Post 25: Microsoft — The Company That Brought Technology to Every Desk

If IBM built the foundation, Microsoft built the house that everyone moved into.

IBM gave the world the mainframe — powerful, reliable, and expensive — sitting in temperature-controlled rooms, operated by specialists, serving large corporations and governments. Microsoft did something different. It took technology and made it personal. It put a computer on every desk and, eventually, in every pocket. And in doing so, it changed not just the technology industry but the way the entire world works.

The Beginning — A Bet on Software

Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gates was 19 years old. Allen was 22. They were not building hardware. They were not building mainframes or servers. They were writing software — and they believed, at a time when almost nobody else did, that software would become the most valuable part of the computing equation.

That bet turned out to be one of the most consequential in business history.

Their first major break came in 1980 when IBM — the very company we discussed in the last post — came knocking. IBM was building its first personal computer and needed an operating system. Microsoft delivered MS-DOS — the Microsoft Disk Operating System — and crucially, retained the rights to license it to other manufacturers. This single decision changed everything. While IBM sold computers, Microsoft sold the software that ran on all of them — not just IBM machines, but every personal computer that followed.

Windows — Technology for Everyone

MS-DOS was powerful but unfriendly. It required users to type commands in text — not exactly accessible to someone who had never touched a computer before. That changed in 1985 when Microsoft launched Windows — a graphical interface that replaced typed commands with icons, windows, and a mouse.

Windows did for personal computing what the smartphone later did for the internet — it opened it up to everyone. You no longer needed to be a specialist or a programmer to use a computer. You clicked, you pointed, you dragged. Suddenly the personal computer was no longer just a tool for businesses and enthusiasts — it was for everyone.

By the early 1990s, Windows had become the dominant operating system in the world. Microsoft’s share of the personal computer software market was extraordinary — not unlike IBM’s dominance of the business computer market three decades earlier. The company that had started in a small office in New Mexico was now the most powerful software company on the planet.

Microsoft Office — The Productivity Revolution

Alongside Windows came something that most people reading this will recognize immediately — Microsoft Office.

Word for documents. Excel for spreadsheets. PowerPoint for presentations. These three applications fundamentally changed how businesses operated. They replaced typewriters, manual ledgers, and overhead projectors. They standardized how documents were created and shared. And they embedded Microsoft so deeply into the daily workflow of businesses, schools, and governments around the world that even today — decades later — Office remains the dominant productivity suite on the planet.

Excel in particular deserves a special mention in the context of this blog. For millions of people around the world, Microsoft Excel was their first encounter with data. Rows and columns of numbers. Formulas and calculations. Charts and pivot tables. Before anyone talked about data science or analytics platforms, Excel was where data lived for most businesses. In many organizations it still is. It is not an exaggeration to say that Excel shaped an entire generation’s understanding of what working with data looks like.

Microsoft and the Enterprise — SQL Server and Azure

As Microsoft grew through the 1990s, it expanded beyond the desktop and into the enterprise — the world of large organizations, corporate networks, and business databases.

SQL Server, launched in 1989, became one of Microsoft’s most important enterprise products. A relational database management system — built on the same principles Edgar Codd introduced in the 1960s and that we discussed in Post 23 — SQL Server gave businesses a powerful, accessible, and relatively affordable database platform. It competed directly with Oracle, which we will cover in the next post, and became the database of choice for countless businesses running on Windows infrastructure.

Then came the internet era, and Microsoft — much like IBM before it — found itself facing a world it had not fully anticipated. The rise of the web, open source software, and eventually cloud computing challenged Microsoft’s desktop-first business model in ways that were uncomfortable and disruptive.

But unlike IBM, Microsoft adapted faster and more decisively. Under Satya Nadella, who became CEO in 2014, Microsoft made a remarkable pivot to the cloud. Microsoft Azure — its cloud computing platform — became one of the two dominant forces in cloud infrastructure alongside Amazon Web Services. Microsoft embraced open source, invested heavily in developer tools, and repositioned itself from a desktop software company to a cloud-first enterprise technology company.

Microsoft and AI — The Next Chapter

No post about Microsoft in 2024 would be complete without talking about artificial intelligence.

Microsoft’s significant investment in OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT — positioned it at the centre of the AI revolution. The integration of AI into Microsoft 365, GitHub, Azure, and its search engine Bing through Copilot represented another bold bet — not unlike the original bet on software back in 1975. Once again Microsoft was wagering that the most valuable layer of technology was not the hardware but the intelligence running on top of it.

Whether this bet pays off as spectacularly as the first one remains to be seen. But the pattern is consistent — Microsoft has always believed in software, always believed in accessibility, and always found ways to put powerful technology into the hands of as many people as possible.

Microsoft’s Contribution to the Data World

For anyone building a career in data, Microsoft’s fingerprints are everywhere.

Excel was most people’s introduction to data. SQL Server remains one of the most widely deployed database platforms in the world. Azure is a primary destination for cloud data infrastructure. Power BI — Microsoft’s business intelligence and data visualization tool — has become one of the leading platforms for data reporting and analytics in enterprise settings. And with Copilot and AI integration across its product suite, Microsoft is shaping what the next era of working with data will look like.

From the bedroom in Albuquerque to the most valuable company in the world — Microsoft’s journey is inseparable from the story of data.