There is hardly anyone in the world who hasn’t heard of Mircrosoft and its billionaire founder Bill Gates. The success and wealth of the company are legendary and an inspiration to many, but despite the scale and prosperity of the Seattle based company there are probably more people who don’t know what Microsoft does, that who do. “They are a computer company or something,” is a standard answer when pushed to explain how Gates and his partners made it so big. That response is in the vicinity of the ball-park but it is a long way from correct. So, by way making it a little clearer let us state that Microsoft is a software company, and then let’s look at some of the programmes and applications that have made it the multi-national giant that it is today.
Get remote
One of the reasons for Microsoft’s success has been their ability to constantly stay ahead of the curve and to develop new software that leads the market. A good example here was their ability to spot that cloud-based technology was going to become huge. As such they came up with a scalable service that allowed for virtual machines to be managed remotely. If you were to type a phrase like ‘Azure remote access Australia’ into a search engine you would probably be amazed by the scale and depth of responses that are returned. Their Azure application is a market leading technology that has grown massively since it first came into being in 2010.
Looking for this
We mentioned search engines above, and we all know that Google is the market leader in this field, but Microsoft’s Bing now has the second largest market share of all search engines and it is slowly making in-roads into Google’s territory. Granted, Google has just under 90 percent market share, but it is Bing that is growing, having passed Yahoo and Baidu, to comfortably take second place on the search engine ladderv. Bing came into being as long a go as 2009 following an amalgamation of MSN Search and Windows Live Search.
Office work
It would be a complete travesty to talk about Microsoft products without acknowledging the incredible suite of products that turned them into the global force that they are today. Microsoft Office was first announced by Bill Gates back in 1988. It was a set of crucial software tools that programmed running a digital office very easy. The standard products in the Office Suite included Word, Exel, Access, PowerPoint and Outlook. These flexible and powerful tools have become almost indispensable to any person who works in an office or on a computer. And yes, there are alternatives to all the standard Office programmes, but the reality is that Office has such a huge market share and the products integrate with each other so seamlessly that most other competitors has never really managed, or bothered, to compete with the industry leader. There are products like Libre Office and Google in the mix now, but a recent survey showed that most companies still prefer to have their staff using the Office suite of products.
