Sweet Success:

By: Brittany Cieri

Entrepreneur

• Real Name: William Henry Gates III

• More formerly known as Bill Gates• Gates left Harvard University,

moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where MITS was located, and founded Microsoft there in 1975

• From 1975 on, Gates and his business only progressed and became more technologically savvy.

Entrepreneur’s Business

• The company's first international office was founded on November 1, 1978, in Japan

• It was titled “ASCII Microsoft“

• Now called Microsoft

Company History• Why: The company was founded

on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800 (a microcomputer design) ----------------------------

• Where/When: Founded in New Mexico, Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA in 1975

• Interesting Fact: As of the third quarter of 2009, Microsoft was ranked as the third largest company in the world, following PetronChina and Exxon Mobile.

Type of Business

• Microsoft a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices

• Is a corporation because Gates wanted to be “recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like actual people”, which a corporation instills.

Products of Microsoft• The biggest success obviously

being the Windows Operating system. Gates made it possible for each and every home computer to be functional.

• Offers server software such as the Windows Server System

• PDA’s and Smartphone Products

• Helped create DVR and TIVO• One of its most popular

achievements, creating the Xbox and Xbox 360.

Benefits to Society• One of Bill Gates' key visions for the

company was to "to get a workstation running our software onto every desk and eventually in every home, which was obviously done.

• Microsoft made it easy and affordable for people to put computers in their house.

• Makes research, homework, and online shopping possible.

Number of People Employed

• 89,809 People are Employed at Microsoft

• Employment is only subject to increase over the preceding years.

Growth/Success/Failure Of Microsoft

• Joined the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA)

• Criticism: Anti Competitive• The majority of criticism has been for its business

tactics, often described with the motto “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

• Which means, Microsoft initially embraces a competing standard or product, then extends it to produce their own version which is then incompatible with the standard, which in time extinguishes competition that does not or cannot use Microsoft's new version

• Besides a few minor consumer complaints such as this one, Microsoft has continued to be a success and grow as a multinational corporation.

Challenges

• Other than the headaches of trying to create the computer system, programs, and all of its products, Microsoft has only continued to grow each year and had extremely minimal challenges.

Business Organization Today

• It is a multinational corporation (grew from a small corporation to a multinational corporation because of its success and popularity)

• World wide, one can find the Microsoft logo in almost every electronic section of stores

• Microsoft is currently a public corporation: shares are publicly traded by thousands of shareholders

The End