Roman Majda

“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”

Bill Gates

*Microsoft is a pioneer and a leader in computer technology.

*Best known for creating the Windows operating system and Office software

*Corporation has become a major player in the industry and continues to pave the information superhighway.

History*William H. Gates, a Harvard dropout, founded Microsoft in 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

„I didn‘t just drop out, I went to found Microsoft“

Bill Gates to Forbes

*He teamed up with Paul Allen and began writing programming for personal computers.

*Microsoft originally started as Micro-Soft

and it means „microcomputer“ and „software“

(hyphen removed in 1976)

*First customer: Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) bought Altair BASIC, written by Allen and Gates while Gates was in college

*In 1981, they bought the QDOS ($50 000) and then in collaboration with IBM, they released it renamed MS-DOS as the first user-friendly 16-bit operating system :)

*The first version of Windows was launched in November 1985

*1st virus to infect Windows (WinVer 1.4) was unleashed in 1992

History Until then, the use of computers was reserved for universities and large corporations (too complicated and too expensive to use)

Businesstoday

With something to offer everyone - from the corporate CEO in need of business solutions to the teenager playing Xbox after school-the corporation has expanded and is no longer just a worldwide leader in computer programming but a major player in the technology industry as a whole.

Corporate Structure*Microsoft is the world's largest computer software

company,

*10-person board of directors runs the company, with Steven Ballmer as the CEO and Maria Klawe as president.

*The board is made up of 5 committees including:

* the audit committee

* the compensation committee

* the finance committee

* the governance and nominating committee

* the antitrust compliance committee.

*In addition to this board, Microsoft is made up of an executive team to handle leadership and the corporate staff council, which oversees staff functions throughout the company

And what about Bill?*Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of

Microsoft in January 2000.

*He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect.

* In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be part-time worker at Microsoft and full-time at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

*He gradually transferred his duties to:

*Ray Ozzie, chief software architect

*Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer.

*Gates' last full-time day at Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.

*Paul Allen retired from MS in 1983 as a result of his battle with Hodgkin‘s disease

Employees*Microsoft has operation centers and

subsidiaries all over the world and employs more than 95,000 people who work across 32,404,796 square feet of MS presmises

*Headcount has nearly tripled since 1999 and half are located in the United States.

*The largest division of the company is the business group, employing 46,000 workers.

*Only 25 % workers are female

*The average Microsoft employee, “Softie” as they call themselves, is a 38-year-old with the average salary for a developer coming in at $106,000

MS employees in 1978

30 years after legendary photo

Some interesting facts*Mix business with pleasure:

• Paul Allen and Bill are childhood frieds

• Steve Ballmer was a Harvard classmate of Bill and was MS‘s 24th employee

• Bill Gates wrote a class scheduling program for his school. He tweaked the program’s code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students ;)

• Bill married MS employee Melinda French

* Total revenue: first year $16,000 and 4 years later $1,000,000

*MS made Bill a billionaire by age 31* Bill Gates was knighted by Queen of England in 2005

*MS has more that 10 000 patents and spends almost half of its legal budget on patent cases

*MS is one of the biggest corporate collectors of contemporary artwork – they have over 5,000 pieces

* Temporary MS employees are given an email address

with a dash before the „@“ and permanent employees refer to them as „Dash Thrash“

• 2009 was the first time in 23 years that MS reported a quarterly drop in revenue

• Microsoft‘s stock has split nine times since the company went public in 1986

• Microsoft has acquired over 150 companies in its history

• The $2.8 billion in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation totalled the GDP of more than 25 countries worldwide.