The proposed agreement initially drew fire from local residents, companies neighboring the campus and the city of Bellevue. Concerns centered on how the expansion would impact already heavily used roads.
Under the new agreement, Microsoft has agreed to hold off on developing some of its land so other companies, such as Nintendo of America, can expand their campuses. Rachel Tuinstra: or rtuinstra seattletimes. Share story. Designed to provide a refuge free of distractions for those whose job was, in Gates's words, to "sit and think," the campus was nestled in a quiet woodland setting and reflected huge expenditures for tools, space, and comfort. Buildings were designed in the shape of an X to maximize light, with each programmer given a private office rather than a cubicle.
The buildings featured many small, subsidized cafeterias, as well as refrigerators stocked with juice and caffeinated beverages. The self-contained, collegiate surroundings were carefully designed to promote the company's distinctive culture, which one commentator described as a close approximation of "math camp. Employees were hired on the basis of sheer intelligence, with the company selecting only a small fraction of applicants from the more than , resumes it received each year, and were expected to work brutal schedules to bring products to market as quickly as possible.
Microsoft paid salaries that were distinctly lower than elsewhere in the industry, even to their senior executives, but compensated with generous stock options that made thousands of Microsoft employees millionaires.
At the same time, the company tried to maintain a small company mentality, in which executives traveled coach class, the necessity of additional staff positions was closely scrutinized, and other unnecessary expenditures were vigilantly avoided.
The following year Microsoft released its first CD-ROM product, Microsoft Bookshelf, a collection of ten reference works, as well as Excel for Windows, its first application for the new operating system. Microsoft also purchased Forethought, Inc. In November Microsoft introduced Windows 2. As Windows began to take hold, more software companies were convinced to develop applications for the operating system, which brought it increased usefulness and further sales momentum.
The company was accused of copyright infringement by Apple, which alleged that Microsoft had copied the "look and feel" of the Macintosh, in a lawsuit that was finally dismissed after five years of litigation. In the company introduced Microsoft Office, a "suite" of programs that eventually came to dominate the market and become Microsoft's best-selling application product. While the initial release of Office was a discount package, later versions incorporated standard, shared features and included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the e-mail program Mail, with the Access database management program included in the Office Professional version.
Before Microsoft was primarily a supplier to hardware manufacturers, but after the bulk of the company's revenues came from sales to consumers. While the initial acceptance of Windows NT was disappointing, an upgrade shipped in September of the following year as NT 3. Microsoft announced an agreement to purchase Intuit, the producer of the leading package of personal financial software, called Quicken; however, after the U.
Department of Justice filed suit to prevent the takeover on the basis of antitrust concerns, Microsoft withdrew its offer. In August Microsoft launched its next version of Windows, called Windows 95, which sold more than one million copies in the first four days after its release.
For the rest of the decade Microsoft expanded aggressively into new businesses associated with its core franchise. Its projects included two joint ventures with the National Broadcasting Company under the name MSNBC: an interactive online news service and a cable channel broadcasting news and information 24 hours a day. The company's web-based services included the Microsoft Network online service, a travel agency, local events listings, car buying information, a personal financial management site, and a joint venture with First Data that allowed consumers to pay their bills online.
Microsoft's latest generation of Windows, Windows CE, was designed to expand the franchise into computer-like devices including mobile phones, point-of-sale terminals, pocket organizers, digital televisions, digital cameras, handheld computers, automobile multimedia systems, and pagers.
By early the company had secured more than licensing agreements with manufacturers of these "intelligent appliances. Microsoft's many critics believed that the company's goal in this widespread expansion was to control every delivery channel of information, thereby providing the means to control the content. According to Scott McNealy of rival company Sun Microsystems, "By owning the entry points to the Internet and electronic marketplace, Microsoft has the power to exercise predatory and exclusionary control over the very means for people to access the Internet and all it represents.
The U. After an intensive investigation of Microsoft's competitive practices that had gone on for much of the decade, in the U. Department of Justice and a group of 20 state attorneys general filed two antitrust cases against Microsoft alleging violations of the Sherman Act. The government sought to prove a broad pattern of anticompetitive behavior on Microsoft's part by demonstrating an array of claims, including the following: that Microsoft had a monopoly on the market for operating systems; that the company used that monopoly as a means of preventing other companies from selling its competitors' products most notably Netscape's Internet browser ; that it was illegal for Microsoft to bundle its own browser into the operating system Windows 98 as a means of precluding customers from purchasing Netscape's product; that the company sought to divide markets with competitors; that Microsoft sought to subvert the Java programming language, developed by Sun Microsystems, which it viewed as a threat to Windows; and, finally, that Microsoft's business practices were detrimental to consumers.
The case was conducted under a flurry of media attention, with all parties agreeing that the stakes were extremely high: should Microsoft win, its brand of extremely aggressive capitalism would secure a legal blessing; should the company lose, the company could be forced to license the source code for Windows to competitors, thus destroying its monopoly, or could be broken up into smaller components, crippling its hold over the marketplace.
The fear and resentment that Microsoft and its founder Gates engendered were testament to the company's mythic status and Gates's role as the embodiment of the digital era. While the antitrust suit against Microsoft showed threats of a forced breakup of Microsoft, innovations in the company continued.
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