Microsoft Corporation is the software company founded by BillGates'. They made MS-DOS, MicrosoftWindows, MicrosoftOffice, MicrosoftAccess, InternetExplorer, VisualBasic, VisualC++, VisualStudio and the MicroSoftDeveloperNetwork development tools. They have also sold a UNIX called Xenix, but all references to this have been wiped from their WebSite (MicrosoftWindows actually has a POSIX compliance layer and they do work with MainSoft? on compatibility with UNIX).
Their main cash cows are MicrosoftWindows and MicrosoftOffice, and to a lesser extent MicrosoftExchange and the SQLServer. All other branches of their product family are of questionable profitability, but thanks to the four aforementioned obscenely profitable products they can afford to indefinitely dominate markets where they never turn a profit. Historically they have harvested their profits from software licenses sold in bulk to OEMs and large corporations under secretively protected terms. In more than a few cases these terms have been designed for heavy handed stifling of competition and have been, if not outright illegal, then at least highly questionable. Antitrust investigations have had some corrective effect on the most egregious offences, but this generally happens long after the fact.
Events in mid-2007 surrounding the standardisation of the Office OpenXML format at ISO have underscored that MicrosoftCorporation remains the company it has always been. In November 2007, after Mandriva closed a deal for 17,000 notebooks intended for pupils that would be delivered with Linux preinstalled, the Nigerian government suddenly informed Mandriva that they would buy the notebooks as agreed but replace Linux with MicrosoftWindows on delivery. In other late-2007 news, MSFT are stonewalling the progress of ECMAScript 4, spreading FUD about its compatibility with ECMAScript 3 alias JavaScript, proposing instead to create an entirely new language to move the development of browsers and the web forward.
Their street address is 1 Microsoft Way. Some say that's their company slogan too.
AddToMe: Palladium / DRM stuff.
See also:
AsSeenOnSlashdot, The Microsoft Prayer.
Our father, who art in Redmond
Microsoft be thy name
Thy monopoly come, thy will be done
throughout the earth as it is in the US.
Give us this day, our daily license activation key
And forgive us our bug reports
as we forgive our system crashes
And lead us not into competition
But deliver us from innovation
For thine is the Control, and the Power and the Greed
Forever. Amen.
86 pages link to MicrosoftCorporation:
