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Microsoft is a multinational technology company originating from the United States, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, and Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and five technology giants. Among them, the main business is R&D, manufacturing, licensing and providing a wide range of computer software services, the most famous and best-selling products are Microsoft Windows operating system and Microsoft Office office software, and other subsidiaries such as Xbox game business are also very famous.

In its early days, the company developed and sold the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, and in the mid-1980s it made great strides in the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS, and later on Windows, which allowed Microsoft to gradually dominate the home desktop operating system market. At the same time, Microsoft also began to expand its business, entering other industries and markets, creating the MSN website, and in the computer hardware market, the Microsoft logo and Xbox game consoles, Zune and MSN TV home entertainment devices also appeared on the market in various years. Microsoft went public in 1986, and since then its rising share price has created four billionaires and 12,000 millionaires for Microsoft.

As the company has gone from strength to strength, Microsoft has also received more and more criticism and blame, which has not stopped for decades. Practices such as refusal to trade and bundling have led to lawsuits for monopoly and unfair competition. Both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission have ruled against Microsoft under antitrust laws.

As of 2015, although Microsoft has lost the vast majority of mobile systems due to competition from Android and iOS, it still dominates the IBM PC-compatible operating system market and the office software suite market. The company also produces a variety of other consumer and enterprise software for desktops, laptops, tags, gadgets, and servers, including internet search (with Bing), digital services marketplace (via MSN), mixed reality (HoloLens), cloud computing (Azure), and software development (Visual Studio).

Steve Ballmer, who replaced Gates as CEO in 2000, later envisioned a “equipment and services” strategy. It first entered the PC production market in June 2012 with Microsoft’s acquisition of Danger in 2008, with the launch of Microsoft’s Surface family of tablets, and subsequently through the acquisition of Nokia devices to form Microsoft’s Mobile and Services division. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has diversified its business to grow the Surface family and cloud services in addition to its original Windows, Office and console businesses, and has become more actively involved in open source, such as on August 18, 2016, when it announced the open source of PowerShell, and added support for the Linux platform in addition to the Windows business, Office business and Xbox business, and the development of WSL. Open source Windows Terminal, acquisition of GitHub, .NET Framework open source and cross-platform, open source VS Code, strengthen the development of Microsoft Azure platform, Office products support multi-platform.

In 2018, Microsoft once surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. In April 2019, Microsoft reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion, becoming the second U.S.-listed company after Apple to have a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion (Amazon.com Inc. had already traded more than $1 trillion in intraday trading in September 2018, but it was not considered an official record at the close). In June 2021, Microsoft’s market capitalization exceeded $2 trillion for the first time, becoming the second company to exceed $2 trillion in market capitalization. Microsoft is ranked 95th in the Fortune Global 500 list in 2015.