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posted by CoolHand on Saturday April 04 2015, @12:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-all-love-microsoft dept.

Alyssa Newcomb reports at ABC News that the software company started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975 is 40 and fabulous and highlights products and moments that helped define Microsoft's first four decades including: Microsoft’s first product - software for the Altair 8800; Getting a deal to provide a DOS Operating System for IBM's computers in 1980; Shipping Windows 1.0 in 1985; Microsoft Office for Mac released in 1989; Windows 3.0 ships in 1990, ushering in the era of graphics on computers; Windows 95 launches in 1995, selling an astounding 7 million copies in the first five weeks, and the first time the start menu, task bar, minimize, maximize and close buttons are introduced on each window.

For his part, Bill Gates sent a letter to employees celebrating Microsoft's anniversary, recalling how far computing has come since he and Paul Allen set the goal of a computer on every desk and in every home, and predicting that computing will evolve faster in the next 10 years than it ever has before. "We are nearing the point where computers and robots will be able to see, move, and interact naturally, unlocking many new applications and empowering people even more. Under Satya's leadership, Microsoft is better positioned than ever to lead these advances. We have the resources to drive and solve tough problems. We are engaged in every facet of modern computing and have the deepest commitment to research in the industry," concludes Gates. "We have accomplished a lot together during our first 40 years and empowered countless businesses and people to realize their full potential. But what matters most now is what we do next. Thank you for helping make Microsoft a fantastic company now and for decades to come."

Some of us may disagree that the company is currently fabulous, but there is no doubt that it has been a force that has shaped the industry for the past forty years.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by Appalbarry on Saturday April 04 2015, @05:08PM

    by Appalbarry (66) on Saturday April 04 2015, @05:08PM (#166442) Journal

    I started with a Timex Sinclair, then a Commodore 64 running Paperclip and Multiplan (I think?)

    Truth is, moving to DOS and Wordperfect 5.1 was a massive change for the better. Adding MS Office even more so because of Excel.

    Windows 3.1 may have been clunky, but alternating subsequent releases were impressive for the time. I think we went from 95, to 98, to 2000, and stayed with that for years until moving over to Linux. In the real world they were the product that Just Worked, and more importantly that had the software that you needed.

    With the demise of Wordperfect (yes, they still exist, but...) Word was the defacto standard because there was nothing else on the market to match it. (And yes, there were attempts to create alternate products, but they all pretty much died on the vine.)

    For most users MS Word on Windows was the first choice because it let you do one heck of lot of things that no other product could match. Same for Excel. That's still true today, and I speak as a die hard LibreOffice user.

    My ultimate point is this: it's easy to pick and choose specific features or mistakes (Windows ME?) that Microsoft made over the years, but overall, for at least a couple of decades, they were the innovators, and they were the company that delivered what users and corporations wanted and needed.

    When you can name another company that delivered the same number of usable, fairly robust, and fairly innovative products, that weren't tied to a specific hardware package (yes, Apple) (who also benefited greatly from Microsoft software), and that were usable by millions of ordinary end users, you can start to complain.

    Most honest users who've been actually using computers for thirty or forty years will (at least grudgingly) admit that Microsoft pretty much built the personal computer market, and created software conventions that are still with us today.

    (For the record, the only time I use any MS product these days is a VM of Vista once a month for bookkeeping.)

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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 05 2015, @09:23PM

    by Bot (3902) on Sunday April 05 2015, @09:23PM (#166779) Journal

    Microsoft does not strike me as being particularly innovative.

    Take windows (the trademark for, guess, a window system). Microsoft copied Apple who copied Xerox, a PHOTOCOPIERS company. Can you get less original than that?

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