Microsoft celebrates 50 years of life, half a century of technological innovation that covers from the creation of a ‘software’ for one of the teams that popularized personal computers in the 70s until the appearance of a new product category promoted by processors dedicated to artificial intelligence. Bill Gates and Paul Allen are the architects of Microsoft (or Micro-Soft, also in its beginnings), a company dedicated to programming, responsible for the ‘software’ with which the personal computer Altair 8800 worked.
The company was born on April 4, 1975, although its popular operating system, Windows, would still take ten years to appear. Before, they developed MS-DOS for IBM, based on command line, which would become the standard of the industry until 1990. Windows proposed a friendlier graphic interface with users, which over time was updated and accompanied by new categories of ‘software’, such as office programs and productivity collected in the Office package and for developers in Visual Studio, among others.
The launch of Windows 95 in 1995 marked a milestone in the company’s operating system for the novelties it introduced: the distinctive start sound, the taskbar, the recycling paper and the direct accesses on the desk. It also facilitated the installation of ‘hardware’ with a ‘plug and play’ system. The 7 million sales he had worldwide made him the most popular operating system.
In these years, the Microsoft portfolio has grown over time, by the video game division under the Xbox brand (2001); The acquisition of Skype (2011), the most popular video call service of the first decade of the 2000s; The arrival to the Surface team market (2012); the purchase of the Professional Social Network LinkedIn (2016); its first accessible controller for Xbox (2018); and the development of the Majorana 1 chip to boost quantum computing, among others.
The company was introduced into cloud computing with Azure in 2008 and a year later launched its own search engine, Bing. The alliance with Openai in 2019 allowed to work in a language model that would lead to the era of the generative AI. This technology reinvented the search in Bing and Edge, drives the new version of Copilot, the Microsoft assistant, and has inaugurated a new product category, the co -senses+ PC, which have inside a neuronal processing unit (NPU) to focus on artificial intelligence functions.