Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation {{nasdaq|MSFT}} is the world's biggest software company, with over sixty thousand employees and a physical presence in over sixty countries as of 2005. It was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA. Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for various computing devices. Its most popular products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and Microsoft Office families of products, each of which has achieved near ubiquity in the desktop computer market.

Facts and trivia

• The name Microsoft was first used in a letter from Gates to Allen on November 29, 1975.
• Microsoft, without a hyphen, became a registered trademark on November 26, 1976.
• In the early 1980s, in cooperation with a large number of companies, Microsoft created a home computer system named MSX. It became fairly popular in Japan and Europe, but the IBM PC became increasingly dominant through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, bringing an end to the MSX and many other systems like it.
• Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit is the largest developer of Macintosh software outside of Apple itself.
• Microsoft Bob, a Windows 3.1 program manager replacement released by Microsoft in March 1995, is what many consider Microsoft's most unsuccessful product, becoming the source of many jokes as a result of its unpopularity.
• The Microsoft Puzzle Hunt is an annual puzzle hunt (a live puzzle game where teams compete to solve a series of puzzles) held at the Redmond campus. It is a spinoff of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
• Microsoft's first operating system was Xenix, released in 1981 and later sold to Santa Cruz Operation.