Microsoft Corporation

In January 1975, Paul Allen showed Bill Gates an issue of Popular Electronics featuring the Altair 8800. Neither of them had written a BASIC interpreter for it. But Gates called MITS and told them Microsoft had a working version ready. They then had eight weeks to actually build it. It worked. Gates was 19.

IBM approached Microsoft in 1980 to write an operating system for its new PC. Microsoft didn't have one. Gates bought QDOS from a Seattle programmer for $50,000, renamed it MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM — while retaining the right to license it to other manufacturers. IBM thought hardware was the business. Gates understood it was software.

Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones $14 million to use "Start Me Up" for the Windows 95 launch campaign. The launch was the largest consumer software release in history. Lines formed outside stores at midnight. Jay Leno hosted the event.

In 2000, a U.S. federal judge ruled that Microsoft should be broken into two separate companies after finding it had illegally maintained its monopoly in PC operating systems. The ruling was later overturned on appeal, but Microsoft agreed to a settlement.

When Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, Microsoft was widely regarded as a company that had missed mobile, missed search, and missed social. Nadella pivoted to cloud computing and transformed Microsoft's culture. The market cap tripled in his first five years.

Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI in January 2023, securing exclusive access to GPT-4. Within months, "Copilot" had been embedded in Word, Excel, Teams, and GitHub — repositioning Microsoft as the leading AI company in enterprise software.