Microsoft Essays (1913 words) - Microsoft, Bill Gates, MS-DOS

Microsoft Introduction and History: There are very few people in the world today that can honestly say that they do not know who Bill Gates is. This Harvard dropout is quite possibly the most well known, and wealthiest person in the world. Even at the age of fourteen, Gates was on the road for success after he started his own computer programming company. This company, the Lakeside programming group, was credited for writing programs for his schools payroll account. Only after a year of higher learning, Gates and long time friend Paul Allen from the University of Washington, dropped out of college and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1974. Upon their arrival in New Mexico, Gates and Allen started Microsoft, which is now a multibillion dollar computer software company. Initially Microsoft was a small company that did programming from a computer company called MITS. One of Gates and Allen's first big accomplishments working for MITS was to write a programming language called BASIC. When MITS went under, Gates and Alle n had to look for other opportunities and relocated their company back to their home town of Seattle, Washington. At the same time the computer giant IBM realized how large the personal computer market was becoming, and decided to jump on the band wagon when they saw that they were considerably behind the competition in developing a PC product. IBM threw together a machine made mostly from other companies parts and tried to out source the software for the operating system. After being rejected twice by programming firms, including Microsoft, Bill Gates realized what a profitable opportunity it would be to move in on IBM's enormous market share. Gates borrowed fifty thousand dollars from his father, who was a prominent Seattle lawyer, and bought the rights to an operating system sold by Seattle Computer Products. An operating system is the language that links the keyboard, screen, printer, microprocessor and computer and allows the parts to communicate. Gates then approached IBM to s ign agreements to develop the systems for their PC's. This decision would later become legendary. Gates soon perfected this operating system and called it MS-DOS. MS-DOS promptly became the industry standard because of IBM's influence in the market. Microsoft became a wealthy company almost overnight, and is widely known as a leader in the software industry. Shortly after the company's inception, Microsoft started producing software programs, some of which are today, the most widely used everywhere. The famed software programs include Microsoft Word, Macintosh Word, and Excel. Microsoft forced its way into the market and has gradually added different programs to its team. In 1982 the developed Microsoft Multiplan for the business community, and in 1983 they developed their first word processing program to compete with word perfect. In addition to that, IBM urged Microsoft to make Microsoft Word available for the Macintosh. Then Microsoft decided they needed a to add a multitask operating system, which would allow the user to have word processing, spreadsheets, and several other computer applications working together. In 1984 Microsoft developed their biggest breakthrough in the operating systems market, a graphics based operatin g system called Windows. Windows allowed Microsoft to match the user friendliness of Apple Computers operating system, giving them another stronghold in the ever growing personal computer market. This development became extremely important for the company because Windows is now the standard system installed on new computers. In 1992, Microsoft started to dive into the emerging market of networking computers and developed Windows NT. As upgrades continued and the development of Windows 2000 became available, Microsoft became the largest and the strongest computer company in the world. With Gates at the helm steering his company into the future, by hard work and dedication, it is no wonder that he is the richest man in the world. Strengths and Weaknesses: Not mentioning Bill Gates as an incredible strength for Microsoft would be a great unjust for the company. Gates insight and decisions, has given Microsoft a virtual monopoly in the computer software industry. Microsoft had more than 20 projects in development in 1996, and though Microsoft usually is not the first to come out with a product is always, and undoubtedly proven to be the best. Revenues for