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The Rise of Microsoft — A 20-Part Series

The Rise of Microsoft

How did a company born from a bluff over a computer nobody had — two kids promising software they hadn’t written yet — end up on nearly every desk on Earth, survive a near-breakup, stumble through a lost decade, and come back as one of the most valuable companies in history?

This is The Rise of Microsoft, a 20-part series tracing the whole arc: from a teletype in a Seattle prep school, through the IBM deal that built an empire, the Windows and Office years, the antitrust war, the Ballmer plateau, and the Nadella cloud-and-AI comeback. A new part publishes regularly — bookmark this page to follow along.

The full series

  1. Part 1: Two Kids and a Teletype — 1968–1974: Bill Gates and Paul Allen fall for computers at Lakeside School
  2. Part 2: We Have BASIC — 1975: the Altair 8800, the audacious phone call, and the founding of Micro-Soft
  3. Part 3: An Open Letter to Hobbyists — 1976: Gates argues software has value and shouldn't be copied for free
  4. Part 4: The Deal of the Century — 1980: supplying IBM's PC with DOS — while keeping the license
  5. Part 5: The Empire of DOS — The PC clones, Compaq, and MS-DOS spreading to every machine
  6. Part 6: Windows — 1985: Microsoft bets on the graphical user interface
  7. Part 7: The Youngest Billionaire — 1986: the IPO that made Gates the world's youngest billionaire
  8. Part 8: 3.0 — 1990: Windows 3.0 becomes the breakthrough hit
  9. Part 9: Office — Bundling Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to bury Lotus and WordPerfect
  10. Part 10: Start Me Up — 1995: the Windows 95 launch turns software into a cultural event
  11. Part 11: The Internet Tidal Wave — 1995–98: Gates' memo, Internet Explorer, and the war with Netscape
  12. Part 12: United States v. Microsoft — 1998–2001: the antitrust trial that nearly split the company in two
  13. Part 13: Developers, Developers, Developers — Steve Ballmer takes the helm; Windows XP and .NET
  14. Part 14: Xbox — 2001: Microsoft storms the living room and takes on Sony
  15. Part 15: The Lost Decade? — Vista, Zune, Windows Phone, and the missed mobile revolution
  16. Part 16: Betting on the Cloud — 2008–2010: the quiet birth of Azure
  17. Part 17: Hit Refresh — 2014: Satya Nadella reinvents Microsoft's culture and strategy
  18. Part 18: Embrace — LinkedIn, GitHub, open source, and Teams: the reinvention years
  19. Part 19: Copilot — The multibillion-dollar OpenAI partnership and AI in every product
  20. Part 20: The Three-Trillion-Dollar Comeback — 2026: Microsoft's second act as one of the world's most valuable companies

New chapters drop regularly. Start with Part 1.

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