 1999.Earlier dethroned by Apple in 2010,
in 2018 Microsoft reclaimed its position as the most valuable
publicly traded company in the world. In April 2019, Microsoft
reached the trillion-dollar market cap, becoming the third U.S. public
company to be valued at over $1 trillion after Apple
and Amazon respectively. As of 2022, Microsoft has the fourth-highest
global brand valuation.
Microsoft has been criticized for its monopolistic practices
and the company's software has been criticized for problems with
ease of use, robustness, and security.