Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation, one of the world's largest developers in the field of proprietary software for various types of computer equipment - personal computers, game consoles, PDAs, mobile phones and so on. The most well-known products are the Windows family of operating systems and Microsoft Office office applications. In addition, the company develops and sells laptops and tablet computers under the Surface brand, Xbox game consoles, as well as accessories for personal computers (keyboards, mice, and so on).

The company is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA.

As of June 30, 2022, the corporation had 221 thousand employees. In 2018, she was ranked second on the list of the 500 best employers in the world according to Forbes magazine. In the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's largest public companies for 2022, the company was ranked 12th. Among the largest companies in the United States by revenue in 2022 (Fortune 500), Microsoft ranked 14th.

The company began in 1975 when Harvard student friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen read an article published in Popular Electronics magazine on January 1, 1975, about the new Altair 8800 personal computer, and developed a Basic interpreter for it. A month later, on February 1, a license agreement was signed with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the manufacturer of the PC, to use Basic as part of the Altair software. They thought about naming their company Allen & Gates, but felt it would be more suitable for a law firm, so Paul suggested "Micro-Soft", a portmanteau of "microcomputer" and "software". The new company, which had three employees, finished its first year with a turnover of $16,005. (For comparison: in 2000, the corporation's revenue was $25.3 billion, and profits were more than $7.3 billion.) In 1977, Microsoft BASIC was licensed to Apple and Radio Shack; in the same year, an interpreter for the FORTRAN language was developed, and in 1978, for COBOL.

In the early 1980s, the two founders parted ways: according to Allen's recollections, while he did not want to devote his entire life to Microsoft, Gates was fully focused on the work and development of the company. At Gates' insistence, the partners repeatedly renegotiated their stakes in the business, with Allen conceding in favor of Gates. Allen wrote in his book:

My partner wanted to grab as much as possible and wouldn't let go of anything. I couldn't reconcile myself to that... Then I thought that at some point I would have to leave.
In 1981, the company released MS-DOS, which was a renamed version of 86-DOS written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products. The development of 86-DOS took only six weeks and was a CP/M clone from Digital Research, ported for use on the 8086 processor, with only two differences from the original: improved disk sector buffering logic and a new FAT12 file system. The first version of 86-DOS was released in August 1980. Under a November 1980 agreement with IBM, Microsoft was required to provide an operating system for a new IBM PC computer based on the Intel 8086 processor. To do this, Microsoft hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 to complete the adaptation of 86-DOS to the IBM PC prototype, and then in July of that year bought the full rights to 86-DOS 1.10 for $75,000. Microsoft kept the version numbering, but renamed the OS MS-DOS. In August 1981, the IBM-licensed MS-DOS 1.10/1.14 under the name PC DOS 1.0 began shipping with a new personal computer, the IBM PC.

In 1983, Allen left Microsoft, selling some of his stock for $10 apiece and retaining his seat on the board of directors. This deal gave him funds to invest and eventually made him one of the richest people in the world: in 2011, he was ranked 57th on Forbes magazine's list with a net worth of $13 billion. Also in 1983, the first version of the Word text radar was released, but it was not a great success because it was too complex for novice users; A breakthrough in the office applications market was the third version of Word, released in 1986. In 1984, Microsoft developed software (Basic interpreter, Word, Multiplan spreadsheets) for the new Apple Macintosh computer, which brought in revenue $100 million that year. However, the Macintosh's main innovation was the graphical user interface, which made it much easier to work on the computer, and Gates decided to borrow this idea for his MS-DOS. Thus, on November 20, 1985, the new Microsoft Windows operating system appeared; It took 110 thousand hours of programmers' work to develop it. That same year, Excel was released, an improved version of the Multiplan spreadsheet.

In March 1986, the company went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, which brought in $61 million; in a year, the stock price rose from $25 to $85, making Bill Gates a billionaire. That same year, a new campus was opened in Redmond, Washington. In 1987, Microsoft released its first CD-ROM of software and also bought Forethought, a PowerPoint developer. Windows 2.0 was released in November 1987 and sold a million copies by the end of the year. In 1988, with half a billion in sales, Microsoft became the world's largest software developer. In 1989, the first release of the Microsoft Office suite of office applications took place. The company ended 1990 with revenues of $1 billion and 5,600 employees.

