Introduction: Microsoft Corporation is a well-known multinational software company with offices in over 100 countries worldwide, headquartered in Redmond, Washington. It was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in April 1975 and today is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Microsoft's principal activities involve the development, manufacturing, and licensing of a broad range of computing-related products and services. The main purpose of the company at the time of its founding was to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altar 8800. BASIC stands for Beginner's All-USE Symbolic Instruction Code and the purpose was to enable the use of computers by other people without a mathematical background and scientific. The project rose to dominance of the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the 1980s, after Microsoft introduced Windows which would come to dominate the personal computer market. As mentioned above, in addition to the development of operating systems, Microsoft is involved in the production of a variety of different things today. It produces a variety of different software for desktops and servers, it also resisted one of its rivals "Google" by developing the Internet search engine "Bing". On the other hand, Microsoft has also been very successful in the video game industry by developing the Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles. Recently the company started producing the Windows Phone operating system in a deal with Nokia, which almost led to Microsoft buying Nokia. Apart from all this, the company's latest addition is the Microsoft Surface tablets. Even though Microsoft is very successful in developing new projects, there have been times when the company's reputation has been greatly shaken. Going back to 2001, Microsoft began developing new… middle of paper… customers of the time. However, to make matters worse today, it seems that Microsoft hasn't learned its lesson from Vista, since Windows 8 is somewhat reminiscent of that case overall. Windows 7 somehow dragged down the company's reputation, instead of improving it. Microsoft released Windows 8 whose entire structure was more suited to tablets than computers. Works cited McCracken, H. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://technologizer.com/2009/08/10/sixteen-reasons-the-windows-vista-era-never-quite-happened/Smith, W. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/shattered_dreams_and_broken_promises _vistas_failure_launchDvorak, J.C. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2286065,00.aspDemerjian, C. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1007806/microsoft-admits-vista-failure