Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporationheadquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures,licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantlyrelated to computing through its various product divisions. Established onApril 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800,Microsoft rose to dominatethe home computer operatingsystem (OS) market withMS-DOS in the mid-1980s,followed by the MicrosoftWindows line of OSs. Theensuing rise of stock inthe company’s 1986 initialpublic offering (IPO) madean estimated four billionaires and 12,000 millionaires from Microsoftemployees. Microsoft would come to dominate other markets as well,notably the office suite market with Microsoft Office.

One of Microsoft’s business tactics, described by an executiveas “embrace, extend and extinguish,” initially embraces a competing　　standard or product, then extendsit to produce their own versionwhich is then incompatiblewith the standard, which intime extinguishes competitionthat does not or cannot useMicrosoft’s new version. Variouscompanies and governments sueMicrosoft over this set of tactics, resulting in billions of dollars in rulingsagainst the company. Microsoft claims that the original strategy is not anticompetitive,but rather an exercise of its discretion to implement features itbelieves customers want.

As a co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 onthe SAT and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. Whileat Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as CEOof Microsoft. Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student atHarvard and spent a lot of time using the school’s computers.

During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO andchief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder withmore than 8 percent of the common stock. He is consistently ranked amongthe world’s wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computerrevolution. In the later stages of his career, Gates has pursued a number ofphilanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to variouscharitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill& Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoftin January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position ofchief software architect. In June 2006, Gates announced that he would betransitioning from full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and fulltimework at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates’ last full-time dayat Microsoft was June 27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executivechairman.