Microsoft the company
Microsoft the companyMicrosoft: THE COMPANY
The thought of forming a company which supplies its customers with software, was a great idea--especially coming from a college dropout. Bill Gates, along with high-school friend Paul Allen, formed a software company in 1975. From the beginning, Microsoft had a tremendous potential to become a very successful corporation. Beginning with a revenue of sixteen thousand dollars, and three employees, Microsoft developed into a huge "money making machine." In its twenty-five years of existence, Microsoft has developed a very powerful and dominating corporation--but is not necessarily considered a monopoly.
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28,
1955. Gates' father was a lawyer, and his mother was a teacher (Cusumano and
Selby 23). Much of Gates' programming started while he was a thirteen year old, from Lakeside School (tripod 1). He learned BASIC (Beginners All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction) programming with, then sophomore, Paul Allen. By 1973,
Gates was a student at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Allen
had enrolled at the University of Washington, where he studied computer science. Gates left Harvard after just two years of education, and planed on programming for many personal computers. He and Allen later founded the Microsoft company --a name which Gates had picked -- in 1975 (Cusumano and Selby 24).
When Microsoft started out, there were only three employees--Gates and
Allen included. The gross revenue totaled sixteen thousand dollars. By 1978,
Gates and Allen had employed eleven other people, but the revenue had jumped to
1.3 million dollars. The growth rate was quite steady until 1982-1983. This was when Microsoft had grown 104%. By 1995, Microsoft's revenue was 5.9 billion dollars, and they employed 17,800 people (Cusumano and Selby 3). In December of 1996, Gates owned 282,217,980 shares in Microsoft, which ultimately helped him become the richest man in the world (geocities 2).
Gates may have been the richest man in the world, but he had more
important things to worry about at the time. Beginning in 1990, Microsoft had
been under investigation by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) for antitrust
crimes. The Sherman Antitrust Act prohibits any form of monopolizing tactics,
which is now thought to be used be Microsoft (Case 1). In fact, the Sherman
Antitrust Act states that it is only prohibited for a company to control the supply and demand of products, in order to increase the prices of their own goods. In other words, lowering the supply of a product, intentionally, is the only illegality stated in the Sherman Antitrust Act. Doing so, would result in an increase in demand, thus an increase in price (Monopoly 9).
"Antitrust...
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