History Of Microsoft Windows
Windows XP (2001) XP was the first OS based on the Windows NT kernel and was the first version of Windows to include a device activation key in a bid to reduce piracy, as well as online security updates. 14 years later, and even though Windows XP still has an 18.9% market share, Microsoft announced it was ending support for the OS.
Bill Gates and his head counsel Bill Neukom, decided to make an offer to license features of Apple's operating system. Apple agreed and a contract was drawn up. Here's the clincher: Microsoft wrote the agreement to include use of Apple features in Microsoft Windows version 1.0 and all future Microsoft software programs. As it turned out, this move by was as brilliant as his decision to buy QDOS from Seattle Computer Products and his convincing IBM to let Microsoft keep the licensing rights to MS-DOS. (You can read all about those smooth moves in our feature on.).
In their defense, Microsoft claimed that the licensing agreement actually gave them the rights to use Apple features. After a four-year court case, Microsoft won. Apple claimed that Microsoft had infringed on 170 of their copyrights. The courts said that the licensing agreement gave Microsoft the rights to use all but nine of the copyrights, and Microsoft later convinced the courts that the remaining copyrights should not be covered by copyright law.
Bill Gates claimed that Apple had taken ideas from the graphical user interface developed by Xerox for Xerox's Alto and Star computers.
Microsoft Corporation, leading developer of systems and applications. The company also publishes books and multimedia titles, produces its own line of hybrid tablet computers, offers services, and sells systems, computer , and portable media players. It has sales offices throughout the world. In addition to its main centre at its corporate headquarters in, Washington, U.S., Microsoft operates research labs in Cambridge, England (1997); Beijing, China (1998); Sadashivnagar, Bangalore, India (2005); Santa Barbara, California (2005); Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); New York, New York (2012); and Montreal, Canada (2015). Founding and early growthIn 1975 and, two boyhood friends from, converted, a popular mainframe, for use on an early personal computer (PC), the Altair.
Shortly afterward, Gates and Allen founded Microsoft, deriving the name from the words microcomputer and software. During the next few years, they refined BASIC and developed other programming languages. In 1980 (IBM) asked Microsoft to produce the essential software, or, for its first, the IBM PC.
Microsoft purchased an operating system from another company, modified it, and renamed it (Microsoft Disk Operating System). MS-DOS was released with the IBM PC in 1981. Thereafter, most manufacturers of personal computers licensed MS-DOS as their operating system, generating vast revenues for Microsoft; by the early 1990s it had sold more than 100 million copies of the program and defeated rival operating systems such as CP/M, which it displaced in the early 1980s, and later. Microsoft deepened its position in operating systems with, a whose third version, released in 1990, gained a wide following. By 1993, Windows 3.0 and its subsequent versions were selling at a rate of one million copies per month, and nearly 90 percent of the world’s PCs ran on a Microsoft operating system. In 1995 the company released Windows 95, which for the first time fully MS-DOS with Windows and effectively matched in ease of use ’s. Microsoft also became the leader in productivity software such as and programs, outdistancing longtime rivals Lotus and WordPerfect in the process.
As a result, by the mid-1990s Microsoft, which became a publicly owned corporation in 1986, had become one of the most powerful and profitable companies in American history. It consistently earned profits of 25 cents on every sales dollar, an astonishing record. In the company’s 1996 fiscal year, it topped $2 billion in for the first time, and its unbroken string of profits continued, even during the Great Recession of 2007–09 (its net income had grown to more than $14 billion by fiscal year 2009). However, its rapid growth in a fiercely competitive and fast-changing industry spawned resentment and jealousy among rivals, some of whom complained that the company’s practices violated U.S.
Laws against unfair competition. Microsoft and its defenders countered that, far from stifling competition and technical, its rise had encouraged both and that its software had consistently become less expensive and more useful. A investigation concluded in 1994 with a settlement in which Microsoft changed some sales practices that the government contended enabled the company to unfairly discourage OS customers from trying programs. The following year the Department successfully challenged Microsoft’s proposed purchase of, then the leading maker of financial software for PCs. Get unlimited access to all of Britannica’s trusted content.Chasing the InternetPartly because of its stunning success in PC software, Microsoft was slow to realize the commercial possibilities of network systems and the. In 1993 it released Windows NT, a landmark program that tied PCs together and offered improved reliability and network security.
