Microsoft

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IBM

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TEXTS ABOUT DIFFERENT COMPANIES

McDonald’s

Dick and Mac McDonald opened the first McDonald’s in 1948, in San Bernardino, California. In 1954, Ray Kroc also joined them in their business. By 1959, McDonald’s had sold its 100 millionth hamburger, and had opened its 100^th store. At that time, McDonald’s was going at full speed, and Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers. McDonald’s began advertising on TV, and in the 1960s added new menu entrees having expanded to other countries.The rate that McDonald’s was adding restaurants also was increasing steadily. The restaurants opened by the hundreds each year, and the whole world was able to eat at one. Also, in 1996 McDonald’s opened restaurants in India, and added about 80 in Italy.

The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is the leading American computer manufacturer, with a major share of the market both in the United States and abroad.

The company assumed its present name in 1924 under the leadership of Thomas Watson, a man of considerable marketing skill who became general manager in 1914 and had gained complete control of the firm by 1924. Watson built the then unsound company into the leading American manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems used by governments and private businesses. He also developed a highly disciplined and competitive sales force that adapted the company’s custom-built tabulating systems to the needs of particular customers.

In 1933 IBM purchased Electromatic Typewriters, Inc., and thereby entered the field of electric typewriters, in which it eventually became an industry leader. During World War II, IBM helped to construct several high-speed electromechanical calculators that were the ancestors of electronic computers. But the firm refrained from producing these electronic data-processing systems until Watson’s son, Thomas Watson, Jr, became president of the company in 1952 and sponsored an all-out push into that field. Having entered the computer field, IBM’s size allowed it to invest heavily in development. This investment capability, added to its dominance in office-calculating machines, its marketing expertise, and its commitment to repair and service its own equipment, allowed IBM to quickly assume the predominant position in the American computer market. By the 1960s it was producing 70 percent of the world’s computers and 80 percent of those used in the United States. IBM’s specialty was mainframe computers – i.e., expensive medium- to large-scale computers that could process numerical data at great speeds.

The company did not enter the growing market for personal computers until 1981, when it introduced the IBM Personal Computer. This product achieved a major share of the market, but IBM was nevertheless unable to exercise its accustomed dominance as a maker of personal computers. IBM’s enormous Size hindered it from responding rapidly to the accelerating rates of technological change, and by the 1990s the company had downsized considerably.

IBM’s products include virtually every type of equipment needed for information processing, storage, and retrieval. In addition to being the world’s largest manufacturer of computers, the company produces electric typewriters, electronic cash registers, and other business machines.

Microsoft is the largest software company in the computer world, and its operating systems are on almost all computers. Its release of Windows 95 and the Microsoft Office 95 has increased the size of already giant company. It has been so successful because of the low priced and easy to use software it creates. From six year olds to presidents of large corporations use their products.

William

Gates, a 19-year old dropout from Harvard, founded Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen. The two rewrote BASIC, the language that let people create programs for their PC. Then, IBM chose them to write an operating system for the new IBM-PCs. Gates and Allen paid $50,000 to Tim Paterson for his QDOS, and renamed it to MS-DOS. The operating system was extremely successful, and soon all other PC manu­facturers wanted to be compatible with IBM. This gave Microso­ft the chance to make huge profits, and they had done.

Their next big success was Windows, which was a graphical operating system that became popular because it was extremely easy to use. Then, in 1993, they released Windows NT, which made networking extremely easy. By this time, Bill Gates had monopolized the operating system market and had become a billionaire.

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