Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions.

Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, Financial Times Global 500 ranks it as the third largest company in the world for the first quarter of 2010. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Windows line of operating systems. The company’s initial public stock offering (IPO) was in 1986; the ensuing rise of the company’s stock price has made four billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees.