The Story of Microsoft:-

How a Computer Club Took Over The World!

The story starts with a very humble beginning with couple of teenagers in high school, named: Kent Owens, Bill Gates, Ric Weiland and Paul Allen.

These teenagers had drawn interest towards the new computer at the school.

Problem was that, they were to rent the usage time for the computer which was $40 an hour. So instead of paying this money, they decided to exploit the bugs in the computer in order to use them for free.

After a while, the company caught these students for overusing the computer and banned these students for using the computer.

After getting banned, they decided to form their own group/club, and named it as Lake Side Programmer's Club.

Company's first customer was Computer Center Cooperation (same company which banned them for exploiting bugs the previous year).

17 year old Bill Gates and 19 year old Paul Allen, then made a new venture together and named it as: Traf-O-Data, which used the newest Intel Processor to turn raw traffic data into comprehensive and easy to read reports.

But soon later, this venture broke as both of them went for further studies.

By this time around, a new computer was launched by the name ALTAIR 8800, so they both decided to make a basic Programming Language Interpreter for this computer. This was the first product that was created by their newly named company called Micro Computer Software, today known as Microsoft.

They had earned around $30 million dollars from this and wanted IBM to accept their offer to make Microsoft as their main Operating System for their computer.

But, both of them didn't had the final Operating System ready before the deal, so they bought the basic Operating System named 86-DOS (later changed to MS-DOS) from Seattle Computer for $75,000.

In 1981, IBM launched their first computer with MS-DOS as their primary Operating System which was a huge success.

Microsoft soon licensed their Operating System to 7 others companies at that time including IBM, but only one company which didn't use MS-DOC was Apple Computer Inc.

Soon after that, in 1983, Paul Allen was diagnosed with Lymphoma and left the company.

In 1983, only Apple had the Graphical User Interface, 2 years later Microsoft released Windows 1.0 to compete with them.

On March 13 1986, Microsoft had it's initial public offering, where the company was valued at around $350 million.

After the IPO, Microsoft kept adding to it's software products line-up by acquiring a company called Forethought Inc. which was popular for PowerPoint.

Later, Microsoft decided to launch a package with all the acquired items like Word, Excel, PowerPoint as Microsoft Office. Soon, Microsoft sold this package to major companies including Apple too, and this made Bill Gates a youngest self-made Billionaire in the history at 32 years of age in 1987.

Soon later, Microsoft released new changes every single year. This all came to a head when Microsoft launched Windows 95 in 1995.

Windows 95 was considered as a revolutionary product and was also marked as a birth of modern day Operating System. It was also considered as a largest marketing campaign in the computer's history, as Microsoft spent $300 million for the launch of Windows 95 (brought 1.5 million copies of The Times and distributed for free among people, spent money on turning the colors of the Empire State building in the Windows 95 logo colors, hiring celebrating to perform on the event etc.)

This was a success, as the company sold 1 million copies of the Operating System within 4 days, while doubling the company's evaluation for the next couple of months.

Microsoft also launched a News Channel named Microsoft Broadcasting Channel also known as MSNBC in 1996.

Microsoft also created an Internet Browser named Internet Explorer during this time.

Microsoft also invested $500 million in a start-up named DreamWorks, and also brought 10% of Apple in order to run Windows on them.

The Operating System business nearly quadrupled to $261 billion during 1996-98, which made Bill Gates the richest person in the world.

Soon later, Bill Gates made Steve Balmer as CEO who was working with Microsoft for a long time.

Under the guidance of Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect, Steve Balmer made various launches like, Xbox, Windows XP, Programing Language like .NET and C# which are used to program Websites and modern day Video Games.

By, this Microsoft had their hand in majority of the Industries except Mobile Phones. In 2003, way before Apple launched their iPhone, Microsoft launched their mobile phone Operating System named as Windows Mobile.

But, Bill Gates thought that the boom in Mobile market will not be rising, where he was wrong! But, on the other side, the Apple then CEO Steve Jobs thought different and launched their mobiles.

This made Apple enough capital to invest in their big project, which later was named as iPhone.

During this time, Microsoft released their Windows Vista, Windows 7, Bing, Xbox360, Microsoft Surface, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Azure. In the mean time of Apple launched the iPhone. Microsoft also acquired Skype and Nokia.

But, when 2013 came around, Microsoft was at a back seat as compared to other tech companies like FAANG.

It was at this point, that Steve Balmer thought to step down as CEO and appointed Satya Nadella as the CEO.

After Satya Nadella was appointed as the CEO, the company acquired gaming company Mojang Studios who were the creators of Minecraft. Company also acquired the programing platform named GitHub and social network named LinkedIn.

During these acquisitions, Satya Nadella was laser focused on cloud computing and published Microsoft Azure. This made Microsoft as one of the leading companies in cloud computing domain.

Along with Azure and the rest of the products that Microsoft sold, they reclaimed their title of World's Most Valuable Company in 2019.

As Paul Allen, resigned the board of Microsoft in 2000, and hasn't spend much time at Microsoft till this date, but, he acquired a start-up named Ticket Master and also invested in Real Estate which made him a Billionaire.

The Gaming System, The Revolutionary Operating System, Battles with USA's Government, The Youngest Billionaire in history, Internet Browsing Revolution, The Cloud Computing Giant, a Major Cable Network, Tablets, Search Engines, Word Processor, Office Packages all of this was created by a couple of teenagers from scratch from the Coding Club!