Microsoft is the company founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, and traded under the ticker MSFT.
The company began after Gates and Allen developed a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800 microcomputer. Microsoft later became central to the personal-computer revolution through MS-DOS and Windows, followed by productivity software, developer tools, gaming, and cloud services.
Microsoft’s major businesses now include the Windows operating system, Microsoft 365, Azure cloud computing, Xbox, LinkedIn, and enterprise software. The company became publicly traded in 1986, and its shares are listed on Nasdaq.
Microsoft is regularly counted among the world’s largest companies by market capitalization. It is sometimes confused with IBM because both have long histories in business computing, but Microsoft’s origins were in microcomputer software, while IBM was founded much earlier and began as a different type of information-technology company.