Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. In April 2019, Microsoft reached the trillion-dollar market cap, becoming the third U.S. public company to be valued at over USD 1 trillion after Apple and Amazon respectively.
About Microsoft in brief
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. The company’s 1986 initial public offering created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. In 2018 Microsoft reclaimed its position as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. In April 2019, Microsoft reached the trillion-dollar market cap, becoming the third U.S. public company to be valued at over USD 1 trillion after Apple and Amazon respectively. As of 2020, Microsoft has the third-highest global brand valuation. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the U. S. information technology industry, along with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has scaled back on hardware and has instead focused on cloud computing, a move that helped the company’s shares reach its highest value since December 1999. Microsoft entered the international business in 1980 with its own version of Unix called Xenix but it was MS- DOS that solidified company’s dominance.
In November 1980, Microsoft awarded a contract to provide a version of CPM to be used in the IBM PC BIOS, so other companies had to reverse engineer it in order for non-IBM PCs to run it. In August 1977, Microsoft formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first office of ASCII. Microsoft moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington in January 1979. In June 2012, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Surface line of tablet computers, later forming Microsoft Mobile through the acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services division. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for USD 8. 5 billion in May 2011. In December 2016, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for USD 26. 2 billion for $26.2 billion. In January 2013, Microsoft announced the launch of the Microsoft Xbox gaming console for the Xbox One console. In July 2013, it announced the release of its Xbox One virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4 console. The Xbox One is the most popular gaming console in the United States, with more than 100 million units sold since its launch in 2007. It also has the highest market share in the North American gaming console market, with over 80% of the market share. In October 2013, the Xbox 360 gaming console was released. It was the first gaming console to be released in North America, and it is the only one to be sold in Europe and the Middle East. It has also been released in Australia, where it has a market share of over 30%.
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This page is based on the article Microsoft published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 26, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