In 1993, the electronic multimedia encyclopedia Encarta was launched, and the first version of the Windows NT operating system was released. In 1996, the cable television channel MSNBC was created in conjunction with the National Broadcasting Company. In the second half of the 1990s, the company developed software for a variety of electronics, and as of 1999 it had more than 100 licensing agreements with manufacturers.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. As a result, Microsoft was supervised by a U.S. court under a 2002 settlement agreement, but avoided separation.

In 2002, Windows XP was introduced, followed by Windows Server 2003. In 2005, the Xbox 360 game console was launched. In June 2006, Bill Gates announced that he would step down from direct management of the company.

In 2023, the company spent more than $4 billion on the development of artificial intelligence technologies. In particular, the Copilot tool was made publicly available, appearing in a number of products and services, as well as being promoted as a hotel tool.

Mergers & Acquisitions

Until 2011, Microsoft's largest acquisition of other companies was Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive, an online advertising corporation (the deal closed in August 2007 for a total of $6.333 billion). In 2012, the corporation wrote off $6.2 billion from profits due to the recognition of this transaction as unprofitable.

In 2008, Microsoft tried to buy it for $48 billion. Yahoo!, but due to opposition from its minority shareholders, the deal fell through.

In May 2011, the corporation announced the purchase of Skype Limited, a company specializing in Internet telephony, for $8.5 billion. The sellers of the shares will be the founders of Skype and a number of investment funds. Following the completion of the acquisition, Skype Limited was replaced by Microsoft's Skype Division, with Skype CEO Tony Bates remaining in charge.

In early September 2013, Microsoft announced the purchase of Nokia's mobile phone business Devices & Services for €5.44 billion. According to analysts, Microsoft will try to compete with Apple in a similar way, combining the development of mobile devices and software for them. On November 19, 2013, Nokia's shareholders' meeting approved the transaction. The deal was closed on April 25, 2014.

In September 2014, Microsoft acquired the Swedish company Mojang AB for $2.5 billion, the developer of the game Minecraft.

In June 2016, LinkedIn was bought for $26.2 billion. In January 2018, Microsoft announced the acquisition of PlayFab, a backend service provider for creating and launching cloud-based games. The company's services are used by more than 3 thousand studios, it can be found in more than 1.2 thousand active games covering about 700 million people. Famous clients: Disney, Rovio and Atari. Notable projects include Idle Miner Tycoon, Angry Birds Seasons, and Roller Coaster Tycoon Touch. That same year, Microsoft bought GitHub, the world's largest source hosting and collaborative development service, for $7.5 billion.

In March 2021, ZeniMax Media (a computer game developer) was bought for $8.1 billion. In April 2021, it became known that Microsoft had received a contract from the US Department of Defense to supply augmented reality wearable devices for the army. The contract is worth $21.9 billion, and Microsoft is expected to deliver 120,000 devices based on its HoloLens augmented reality glasses to the U.S. Army over the next ten years.

In August 2021, the largest attack in history was recorded, according to the company. It was directed against a European company that was a user of the cloud service. The attack lasted about ten minutes, with a maximum traffic of 2.4 Tbps. 70,000 sources from several countries in the Asia-Pacific region were recorded: Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, China, and the United States.

On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced plans to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion and revealed that "as many games as possible" from the studio would enter the Xbox Game Pass catalog the moment the deal is finalized. The transaction was approved by the European Commission on May 15, 2023. It is the largest deal in the history of the gaming industry, and the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history. In March 2022, another major deal was completed — Nuance Communications, a developer of healthcare software, was bought for $20 billion.

Activity
Microsoft Corporation is a developer of a wide range of software and hardware, best known for its Windows operating systems and the Microsoft Office family of document programs. Today, the corporation produces a variety of products: server suites, games, software development tools, as well as Xbox game consoles.

Divisions as of 2022:

Productivity and Business Processes — various products and services for running a business, including the Office 365 suite of web services, the LinkedIn social network, Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource management applications; 32% of revenue.
Intelligent Cloud – Azure cloud platform, SQL Server databases, Windows Server operating system, Visual Studio development environment, System Center server management software, subsidiaries of GitHub and Nuance Communications; 38% of revenue.
More Personal Computing – Windows operating systems, laptops, tablet computers, game consoles, search engines and information portals; 30% of revenue.
The company's operational centers are located in the United States, Ireland and Singapore. Products under the company's trademarks are produced by third-party contract manufacturers. There are also agreements with contract manufacturers on the pre-installation of Microsoft software products on new equipment (personal computers, servers, etc.), the main such product is the Windows operating system; these agreements account for the bulk of Microsoft Corporation's revenue. About half of the revenue comes from the United States.

