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From The Matrix
Microsoft Corporation
- 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington.
Microsoft Corporation, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, is the world's largest software company, trading on the NASDAQ stock market under the symbol 'MSFT'. Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of software products for various computing devices. Their best known product is the Microsoft Windows operating system family, which has achieved near ubiquity in the desktop computer market, leading to accusations of illegal monopolistic business practices. The company was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters under the company name Micro-soft.
Contents |
Microsoft History
Products
Labor History
Environmental History
Social History
Public perceptions
For a long time, Microsoft was widely seen as the "good guy" in the computer software market, providing an inexpensive alternative to the expensive systems provided by the major mainframe and UNIX vendors, and it was admired for the large amounts of money it made in doing so.
By the 1990s, the perception that Microsoft had become the "bad guy" had increased substantially. It was frequently accused of leveraging its market dominance in desktop computing in order to try to exploit its customers unfairly. Microsoft has rarely failed to own any market it set its sights on; as a result, Microsoft has been able to dampen the future of successful young companies simply by announcing an intention to someday release a competing product. (Though on a few occasions, Microsoft has failed to own a market, such as in the fight between Microsoft Money and Intuit's Quicken, followed by the government's block of Microsoft's attempt to purchase Intuit.)
In recent years, Microsoft has been accused of anti-competitive business practices by the US government, the European Union, and Microsoft's competitors; this has generated huge negative perceptions.
Microsoft has been called "the Borg" after the fictional race of aliens in the Star Trek universe. The name began to be used in reference to Microsoft soon after the Borg's first appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It reflects the perception that Microsoft tends to acquire technology from competitors rather than developing it in-house, as well as to Microsoft's ability to adapt to and overwhelm its opponents' strategies by having vastly superior resources.
The monopoly question
Microsoft's Windows product has an effective monopoly in the desktop operating systems market. Those who make this claim point out that, among other things, almost every PC sold has a copy of Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In a 2003 publication, Dan Geer argued the prevalence of Microsoft products has resulted in a monoculture. This assertion has been responded to directly in a publication sympathetic to Microsoft, MCP Magazine.
Some observers claim that the characterization of Microsoft as a monopoly leaves its competitors in a conflict:
- On the one hand, competitors reject this characterization as negating their own position. In a monopolized market, there exists only one provider of a product or service. Therefore, to competitors, calling Microsoft a monopoly is a defeatist strategy: it denies either their own existence, or their capacity to survive and to compete.
- On the other hand, competitors favor the characterization of Microsoft as a monopoly because such a characterization benefits them. First, it raises the potential for regulatory intervention. Second, the public relations benefits of being seen as an "underdog" may increase sales.
Monopoly or not, there is no doubt that:
- In most mass-market desktop software application markets, Microsoft is a dominant player.
- This dominance attracts widespread resentment.
- This resentment is not restricted to its competitors.
Critics of Microsoft have accused it of using its dominance in desktop operating system to try to leverage market share in other sectors of the computer market, such as web browsers (Internet Explorer), server operating systems (Windows NT), office software suites (Microsoft Office), and streaming media (Windows Media).
After its bundling of the Internet Explorer web browser into its Windows operating system, Microsoft acquired an extremely large market share in the browser market. Partly as a result of this dominance, Microsoft was convicted by a USA federal court for abusing its monopoly in the desktop operating systems market (see Microsoft antitrust case for more details).
In 2003-2004, the European Commission investigated the bundling of media player software into Windows, a practice which rivals complained was destroying the market for their own products. Negotiations between Microsoft and the Commission broke down in March 2004, and the company was subsequently handed down a record fine of €497 million ($613 million) for its breaches of EU competition law. The ruling is subject to appeal in the European courts. Separate investigations into alleged abuses of the server market were also ongoing at the same time.
Microsoft has in all of these cases depicted its actions as its response to customer demand.
Critics also decry Microsoft's perceived "embrace and extend" strategy of adding proprietary features to open, de facto standards, thereby using its market dominance to gain de facto ownership of standards "extended" in this way.
