Microsoft is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the home computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. Microsoft would also come to dominate the office suite market with Microsoft Office. The company has diversified in recent years into the video game industry with the Xbox, the Xbox 360, the Xbox One, and the Xbox Series X/S as well as into the consumer electronics and digital services market with Zune, MSN and the Windows Phone OS.
The company's initial public offering was held on March 14, 1986. The stock, which eventually closed at $27.75 a share, peaked at $29.25 a share shortly after the market opened for trading. After the offering, Microsoft had a market capitalization of $519.777 million.[1] Microsoft has subsequently acquired over 225 companies, purchased stakes in 64 companies, and made 25 divestments. Of the companies that Microsoft has acquired, 107 were based in the United States. Microsoft has not released financial details for most of these mergers and acquisitions.
Since Microsoft's first acquisition in 1986, it has purchased an average of six companies a year. The company purchased more than ten companies a year between 2005 and 2008, and it acquired 18 firms in 2006, the most in a single year, including Onfolio, Lionhead Studios, Massive Incorporated, ProClarity, Winternals Software, and Colloquis. Microsoft has made fourteen acquisitions worth over one billion dollars: Skype Technologies (2011), aQuantive (2007), Fast Search & Transfer (2008), Navision (2002), Visio Corporation (2000), Yammer (2012), Nokia's mobile and devices division (2013), Mojang (2014), LinkedIn (2016), GitHub (2018), Affirmed Networks (2020), ZeniMax Media (2020), Nuance Communications (2021), and Activision Blizzard
Microsoft has also purchased several stakes valued at more than a billion dollars. It obtained an 11.5% stake in Comcast for $1 billion, a 22.98% stake in Telewest for $2.263 billion, and a 3% stake in AT&T for $5 billion. Among Microsoft's divestments, in which parts of the company are sold to another company, only Expedia Group was sold for more than a billion dollars; USA Networks purchased the company on February 5, 2002, for $1.372 billion (~$ in ).
Key acquisitions
Microsoft's first acquisition was Dynamical Systems Research (DSR) on June 20, 1986.[2] DSR developed a clone of IBM's TopView operating environment for DOS; Microsoft employed their technology and programmers to further the development of Windows.[3] Its second acquisition was Forethought on July 30, 1987. Forethought was founded in 1983 and developed a presentation program that would later be known as Microsoft PowerPoint.[4]
On December 31, 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail.com for $500 million (~$ in ), its largest acquisition at the time, and integrated Hotmail into its MSN group of services.[5]
Acquisitions
Stakes
Divestitures
See also
- List of largest mergers and acquisitions
- Lists of corporate acquisitions and mergers
Sources
External links
References
- Monkman, Carol Smith. Microsoft1 Stock is Red Hot on First Trading Day Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 14, 1986^
- Nina Huang. Watanabe, Jayapal throw hats into state senate race Northwest Asian Weekly, March 13, 2014^
- Tom Moran. Software Makers Lean to Microsoft's Windows InfoWorld, IDG Publications, June 30, 1986^