• Introduction: In 1984, Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen posed for a portrait. Growing up in Seattle, they were obsessed with computing and haunted the University of Washington's computer lab.
• Revenge of the hobbyists: In 1975, Allen saw an ad for an Altair 8800 and they built an interpreter for it, forming Microsoft BASIC. Gates had to write a letter to hobbyists begging them to stop pirating software as the notion of software value was novel.
• The PC boom: In the 1980s, MS-DOS was preinstalled on IBM home computers, helping Microsoft software take over. Windows later allowed users to navigate by pointing and clicking, introducing household names like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
• Attempts to reboot: In the early 2000s, Microsoft faced competition from Apple in hardware. Its attempts like the Zune and Windows Phone didn't succeed, but the Xbox video game console was a hit. Today, Microsoft Azure is a big revenue driver and it's betting on artificial intelligence with ChatGPT and Copilot.
• Conclusion: Microsoft has been remarkable in reinventing itself, and many companies don't have this ability and fade away. Microsoft is a financial supporter of NPR but is covered like any other company.