Revenue for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2022 was $198.3 billion, broken down by product and service categories as follows:

Server software products — 67.3 billion,
Office software products — 44.9 billion,
Windows — 24.8 billion,
Computer games — 16.2 billion,
LinkedIn — 13.8 billion,
Search & News – 11.6 billion,
Services to enterprises — 7.4 billion,
Equipment — 7.0 billion.
Microsoft regularly acquires other software developers. In particular, as a result of the acquisition of Navision, Solomonruen, Great Plainsruen Microsoft has a new major business line, Microsoft Dynamics (formerly called Microsoft Business Solutions). Three solutions in this area are presented in Russia: ERP systems Axapta, Navision, and relationship management system — Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The company has been a partner and major investor in OpenAI since 2019. As a result of this collaboration, Microsoft became the exclusive cloud computing service provider for OpenAI, as well as the ability to incorporate ChatGPT into its products. In early February 2023, it introduced new versions of the Edge browser and the Bing search engine equipped with artificial intelligence.

Antitrust Sanctions

Recently, the company has become a defendant in lawsuits filed by the EU Antitrust Commission and competitors. As a result, the company released a product such as Windows N without Windows Media Player, which is considered a free addition to the Windows distribution.

In March 2004, the European Commission found the U.S. company guilty of exploiting its dominant position in the European software market and imposed a fine of €497 million on the company, requiring Microsoft to provide third-party developers with information about its products so that they could freely release compatible software. In July 2006, Microsoft was fined again €280.5 million, after which it complied with the European Commission's decision.

On December 13, 2007, the Norwegian company Opera Software, the developer of the Opera web browser, announced that it had filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission. In the complaint, Opera Software asks Microsoft to allow users to "truly choose" the browser by shipping competitor browsers with Windows or separating Internet Explorer from the mainstream. In addition, the company is demanding that support for open web standards be built into Internet Explorer.

On February 27, 2008, European officials determined that the U.S. monopolist was still charging competitors "an unreasonably high fee for access to documents describing the operation of collaborative server systems", for which Microsoft was fined a further €899 million (the largest fine imposed by the European Commission on a single company at the time).

In July 2008, Microsoft asked the European Union to overturn a $1.35 billion fine imposed by the authorities for failing to comply with the terms of a 2004 antitrust order. Microsoft called the fine "excessive and disproportionate" and said the European Commission had made many mistakes in calculating the fine.

On January 16, 2009, the European Commission brought new antitrust charges against Microsoft. The European Commission believes that Microsoft violates competition law by shipping the Windows operating system along with the built-in Internet Explorer browser: "the current situation distorts competition among Internet browser creators, hinders the improvement of software, and significantly narrows the user's choice."

Criticisim 

The corporation keeps an eye on actual and potential competitors (primarily the spread of Linux systems) in an attempt to maintain its monopoly by applying various methods of pressure.

Microsoft has been criticized for the non-transparent development of most of its products, which has led to several lawsuits. Google filed a lawsuit against Microsoft that sought to obtain information about the Windows Vista search system and other data needed to develop Google Desktop for Windows Vista, one of the functions of which is to index and search files.

Internet Explorer appeared later than similar products of some competitors (for example, Netscape Navigator). However, Microsoft actively pushed out third-party browsers by embedding proprietary technologies into its Internet Explorer that are not supported anywhere else, such as ActiveX, specific Javascript features, etc.; Also, Internet Explorer up to version 7.0 had undocumented implementation features that led to the need for non-intuitive customization of the page markup code for IE. As a result, website creators were forced to ensure that their sites worked correctly in IE, even at the expense of working correctly in other browsers. There were, and probably still are, sites that run exclusively in Internet Explorer. Sites developed exclusively according to W3C standards may not display correctly in IE8.

Microsoft in the Russian Federation has also been criticized for prosecuting copyright infringers, including the refusal of the company's Russian representative office to sign a settlement agreement in the so-called Ponosov case.

Microsoft has also been criticized for promoting its Office Open XML (OOXML) text document format as an ISO standard, as OpenDocument (ODF, ISO/IEC 26300) is already a standard, and the OOXML document format used in Microsoft Office 2007 does not conform to the OOXML standard proposed by Microsoft itself.