Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation
Website	www.microsoft.com
Ownership type	Public, NASDAQ:MSFT
Founded	1975, by Bill Gates
Headquarters	Redmond , Washington United States
Industry	Computers
Product/Service	Computer and Consumer Products

The Microsoft Corporation is a computer software company founded in 1975 by Bill Gates. Microsoft sells several dozen variations of the Microsoft Windows operating system, which in 2007 had a dominant market share, perhaps 97% of personal computers throughout the world. Another highly successful product for Microsoft has been Microsoft Office, which over the years achieved market dominance over various competitors such as Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Microsoft is also known for its popular gaming console, the Xbox, and for the Zune mp3 player.

Microsoft shares are traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The company is one of the 30 companies that compose the Dow Jones 30 Industrials.

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Litigation

• Microsoft has been sued for alleged antitrust violations by Sun Microsystems, AOL Time Warner, Novell, the United States Department of Justice, various states of the United States, and European Union. It is currently appealing a fine of 899 million euros ($1.4 billion) levied by the European Commission, the European Union's antitrust authority.
• Around January 2007, Microsoft offered to pay a blogger to edit the Wikipedia article about the company. Catherine Brooker, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said this was to "correct" inaccuracies heavily written by people at IBM, a proponent of open-source standards .