Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft's best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, and the Edge web browser. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2022. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta.
Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee Brendan Eich created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages and a founding engineer of Netscape Lou Montulli created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.
Lotus Software was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018.
Aldus Corporation was an American software company best known for its pioneering desktop publishing software. PageMaker, the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the Macintosh seeing widespread use in the publishing industry. Paul Brainerd, the company's co-founder, coined the term desktop publishing to describe this paradigm. The company also originated the Tag Image File Format (TIFF) file format, widely used in the digital graphics profession.
Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare.
Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe Systems on December 3, 2005.
Adobe PageMaker is a desktop publishing computer program introduced in 1985 by the Aldus Corporation on the Apple Macintosh. The combination of the Macintosh's graphical user interface, PageMaker publishing software, and the Apple LaserWriter laser printer marked the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution. Ported to PCs running Windows 1.0 in 1987, PageMaker helped to popularize both the Macintosh platform and the Windows environment.
Microsoft Visio is a diagramming and vector graphics application and is part of the Microsoft 365 family. The product was first introduced in 1992 by former American software company Visio Corporation, and its latest version is Visio 2021. Microsoft acquired the assets of Visio Corporation in 2000 and thus also inherited the licensing agreements for the Visio application. A lightweight version of Visio is now included with all commercial SKU of Microsoft 365 and is known as Visio in Microsoft 365. It has two other subscription based SKUs. Visio Plan 1 includes the Visio web app whereas Visio Plan 2 provides access to both the web app as well as the Desktop application.
Spyglass, Inc. was an Internet software company. It was founded in 1990, in Champaign, Illinois, as an offshoot of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and later moved to Naperville, Illinois. Spyglass was created to commercialize and support technologies from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It focused on data visualization tools, such as graphing packages and 3D rendering engines.
Adobe Persuasion is a discontinued presentation program developed for the Macintosh platform by Aldus Corporation. After it was acquired by Adobe Systems in 1994, when the two companies merged, a Microsoft Windows version was released. Adobe discontinued production from September 1997.
The Windows Pioneers are the seven individuals who received awards from Microsoft in 1994 in recognition of their contributions to Microsoft Windows. Bill Gates presented each pioneer with an award.
Delrina Corporation was a Canadian software company active from 1988 to 1995. The company was best known for WinFax, a software package which enabled computers equipped with fax modems to transmit copies of documents to standalone fax machines or other similarly equipped computers. It also sold PerForm and FormFlow, electronic form software. Delrina was acquired by the American software firm Symantec in 1995.
Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its current best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system; Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software; Xbox, a line of entertainment of games, music, and video; Bing, a line of search engines; and Microsoft Azure, a cloud services platform.
Jeremy D. Allaire is an American technologist and Internet entrepreneur. He is CEO and founder of the digital currency company Circle and chairman of the board of Brightcove. With his brother JJ Allaire, he co-founded Allaire Corporation in 1995. Allaire Corp. had a successful IPO in January 1999 and was acquired by Macromedia in 2001. Allaire served as CTO of Macromedia after the acquisition and helped develop the Macromedia MX platform.
IntelliCAD is a CAD editor and development platform with an Application Programming Interface API published by the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium ("ITC") through shared development. IntelliCAD emulates the basic interface and functions of AutoCAD, however, it is particularly able to incorporate and interchange freely between a wide variety of file types.
Micro Focus International plc was a British multinational software and information technology business based in Newbury, Berkshire, England. The firm provided software and consultancy. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange until it was acquired by the Canadian software firm OpenText in January 2023.
Mindjet is a mind mapping and innovation management software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Mindjet's software products, including its flagship product MindManager and SpigitEngage, are designed to visually and collaboratively manage information and tasks. As of June 2016, Mindjet had approximately sixteen million users.
Joseph J. Allaire, better known professionally as J. J. Allaire, is an American-born software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He created the ColdFusion programming language and web application server, founded Allaire Corporation, OnFolio, FitNow, and RStudio, and created LoseIt! and Windows Live Writer. Allaire is currently the founder and CEO of statistical computing company RStudio.
