Microsoft blows out 45 candles. It was April 4, 1975 when two twenty-year-old childhood friends and computer enthusiasts - Bill Gates and Paul Allen - founded a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico that would become the largest PC software company in the world. Their dream was to bring a computer to every desk and every home, and that's more or less what they did.
The business starts with the sale of Basic language packages for Altair microcomputers, but it is in the eighties that the company grows: it becomes a private company with Gates president and Allen vice, moves the headquarters to Redmond, expands in Europe, creates the Word program and attach a demo to a PC magazine, on floppy disk, to make it known. Basic follows Dos and finally Windows, which brings windows to screens.
The nineties are those of the consecration and those in which Gates becomes the richest man in the world, but they end with the first step back of the founder: in January 2000 Gates leaves the role of CEO to Steve Ballmer to focus on "strategies long term ". In that same year he founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world.
Ballmer has been driving Microsoft for 14 years, with highs (the Surface) and several lows (from Windows Vista and Mobile and the acquisition of Nokia phones), to then give way to Satya Nadella. Gates, meanwhile, is increasingly absorbed in philanthropic commitments. The conclusion of this path brings the date of 13 March 2020: Gates leaves the board of Microsoft, a giant that has reached 1.200 billion market capitalization.
Five years ago, on the company's 40th birthday, Gates had sent a letter to the employees in which he wrote: "Now what matters most is what we will do next." That later, for him, is far from Microsoft.