Microsoft's founders are Bill Gates and Paul Allen, but before they started the company, they tried another venture. Traf-O-Data was created in order to use computers to process traffic information collected from equipment installed on the streets of Seattle, USA.

The company's original name was hyphenated, Micro-Soft, and was coined by Paul Allen, partner of Bill Gates. Allen thought of the name because of the newly launched microprocessors: he wanted to create software for them. “Microprocessor Software” (Software for Microprocessors) has become the company's objective, hence the name Micro-Soft.

For years MS-DOS was the standard operating system on PCs, until Windows started to become popular in the mid-90s. The system was launched in 1980, along with the first IBM PC, but it was not developed by Microsoft. It acquired the system, then known as 86-DOS, from a company called Seattle Computer Products, and licensed it to IBM. Some time later, Tim Patterson, creator of 86-DOS, went to work at Microsoft, where he participated in the development of the Visual Basic programming language.

A tradition at the company is that employees take about half a kilogram of M & Ms tablets to work on the anniversary of their hire date. On the second anniversary, employees must bring a pound of M & Ms to work, and so on. If Bill Gates follows that tradition, he would need to bring forty-three pounds of M & Ms to work with him.

The first version of Microsoft Office was not designed for Windows: it was originally developed for the Macintosh and launched in January 1985. The first Windows version only appeared five years later, in 1990.

"Handhelds relate to desktops relate to cell phones relate to music players relate to servers relate to game consoles relate to databases." Technology across software domains should be consistent. There should be a standard, however de facto, that works everywhere. The reason for that unstoppability is the lack of an awareness on anyone else's part of the value of an end to end solution where everything works together using the same technology

I wonder whether the open source world can match that consistency. Granted, there are movements to make things consistent, such as the LAMP set of technologies for Linux, or the Linux Standard Base project. However, the structure of development for open source products militates against the establishment of any consistent standard.