Microsoft

Headquarters

Redmond, Washington, USA

The Microsoft campus is the corporate headquarters of Microsoft, located in Redmond, Washington, United States, a part of the Seattle metropolitan area. Microsoft initially moved onto the grounds of the campus on February 26, 1986, shortly before going public on March 13. The headquarters has undergone multiple expansions since its establishment and is presently estimated to encompass over 8 million square feet (740,000 m2) of office space and have over 50,000 employees. Additional offices in the Eastside suburbs of Seattle are located in Bellevue and Issaquah. Building 92 on the campus contains a visitor center (with interactive exhibits) and store that are open to the public. The Microsoft campus in Redmond sits on 502 acres (203 ha) and has 83 buildings.The company has a total of 125 buildings in the Puget Sound region and employs 53,576 people. The campus is located on both sides of the State Route 520 freeway, which connects it to the cities of Bellevue and Seattle as well as Redmond city center. Microsoft partially covered the cost for an overpass over the freeway at NE 36th Street to relieve congestion on other cross-streets in the area.

Industry

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2016. It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the U.S. information technology industry, along with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

Main Products

Product	Type
Azure	Cloud
Bing	Search
GitHub	Software
LinkedIn	Software
Office 365	Software
OneDrive	Cloud
Surface	Hardware
Xbox	Hardware

History

Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business using their skills in computer programming. In 1972, they founded Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data. Gates enrolled at Harvard University while Allen pursued a degree in computer science at Washington State University, though he later dropped out to work at Honeywell. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems's (MITS) Altair 8800 microcomputer, which inspired Allen to suggest that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device. Gates called MITS and claimed that he had a working interpreter, and MITS requested a demonstration. Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter, and it worked flawlessly when they demonstrated it to MITS in March 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. MITS agreed to distribute it, marketing it as Altair BASIC.:108, 112–114 Gates and Allen established Microsoft on April 4, 1975, with Gates as CEO, and Allen suggested the name "Micro-Soft", short for micro-computer software. In August 1977, the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office of ASCII Microsoft. Microsoft moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington in January 1979.