Welcome to watchmojo.com, I’m your host Stash Can. In today’s business profile, we take a look at Microsoft. Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington. It is a company that operates in over a hundred countries, has over 80,000 employees and has annual revenues of over 50 billion dollars.
Microsoft commands nearly 90% market share but like most companies it’s facing a period amount of challenges to date. Microsoft’s story is well documented and that is the Bill Gates was a student at Harvard University and decided to drop out and basically relocated to New Mexico where one of its first partners and clients was located. The next year, in 1978 the company’s first international office opened up in Japan and on January 1st 1979, Bill Gates decided to relocate the company’s headquarters from New Mexico out over in Redmond, Washington.
And in 1980, Steve Ballmer a Harvard classmate of Bill Gates decided to leave Procter and Gamble and join the company. On August 12, 1981 IBM gave Microsoft its first major successful contract. That is when IBM passed up digital research and granted Microsoft a contract for the Disk Operating System or DOS. On March 13, 1986 Microsoft had its IPO or Initial Public Offering. The stock opened at 21 and closed at 28. but if you adjust for all the stocks splits, that’s about 10 cents compared to today’s price.
Now, Microsoft has gone on to create four billionaires and over 12,000 millionaires. In 1989 Microsoft launched its flagship office suite called Microsoft Office. And the next year, in 1990 it launched Windows 3.0 which really helped the company become the dominant platform of the computer industry.
Microsoft’s critics are quick to point out that the company has rarely invented much. And in fact, it’s missed on many opportunities none of which are greater than the internet in the World Wide Web. By the mid 1990’s, Netscape has commanding position in the browser worse and that’s when Microsoft decided to launch internet explorer and bundle it in its OS. That's when the justice department decided to follow motion in Microsoft’s anti-trust problems begun.
Today, Microsoft is a diversified technology company that uses its cash accounts to invest in new high growth areas. Microsoft is facing many competitors all at once. In the video game market, it is taking on of course Nintendo and Sony. In the music business, it’s taking on Apple and Sandisk and of course, on line it’s taking on yahoo, Google, and AOL. It’s for that reason that some people are arguing that Microsoft should be broken up not fro anti-trust purposes but for strategic reasons.
While Bill Gates remains the company’s chairman, other executives have taken over the most senior positions. Steve Ballmer became the president in 1998 and is today the CEO as well. And in 2006, Ray Ozzie became the firm’s Chief Software Architect. In 2007, Microsoft shocked the investment community by investing 240 million dollars and a 1.6% percent stake in Facebook, the hot social networking site. It valued Facebook at 15 billion dollars and more importantly it showed the community just how serious Microsoft is in it's war against Google for internet advertising dollars.
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