Company
ActiveMicrosoft
Redmond · Since 1975
Still independent. Its center of gravity moved from the desktop operating system to cloud computing, and then to commercial AI.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 in Albuquerque to write a BASIC interpreter for the Altair. The company that matters for the history of work is the one that, in 1980, agreed to supply an operating system for the IBM PC and was allowed to sell that system to IBM's rivals.
DOS, and then Windows, put a software company between the machine and the clerk. A typist had learned a keyboard. An office worker now learned a program Microsoft could update, and charge for, without asking the computer maker.
The office as a product
Microsoft employed developers, and it employed the people who wrote the manuals, answered the support calls, and sold site licenses to companies that then hired their own administrators. The downstream jobs, the ones inside other firms, were the larger effect. Someone had to install the software, train the staff, and repair the spreadsheet. Those people did not work in Redmond. They existed because Redmond had standardized the task.
Cloud, then a model
Antitrust cases in the 1990s treated Microsoft as the company that controlled the desktop. It lost the mobile decade and rebuilt around Azure, the cloud business, and Office as a subscription. It is a major investor in OpenAI and sells AI features inside the same office software. The later timeline chapters that cast Microsoft as the utility of human-AI work are projections. The company itself is not. It is still in Redmond, still independent, and still an employer of engineers on a scale the 1975 partnership could not have staffed.
The work it organized
- Developer
- Support engineer
- Site-license seller
- Technical writer