50 years later the amazing thing is not that Microsoft continues to exist. The hallucinating thing is that it remains (Tan) relevant

Does 50 years Two young people called Bill Gates and Paul Allen They created the one that has become the largest software empire in history. That April 4, 1975 was born Micro-Soft. The name occurred to Allen, what years later I didn’t remember why he used the script and that capital.

The detail has remained in anecdote. One of the thousands which are already part of the history of a company that has managed to be relevant and toe for half a century. There are not many in the world of technology that can boast something like that. How did you do it?

Reinventing himself.

Microsoft has been lifted after each fall. And there have been many. And very important.

But it was not so at the beginning. Microsoft, like all the big ones, was loved long before being (deeply) hate. Gates and Allen were in the right place and moment, but they also knew how to take advantage of their opportunities. The first arrived in 1980, when they reached an agreement with IBM to provide the operating system for its PCs.

It is curious how history is repeated again and again, because that is just what would happen to that operating system that would end up calling themselves. Gates and Allen did not create that operating system: they bought the original, QDOS/86-dos, for $ 50,000, and modified it so that it could be used on the IBM PCs.

Apple did the same with Nextstep (based on FreeBSD) When he bought Next and ended up turning that operating system in Mac OS X. years later Google would buy a small startup called Android Inc. to take advantage of an operating mobile system that he had created. That said. The story ended up.

But those are other stories. That agreement with IBM was a turning point, but above all it was for its terms. Microsoft received $ 430,000 for that product – very less than Ibm hoped to have to pay – but Microsoft maintained the ability to sell its operating system to other companies.

From that moment Microsoft was a rocket. One controlled by a Gates implacable and fierce. With their lights and their (many) shadows, Gates and his company would soon begin to achieve the goal that They had marked and that a priori seemed impossible: put a computer in each home.

It did not matter others doing things in a different or better way: Microsoft always managed to impose itself. He did it with MS-DOS and of course he did it with his long and erratic Light of Windows operating systems or with its office suite, Office, today maximum expression of the intention of how everything can (but should not) become a service in the cloud.

For 25 years, Microsoft was no one to cough him, but then the earthquakes began to arrive. First, Internet, browsers, search engines and social networks. Then the smartphone. Redmond’s company lost all those wars. Always late and bad, and he was convicted of that Innovative dilemma in which David wins the game to Goliath.

But there is the really amazing. Microsoft fell and lost those wars, but he got up again and reinvented. Even those that had won – like that of the browsers, With Internet Explorer– He ended up losing them, but we insisted: it didn’t matter.

There we saw the true strength of Microsoft. It didn’t matter if the general public hated her: they did not give up and tried one, and another, and again. They failed with bing in search engines, they had to spend 26.2 billion dollars to “compete” on social networks and also shipwrecked (Too bad) With Windows Phone.

And once again, it didn’t matter. Faced with these failures, new successes. Not only that: definitive reinvention. After the arrival of new contendliere NadellaMicrosoft changed the image and of strategy.

Of being hated and almost ignored it was relevant and even loved. He got it shyly In the mobile segment, but where he has achieved an exceptional triumph has been in the cloud, where Azure marks the pattern with his great rival, AWS.

And since then and along the way, many more stories, many smaller and large failures and also many small and large hits. It is impossible to put them all here, but it is also inevitable not to mention legendary products.

Among them the Xbox, pillar of a very forty bet But not especially fortunate For the video game segment. Or also the successes that the company also achieved with the devices of the Surface family. The Hololens were Another failureYes, but one that at least showed that the company always tried to reinvent himself.

In those is precisely now Microsoft, but this time not to lose what may be the most important train in history: The artificial intelligence. His reaction thus has been faster and more ambitious than on other occasions, but still the unknowns about the result of that bet are enormous.

Whatever happens, it will probably give the same. And it will give the same because Microsoft will end up doing what you have always done.

Reinvent yourself.

Happy 50, Microsoft.

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