3. Microsoft
Four decades ago, Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen set the ambitious goal of bringing a PC to every desk and every home. Forty years later, that goal has largely been realized. More than a billion PCs are currently in use in businesses and homes around the world. With user-friendly tools like Windows, Office and MS Paint, Microsoft has succeeded in making computing, something foreign and foreign to most people, a personal and effortless experience. Consumers and businesses also benefited from the fact that Microsoft's platform became the go-to box and target of a large community of developers, who eventually powered Windows with 16 million programs.
Not only did Microsoft put PCs in every home and on every desk, but it was also critical in defining the relationships between OEMs, platform providers, developers, businesses, and consumers that underpin of the current personal computer era. Microsoft has integrated personal computing to the point where PCs are now available in many different forms and price points. PCs and Windows have become fundamental tools that help authors write best-selling books, artists create masterpieces, musicians make music, social services, and volunteer organizations monitor resources. , manufacturers optimize production, banks power ATMs and more.
Many of the world's businesses, which drive local and global economies and have complex relationships with and impacts on local and global communities, run on Microsoft-based IT infrastructure. Billion-dollar companies rely on the integrity and reliability of Microsoft tools every day. Governments, from municipalities to local agencies, rely on Windows and other Microsoft services to operate smoothly and securely.
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