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 jus

As far as the money goes, Microsoft is making a lot of it. Microsoft's profits in 1998, which neared four billion dollars, exceeded 40% of the profits from the ten largest software companies (Cusumano and Selby iv).

Gates and Allen had employed eleven other people, but the revenue had jumped to

The market is heavily controlled by Microsoft, but the customers are the

steps before getting to Windows, Microsoft has totally dominated the computer

"Antitrust laws kick in when significant competition does not exist in a

important things to worry about at the time. Beginning in 1990, Microsoft had

billion dollars on research (monopoly 1). Also, by 1997, Microsoft employed over nineteen thousand employees (Cusumano and Selby 3). It is estimated that 90% of PCs (personal computers) have, or once had, Microsoft Windows installed on it (monopoly 1). There are many alternatives to Microsoft's Windows. Such systems include: Sun's Solaris, Caldera, BSDI, Digital's Unix, BeOS, Apple's Rhapsody, and IBM's OS/2. Microsoft's Windows 95, MacOS, and IBM's OS/2 are all around the same price (monopoly 2-4).

ones who choose the company to begin with. Microsoft is also doing much more

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Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)