Microsoft created the Windows operating system and became a trillion-dollar public company.
Microsoft reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion in April 2019. Its best-known software products include Windows and Microsoft Office, while its businesses also span cloud computing, gaming, enterprise software, and hardware.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975. The company’s early success came from software for personal computers, including its agreement to provide an operating system for IBM-compatible PCs. Windows later became a dominant desktop operating system, and Microsoft Office became a standard productivity suite.
Microsoft’s modern valuation has also been shaped by Azure, its cloud-computing platform, and its ownership of Xbox and LinkedIn. A company’s market cap changes with its share price, so reaching a trillion-dollar threshold describes a market event rather than a fixed measure of annual sales.