Microsoft hits the age of 30 today

SOFTWARE KING of the World, Microsoft, is celebrating its 30th birthday today.

The company is holding its 30th annual meeting today with a fairly typical mid-life crisis.

More than 16,000 employees will be brooding about a stagnant stock price, accusations that bureaucracy is stifling new ideas, Google, and the company's restructuring.

Sir William Gates III and the otherwise reclusive CEO Steve Ballmer are expected to talk about the company's future and big ideas in the areas of graphics, speech recognition, signal processing, facial-expression mapping, and quantum computing.

Vole came into being in 1975, but really didn't make it big until IBM decided to enter the market for personal computers in 1981.

Gates licensed an operating system Microsoft had bought to IBM, but retained the rights to sell the operating system to what eventually became PC clones.

The MS-DOS/PC-DOS operating system from Microsoft outsold IBM's own systems and became the industry standard.

Gates said that in the last 30 years he was the most proud of making big bets on technologies like the graphical user interface and web services.

The GUI idea ultimately came from Xerox, via Apple and the Internet was something that Gates personally didn't see coming, but hey it's Vole's birthday so we should not be mean.

More signs of the times here. µ