40 Amazing and Interesting Facts about Microsoft | Amazing Facts 4U
- Though Microsoft is currently headquartered in Redmond, Washington, the company was actually founded in New Mexico back in April 1975. It moved to Redmond in 1986.
- Microsoft was created and named by Bill Gates and Paul Allen as being a combination of the words “microcomputer” and “software,”. It was originally spelled as “Micro-soft.”. The hyphen was removed in 1976.
- Amazingly Microsoft didn’t make the original MS-DOS operating system. It licensed the software for 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, reworked it, and then later renamed the software MS-DOS.
- Microsoft cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen designed the company’s first logo in under a day.
- Bill Gates right from the beginning consciously decided not to sell any software that Microsoft developed. It only licenses its software and enjoys full retaining rights. This strategy has made billions for Microsoft as it reached every business and home.
- Microsoft is a software giant employing about 1,13,000 workers all over the world and We find it’s presence all around us in our life.
- The Microsoft Partner Network includes over 430,000 organizations with more than 160 million mutual customers worldwide.
- Microsoft has 16 different $1 billion-plus businesses.
- About 1.5 billion people use Windows every day. More than 1.1 billion people use Microsoft Office.
- Microsoft had it’s first ever quarterly loss in July of 2012.
- In 1981 , IBM introduced its personal computer with Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS 1.0.
- Though Microsoft made its billions on software, the company had in fact, first ever hardware product , the Microsoft Mouse dating back to 1983.
- Mcrosoft stock goes public in 1986. In it’s first year of public trading, Microsoft only managed $16,000 in revenue. However, just 4 years later, that amount had jumped all the way up to a million.
- If you had bought one share of Microsoft stock for $21 at its IPO, it would be worth nearly $15,000 today. In fact, in 1987, at age 31, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates became the youngest-ever billionaire at the time.
- Microsoft’s explosive growth and the resulting increase in stock value has made for at least two more billionaires and as many as 12,000 millionaires.
- Microsoft launched Windows 3.0 in 1990 followed by Windows 95 and Windows 98 and Windows 2000.
- Bill Gates in fact named windows 1.0 ‘Interface Manager.’ Gates had the good sense to abandon his preferred name and instead go with ‘Windows’. Windows 1.0 had a colour 16-bit interface and was less than 1MB in size requiring a minimum of 256 kilobytes (KB) RAM, two double-sided floppy disk drives, and a graphics adapter card.
- Microsoft truly became a dominant force in desktop computing after release of Windows 95 in August 1995. It had a massive advertising budget. Over the next 10 years, Microsoft’s annual revenue climbed by more than five times.
- Windows 95, startup chime was created by a music legend, Brian Eno. He was instructed to limit it to 3 1/4 seconds long.
- Windows XP was launched in 2001. It was immensely popular product. It was compiled from 45 million lines of code. Thereafter Windows 7 was launched in 2009 & Windows 8 was launched in 2012.
- The standard Windows XP background photo titled “Bliss,” is the photo taken in Sonoma County, California, by Charles O’Rear in 1996. It is the most viewed photo in the history of the world.
- Microsoft’s first killer app was Microsoft Excel, which unseated long established spreadsheet products Apple VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft office all grew from that one program.
- Although iPhone took the lead in crafting the modern-day smartphones , Microsoft was in fact busy putting Windows mobile on PDAs and smartphones as early as 2000, a good seven years before the iPhone was released.
- Microsoft and Apple actually worked together for years on software for the first Macintosh computer until Microsoft announced its competing Windows, which sparked a rivalry between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
- In 1994, Timex and Microsoft designed the Datalink 150 watch together. It was the first-ever smartwatch, beating Apple by 12 years. However, it didn’t click then.
- It’s not well known that in 1997, Microsoft saved Apple from certain bankruptcy by making a $150 million investment.
- Microsoft released the Xbox games console in 2001. “Xbox” is short for “DirectX Box” derived from DirectX which is the crucial software on Windows required for intense game graphics.
- Microsoft and partners launched Tablet PC in 2002.
- Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in 2010, Windows Phone 8 in 2012 and Windows 10 in 2015.
- The Windows Phone Store features nearly 250,000 apps and games.
- Microsft outlook has over 400 million active users and is the world’s fastest-growing email service.
- Microsoft has acquired about 150 companies. Hotmail, the first email was amongst them. Microsoft closed its acquisition of Skype in 2011. Skype users now make an average of 50 billion minutes of calls per month.
- Microsoft acquired Nokia in 2013 which has turned out to be one of the very costliest acquisitions.
- Microsoft has recently announced it’s plan to purchase LinkedIn for the huge sum of 26 billion dollars , it’s biggest acquisition.
- In 2006, Microsoft had the chance to buy YouTube for just 500 million dollars, but they didn’t think it could ever be that valuable. Today YouTube is worth between 25 and 40 billion dollars.
- Satya Nadella named chief executive officer for Microsoft in 2014.
- Microsoft launches latest Office 2016 in 2015.
- Amazing facts is that Microsoft holds over 10,000 patents. It files about 3,000 patent per year. Any staff member that secures a new patent gets a $1,500 bonus, a plaque, and a specially marked granite cube for their desk.
- Amazing fact is that you can’t create any of these folders in windows as these are reserved names, namely CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9.
- Microsoft has a collection of over 5,000 contemporary pieces including painting, sculptures, paper work, photographs and multimedia works, It is one of the largest corporate collector of artwork.
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