Short answers, pulled from the story.
Microsoft was officially founded on the 4th of April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. The company originated from a demonstration of software for the Altair 8800 microcomputer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March 1975.
Microsoft secured the deal by purchasing 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products and rebranding it as MS-DOS in November 1980. The agreement allowed Microsoft to retain ownership of the software while licensing it to IBM for the Personal Computer launched in August 1981.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion to stop the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows 95 in 1997 after the company released the operating system on the 24th of August 1995. The European Union imposed a fine of €497 million in 2004 for abusing its dominance through these anti-competitive practices.
Satya Nadella took over as CEO in February 2014 and led the company to acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016 and Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in 2023. These moves established the largest video game division in the world and shifted the focus toward cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
Leaked documents from June 2013 revealed that Microsoft was one of the first companies to participate in the PRISM surveillance program initiated by the National Security Agency. The company later signed a $480 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense in 2018 to develop augmented reality headsets for soldiers.
The term Velvet Sweatshop emerged in 1989 to describe the company's culture of overworking employees, and the company announced plans to lay off 18,000 employees in 2014. ProPublica reported in 2020 that Microsoft diverted more than $39 billion in U.S. profits to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes, a strategy challenged by the Internal Revenue Service in 2023.