Happy birthday to Microsoft’s 44th Anniversary! In 1975, Paul Allen advised his friend Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard University, and the two together founded Microsoft. At the beginning of its establishment, Microsoft’s main business was to develop application software for Apple.
Until 1990, after Microsoft introduced the Windows 3.0 system based on the graphical interface, it gradually became the dominant player in the field of computer operating systems. Since then, Microsoft has made great progress and has made great progress in many fields of technology.
However, the anti-monopoly lawsuits that lasted for nearly 10 years in 2000 and the subsequent misjudgment of the Internet have greatly affected Microsoft, and the market value has gradually surpassed by companies such as Google and Apple. In 2014, Microsoft ushered in its third CEO, Satya Nadella, and gradually transformed into a cloud-centric enterprise.
Now that Microsoft has been through for nearly 44 years, this technology giant is still one of the world’s most valuable companies, and people have to admire its strong vitality. Microsoft, happy 44th birthday.
Happy birthday to Microsoft’s 44th Anniversary
The Internet has the power to change the world, and Microsoft has undoubtedly become the biggest promoter of this power in its first three decades of development.
With Windows, the invisible magical world of the Internet has opened a window.
With Office, we have a modern office experience for the first time.
With Microsoft, the big technology ecosystem has really benefited all mankind.
The grand goal of “having a computer for every desk and every family” set at the beginning of Microsoft’s founding has now become a reality to a large extent.
In developed countries, a computer with one person and a society for everyone has been initially established. In the largest developing countries, the daily life of ordinary Chinese people has long been inseparable from the Internet, and hundreds of millions of young Chinese generations are using various forms. A variety of Microsoft productivity tools to create greater business value for the whole society and even for all humanity.
Since its inception, Microsoft has used a total of five logos. Microsoft’s full set of logos are organized as follows.
Which one do you like the most?
1975-1979: A Micro-Soft written by a large number of curved lines
1980-1981: First appearance
1982-1986: a little more rounded and restrained
1987-2012: Classic Microsoft familiar to everyone
2012-present: New logo, fresh, simple and colorful
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned in “Refresh: Rediscovering Business and the Future”:
What we have to answer is: What does the company do? Why do we exist? I told them it was time to rediscover our souls, that is, what made us different
After the rise of the mobile Internet, Microsoft’s glory began to be overshadowed by technology companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. However, Microsoft’s stable performance against the cycle last year is more visible. In recent years, Microsoft’s layout in the enterprise-level market such as cloud computing has received results and began to regain its former glory.
And the biggest hero behind this is the non-current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. In the cover article of Forbes, Bill Gates’s mission to Nadella is to rebuild. Microsoft, until the glory of the year, Nadella did not live up to Gates’s high hopes.
Microsoft: Software giants beyond the cycle
In 2014, Microsoft’s “Mr. Yun”, Satya Nadella, who was in charge of Bing search engine, SQL Server database and Azure cloud computing business, was appointed as the new CEO. From this, Microsoft began the path of “mobile first, cloud first”.
Ai Farner once named Microsoft as the company of the year 2015. It was the second year after Nadella took office. At the launch conference in October of that year, Microsoft unveiled a number of heavy hardware devices: including the hybrid reality helmet HoloLens. , Smart Band Band 2, and the benchmark Surface product – Surface Book.
In addition to the advancement in hardware, Microsoft is more famous for its openness that was hard to see in the past, such as its transformation of Outlook and Office into a cross-platform application, open source .NET.
In June 2018, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Github, the world’s largest code hosting site, for $7.5 billion.
This unexpected decision means that Microsoft’s transformation is more thorough. Developers have begun to fall in love with Microsoft. In 2018, Microsoft continues this momentum.
In October 2018, Github released its annual report. The most active company on the platform is Microsoft, with 7,700 engineers from Microsoft contributing their code in the open-source community.
In addition, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code became the hottest open-source project on Github, surpassing the famous front-end open-source framework React-Native and the most popular TensorFlow in deep learning.
With the complete development ecosystem of hardware, software, development tools, and the open source community, Microsoft can better understand and listen to the voice of developers. Such a move has also paid off, and a cloud computing service launched by a giant who understands developers and benefits developers is also more easily accepted by developers.
In 2016, Microsoft’s Azure cloud service surpassed Google and became the second largest cloud service provider after Amazon AWS. In 2018, Amazon AWS still occupied the number one position in cloud services, but Azure maintained rapid growth.
In February 2018, market research firm Canalys estimated that in the cloud computing market with a size of $15.6 billion, benefiting from Azure’s growth, Microsoft ranked second in the market with a 14% share, and Amazon’s share has been stable at 30% for a long time. about.
On July 20th, Microsoft released its fourth quarter earnings report for the second quarter of FY18, with quarterly revenues of $30.1 billion, exceeding the previous analysts’ forecast of $29.2 billion. The commercial cloud received $6.9 billion in revenue, a 53% increase over the same period last year.
Revenue from commercial cloud services is rarely affected by cyclical factors. Its continued growth has also driven the steady rise of Microsoft’s stock price, and Microsoft has thus become a clear stream in the 2018 technology stock market downtrend.
At the close of the US stock market on November 30, 2018, Microsoft’s market capitalization reached $851.2 billion, surpassing Apple’s $847.4 billion. Since 2002, it has once again stood at the top of the global market capitalization.
After Apple surpassed Apple, Microsoft’s world’s number one market value was not surpassed by Amazon until early January, but the difference between the two is less than 10 billion US dollars. The position of the world’s highest market capitalization company will change at any time, but Nadella is not fluent in this achievement. In a recent interview, he said:
I am not the kind of person who will celebrate because of the market value. This is just an unstable indicator.
What really interests Nadella is how to create more value for teams and individuals who use Microsoft products to start and work. He once again emphasizes Microsoft’s current position:
Our business model is to create more external surpluses. Only when the partners around us make more money, we have achieved long-term success.
Microsoft wants to be a platform for empowering users. Microsoft founder Bill Gates talked about the platform a few years ago. He believes that only the sum of the business value of a company created around an ecosystem exceeds that of creating it. The value of the company can be called a platform.
With Bill Gates’ standards, Microsoft Cloud Services is still a long way from the real platform. Just as Zhang Xiaolong’s driving force for creating WeChat is “let the creators reflect value”, for a company that wants to be a good platform, the market value and stock price increase are natural by-products after the products are well served.
