Microsoft is the world’s largest and most successful publisher of operating systems and application programs for personal computers, headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Key products include the company’s consumer operating systems (Windows XP Home), its corporate workstation and server operating systems (Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003), its market-leading office suite called Office (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook), and the market-leading Web browser (Internet Explorer). The firm’s critics view the company’s .NET initiative as an attempt to transform the Internet into a system by which clients communicate with servers, thus eliminating Microsoft’s competitors from the emerging, highly profitable market for services such as digital music distribution. See Office, Windows, .NET, Web Services.
Microsoft