Sales were initially disappointing, but by 1996 Windows NT was being hailed as the likely standard for PC networking, quickly surpassing Novell’s NetWare in market. Microsoft did not move into Internet software until a new venture, had introduced Navigator, a Web program that simplified the once-arcane process of navigating the.
In a violent change of course, Microsoft quickly developed its own browser, made it free, and moved aggressively to persuade computer makers and Internet service providers to distribute it exclusively. By 1996 Microsoft was bundling Explorer with and had begun the process of Explorer directly into Windows. In response, Netscape accused Microsoft of violating its 1995 consent decree and sued; those efforts helped to persuade the Justice Department to reopen a broad investigation of Microsoft. In 1999, following a trial that lasted 30 months, a judge found Microsoft in violation of the (1890) and ordered the breakup of the company. In 2001 an appeals court overturned the breakup order but still found the company guilty of illegally trying to maintain a. The company’s legal woes continued in 2004: the (EU) levied the largest fine in the organization’s history to that point, €497.2 million ($611 million), in retaliation for what were described as Microsoft’s near-monopoly practices. In February 2008 the EU imposed an even higher fine, €899 million ($1.35 billion), on the company for having defied the EU’s 2004 antitrust decision against Microsoft for illegally bundling multimedia software with its Windows operating system to the exclusion of competitors.
Entry into the gaming and mobile phone marketsIn 2001 Microsoft released the, an console that quickly captured second place in the video gaming market. In 2002 it launched, a broadband gaming network for its consoles. A more powerful gaming console, the, was released in 2005.
History Of Microsoft Windows Operating System
In an intensely competitive market, where the Xbox faced strong pressure from the and, Microsoft struggled through the years to make consistent profits from its console. For example, in 2009 the company cut the price of the Xbox 360 Elite by as much as 25 percent in order to pick up market share. The move was successful; by 2010 the Xbox 360 was the most-used game console in the American home. But at the same time, the price cuts also led to a 6 percent drop in revenue in Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division (EDD).
Other EDD products also struggled. The Zune family of portable media players introduced in 2006 failed to challenge the market dominance of Apple’s. The Windows Mobile OS, used in made by a variety of vendors, including HTC, LG, and, trailed in market share in the behind Research in Motion’s and Apple’s. In 2009 Microsoft ceased publishing online and disc versions of its encyclopaedia. Further developments in Windows OSMicrosoft began planning a major replacement for all of its operating systems in 2001. The project, code-named Longhorn, encountered numerous delays, in part because of efforts to address the public’s growing concern with and consumers’ desire for PCs to have greater with a full range of entertainment equipment within the modern electronic home. The company started over, and the new operating system, renamed Vista, was released to other software developers late in 2006 and to the general public in 2007.
Like most new operating systems, Vista met with initial problems involving incompatibilities with older computer peripherals. More problematic for the new operating system was its “bloated” structure, which required a very fast and large amounts of dedicated for proper functioning. Its high for adequate system resources deterred many companies and individuals from upgrading systems from earlier, and perfectly serviceable, systems such as (derived from the term Windows Experience). In addition, consumers were baffled by the numerous Vista options—Home (Basic or Premium), Ultimate, Business, and others—while business users (Microsoft’s core market) balked at its major change to the user interface and were unwilling to port their internal applications to the new system.Microsoft’s corporate users had other reasons to stick with Windows XP.
