Microsoft Corporation

According to CEO Steve Ballmer Microsoft's main competitors are:

• Google
• Apple
• Oracle
• VMware
• open source (Linux, Firefox)

So let's take a look at why each of those companies is a main competitor:

This is the big kahuna. Google is a serious threat because not only does it have its hand in multiple markets, it has the ability to jump in and quickly grab significant market share.

Web search/online advertising is one thing Google dominates, and Bing (soon to be paired with Yahoo) is scraping away at its market share. But Bing is not, despite what Ballmer may hope, one of Microsoft's biggest products. At least it's not making much, if any, money.

Gmail went public only about three years ago, but already it's the third-largest webmail service behind Hotmail and Yahoo. Google Apps is up-and-coming, having won a few key contracts in the enterprise market. Microsoft's release of Office Web Apps shows the company is worried about Google, which is touting apps as an easy-to-use-from-anywhere service with an easier and less expensive business model.

Android has accomplished a heckuva feat, jumping from nearly no market share a year ago to being the platform of choice for about 10 percent of new smart phones sold. Chrome has been consistently eating away at Internet Explorer since its launch nearly two years ago. And with App Engine, Google has been making a push in the cloud-platform space to which Microsoft, with Windows Azure, just showed up this winter.

And then there's Chrome OS, the browser-based operating system that Google is expected to launch by late autumn. It's unknown how successful the novel idea will be, especially with the incoming tablet market, but considering Google's success in other sectors it could very well grab netbooks away from Windows.

When you're talking competition between Microsoft and Apple, you're mainly talking about hand-held devices. Windows is still on more than 90 percent of computers and Safari, Apple's Web browser, essentially has the same market share as Macintosh computers - though that line is now being blurred.

Because the iPhone has turned into, well, the iPhone. It's a sensation. Apple is leading the charge for mobile computing. And as Google can attest, there's plenty of room in the market to capitalize. Microsoft, for its part, has not been able to do that lately. As Apple and Android surge in popularity, Windows Mobile hemorrhages market share. Microsoft must deliver a knock-out hit with Windows Phone 7 this holiday season.

And then there's the iPad - don't even get me started on tablets. Apple has succeeded where others, namely Microsoft, tried 10 years ago. Apple has opened the door for a potentially huge new market, but Microsoft must step it up if it wants Windows on the hottest slates.

Ah, enterprise software. Microsoft is a household - or perhaps, officehold? - name in the sector. But so is Oracle.

And so was, as it happens, Sun Microsystems - which Oracle bought last year. Now Oracle offers not just software, but an entire line of hardware, as well. Oracle's new slogan, "Software. Hardware. Complete.," highlights for the enterprise sector the same reason Apple's products have dominated the consumer business: hardware plus software, built by the same company, working elegantly together as a package.

Of course, Microsoft doesn't produce hardware. (Well, nothing significant - mice and keyboards and webcams don't count.) Its enterprise products - Windows Server, SQL Server, Office - are well known in the sector, and so is Microsoft's competition there with Oracle. Java, Linux/Solaris, Siebel CRM, MySQL, Open Office, virtualization? Yeah, Oracle is a main competitor, for sure.

And here's where things get interesting. VMware represents the future of Microsoft's enterprise competition: virtualization and cloud computing. Microsoft, arguably late to the game, launched its Windows Azure cloud platform just this past winter. VMware, with vCloud, has already found its place in the sector.

But Microsoft has the legacy - it's Windows and .NET programming languages - to immediately make a splash. Besides, the Redmond company has already offered cloud solutions for some time, just not with the metered payment model of a platform/infrastructure like Windows Azure.

Virtualization has changed enterprise computing by reducing the number of physical servers a company or data center needs. And virtualization is VMware's bread and butter. With Hyper-V, Microsoft could take a chunk out of VMware's ESX.

As cloud computing becomes more the norm for the enterprise, we'll see how the market shakes down. Because in that sector, VMware's not by far the only company Microsoft must think about. How about Salesforce, Amazon, Google, Rackspace, GoGrid and Oracle?

Bill Gates founded Windows, a company that created Microsoft. Bill Gates invented Microsoft in 1975 when he was 20 years old.

This is largely inaccurate. Bill Gates founded a software company called "Microsoft" in April 1975, when he was 19, along with Paul Allen. They started off working on a version of the programming language "Basic".

Later they sold a version of the operating system DOS (called MS-DOS) to IBM to launch on the new IBM personal computer (PC). This took off in a big way and many competitors developed computer hardware which were compatible with the IBM machine. These computers are the ones now called just "PCs".

Several years later, faced with the popularity of the Apple and its user interface, Microsoft developed a similar one for the PC and called it "Windows". The first couple of attempts did not really succeed, as most users were happy to stick with the old DOS way of doing things. Then Windows 3 came along and the Windows 3.1 which made several things (e.g. networking) much easier than on the old DOS basis.

Since then many people (thousands - literally) have worked on one version or another of the Windows software. At the time of writing Microsoft (the company) are preparing to release version 8 of Windows.

The original version of DOS which Gates and Allen sold to IBM was closely based on the work of another company, which Gates bought in. All later versions of DOS and all versions of Windows are not the "invention" of Bill Gates. He was, however, the person who saw the opportunities for all these changes and drove them through.

So - in short - Bill Gates (together with Paul Allen) founded Microsoft the company. At the guiding technical spirit, he helped drive the development of the Microsoft version of the WIMP user interface. However, the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer way of doing things was invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and first popularized by Steve Jobs Apple company.

Too much!!!

From the economics category: "Too much money" is subjective :-). Also, for the answer! If we assume his current net worth ($57B) over the course of his life (which I calculate from his birthday to the time I am writing this, 3:32EST on December 29th, 2008. Basically, it's ~1,678,030,008 seconds), we come to 33.9684033 dollars per second. Now we have to realize this is how much money he has made per second if we average out his current net worth over his entire life. Basically, this says that for every second Bill Gates has been alive, he has made almost $34.

If we take from the time Microsoft got big to now, the figure would obviously be much larger, probably around double that.

It depends whether you want your line in the middle or on the bottom of the line.

In the middle: use this sign " - " and just type it as long as you need the line. They will stick together

On the bottom: use this character " _ " and do the same