The software business was dominated by hardware companies, and everybody thought they would just come in and wipe us out. People forget that Microsoft took a huge bet to think that an independent operating system and programming language would be successful.

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IBM legitimized the notion of the PC -- that it would not be just a hobbyist computer.

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Activities such as the BAM Minority Student Day are part of a larger Microsoft effort to provide urban high school students with exposure to the real-life experience of working in the high technology industry. Through the event, we also hope to inspire young minority students to become the information technology leaders of tomorrow.

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There are nearly 300 million PC users out there now, and so that gives us a very, very broad market. So we can put far more, you know, ten times more into R&D of the operating system, yet make it available for one-tenth or less the price.

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Within a month, Ray was putting his thoughts on software-as-services on paper.

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Great job. I really enjoyed reading your essay.

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What Microsoft has done over the years is bring technology to mass markets, and we think the time has come to do that with business intelligence software. And we're building it into the Office tools that are familiar to everyone.

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[Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes remembers what the industry was like when he joined the company in 1981.] The software business was dominated by hardware companies, and everybody thought they would just come in and wipe us out, ... People forget that Microsoft took a huge bet to think that an independent operating system and programming language would be successful.

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One way to increase the impact that people can have in an organization is to give them access to the information they need. Until now, BI software has been too complex, costly, and disconnected from the software tools people use every day to do their jobs.

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