Though still problematic compared with other operating systems, XP was significantly more secure than its predecessors. XP was also faster and much more stable than Windows 95 or 98, and it ran tens of thousands of software programs written specifically for it, which made business users reluctant to switch operating systems. It can be argued that customer satisfaction with XP is what killed Vista among business users. PC makers, who were contractually required by Microsoft to ship products with Vista, were compelled to offer “downgrades” from Vista to XP, and user appreciation even compelled Microsoft to extend its official support of the older OS through 2014, three years beyond its normal support policies.Adding to Microsoft’s OS problems was increased competition in the marketplace. Apple’s Mac OS X, riding on the huge success of the iPhone and iPod consumer products, grew in popularity., long an operating system for the technically adept, began to appear in more user-friendly versions, such as Ubuntu, and by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Linux had captured one-third of the growing low-cost market.
Yet, despite its problems in the marketplace, Microsoft remained the dominant supplier of operating systems. Windows held a worldwide market share of 86 to 92 percent, depending on the research analysis. With the release in 2009 of, the replacement for Vista, to critical praise by reviewers and analysts, Microsoft’s lead remained intact. In 2012 the company released, which offered a start screen with applications appearing as tiles on a grid., released in 2015, featured Cortana, a digital personal assistant capable of responding to voice commands (as did the iPhone’s Siri), and a new Web browser, which replaced Internet Explorer.
Competition withMicrosoft’s continued OS dominance and its quick recovery in the “browser wars” did not repeat itself in the market, where Microsoft’s, Live Search, trailed well behind those of, the new industry giant, and, the durable Internet portal site. Microsoft hoped to change the market with the release in 2009 of, a “decision engine” designed to display more retrieved information in search pages than was typical, thus enabling better-informed decisions concerning what links to follow or, in some cases, displaying enough information to satisfy the original query.In 2008 Microsoft had offered to buy for $44.6 billion, but this proposal was rejected by Yahoo! However, negotiations between the companies continued, and in 2009 an agreement was reached in which Yahoo!
Would use Bing for its and would handle premium advertisements for Microsoft’s Web site—an arrangement scheduled to last 10 years. Microsoft followed up the agreement with Yahoo! By licensing search content from Wolfram Research, makers of the Mathematica-powered WolframAlpha scientific search engine.On another front in its competition with Google, Microsoft moved into, where application software and data storage are provided by centralized Internet services and are simply accessed by users through their local PCs.
Microsoft’s first move was with its Windows Azure platform, announced in 2008. Azure lets service providers or businesses build computing in the “cloud” and then offer the infrastructure as services to users.
In 2011 Microsoft released Office 365, a cloud version of its highly profitable Office business software suite (comprising, Outlook, and OneNote) that included services and features similar to those of Google Docs.In 2011 Microsoft bought the Internet voice communication company for $8.5 billion, which at that time was the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history. Microsoft planned to add Skype to Xbox, Outlook, and Windows smartphones. The Skype acquisition placed Microsoft in competition with Apple’s video-chat service Facetime and Google’s Internet communication service. Microsoft after Bill GatesIn 2000 company cofounder Gates relinquished his role as CEO of Microsoft to, whom Gates had met during his brief at in the 1970s. He handed over the title of chief software architect in 2006 to Ray Ozzie, a chief developer of the computer networking package Lotus Notes in the 1990s.
In 2008 Gates left the day-to-day running of the company to Ballmer, Ozzie, and other managers, though he remained as chairman of the board. Ozzie stepped down in 2010, and longtime Microsoft executive replaced Ballmer as CEO in 2014.
History Of Microsoft Windows Pdf
There was some concern (and some hopefulness) among industry observers that the departure of Gates would hamper Microsoft’s preeminent position in the computer industry. That situation did not materialize. The company retained its top spot in both business and consumer segments, including operating systems, productivity software, and services.
In 2012 it introduced Surface, a line of hybrid tablet computers with hardware designed by Microsoft itself, a first for the company. It also had competitive products in almost all areas of business information technology and applications. Microsoft’s core strengths and most of its profits were to be found on its business side, where it set global standards with its products. Nevertheless, Microsoft’s management understood that the company also had to have a major, even if not a dominant, presence in consumer markets as improvements in information technology continued to blur the line between personal computing and business computing.