When was Microsoft Corporation founded?

Microsoft Corporation was founded in 1975, in Redmond, Washington by Bill Gates, Paul Allen.

Who are the founders of Microsoft Corporation?

The founders of Microsoft Corporation are Bill Gates, Paul Allen. The company was established in 1975 in Redmond, Washington.

Who is the current CEO of Microsoft Corporation?

The current CEO of Microsoft Corporation is Amy Hood, serving since 2013.

Where was Microsoft Corporation founded?

Microsoft Corporation was founded in Redmond, Washington in 1975 by Bill Gates, Paul Allen.

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Microsoft Corporation

SoftwareFounded 1975- Updated June 2026

Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya

Last reviewed: June 2026

Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.

CorpDigest

Search brand historiesSearchK Contact

Microsoft Corporation

SoftwareFounded 1975- Updated June 2026

Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya

Last reviewed: June 2026

Founders

Who Founded Microsoft Corporation?

Q: Who founded Microsoft Corporation?

Microsoft Corporation was founded by Bill Gates, Paul Allen in 1975 in Redmond, Washington.

Bill Gates, Paul Allen · Founded 1975 · Redmond, Washington

Last reviewed: June 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya

Quick Answer

Microsoft Corporation was founded by Bill Gates, Paul Allen in 1975 in Redmond, Washington. The company is currently led by Amy Hood.

Founding Story

Paul Allen spotted the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975 and practically ran to find Bill Gates. The machine was a kit computer — no keyboard, no screen, just toggle switches and blinking lights. But Allen saw what mattered: a real microprocessor, the Intel 8080, cheap enough for individuals to own. The hardware existed. The software didn't.

Gates was nineteen, a Harvard sophomore who'd been programming since age thirteen at Seattle's Lakeside School. Allen was twenty-two, working as a programmer at Honeywell in Boston. They called MITS, the Albuquerque company selling the Altair, and told them they had a BASIC interpreter ready. They were lying. They hadn't written a single line of code for the machine.

What followed was eight weeks of frantic work. Allen built an emulator for the 8080 processor on a PDP-10 mainframe at Harvard. Gates wrote the BASIC interpreter targeting that emulator — software for hardware they'd never physically touched. When Allen flew to Albuquerque to demonstrate it, he loaded the program via paper tape into an actual Altair for the first time. It worked. The "READY" prompt appeared. Allen later said he wasn't sure it would run until that moment.

MITS licensed Altair BASIC, and Microsoft (originally "Micro-Soft") was born. The company's first year revenue was $16,005. Gates dropped out of Harvard. They set up shop in Albuquerque because that's where MITS was, not because New Mexico had a thriving tech scene.

The early years were a fight for legitimacy. Hobbyists copied software freely — the culture treated programs as communal property, like recipes. Gates' infamous 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" was a twenty-one-year-old yelling into the void that his work deserved to be paid for. It made him unpopular in hobbyist circles but established a principle that would underpin the entire commercial software industry.

Bill Gates

Co-founder 1975

Background

Bill Gates grew up in Seattle and began programming as a teenager at Lakeside School, where he met Paul Allen. Before Microsoft, he wrote code for school scheduling projects, worked with Allen on Traf-O-Data, and entered Harvard with a reputation for unusual programming intensity. Gates was not merely a technical founder; he was the commercial architect of Microsoft's earliest strategy. When Allen saw the Altair 8800 opportunity in 1975, Gates helped turn a speculative idea into a working BASIC interpreter and then into a business. His background combined mathematics, programming discipline, legal caution, and competitive instinct. That mix shaped Microsoft's emphasis on licensing, contracts, platform control, and developer tools. Gates left Harvard to focus on Microsoft because he believed the software layer around personal computers could scale faster than hardware manufacturing. His early experience also made him unusually sensitive to piracy and intellectual property, which explains his famous 1976 letter arguing that software creators needed to be paid.

Role at Microsoft Corporation

Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and served as CEO until 2000, remaining a central strategic figure as chairman and later technology adviser. His most important contribution was recognizing that software could be licensed repeatedly across hardware ecosystems. The IBM PC operating-system deal showed that instinct: Microsoft supplied IBM while retaining rights that let MS-DOS spread through the wider PC market. Gates also drove the company's intense focus on Windows, Office, developer platforms, and enterprise licensing. He was famously demanding, deeply involved in product reviews, and willing to use Microsoft's platform power aggressively, which helped build the company and also contributed to antitrust scrutiny. After stepping back from day-to-day leadership, Gates shifted much of his attention to philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, while his Microsoft legacy remained embedded in the company's licensing DNA. The modern subscription and cloud model is different in delivery, but it still reflects Gates' core insight: control the software layer that customers build around.

Paul Allen

Co-founder 1975

Background

Paul Allen was the co-founder whose timing and technical curiosity helped create Microsoft. He met Bill Gates at Lakeside School in Seattle, where both developed an early fascination with programming. Before Microsoft, Allen attended Washington State University, left to work as a programmer, and later joined Honeywell in the Boston area. His defining pre-company contribution was spotting the Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 and convincing Gates that the personal computer market was arriving sooner than expected. Allen understood the hardware shift and saw that even primitive machines would need programming languages. He worked with Gates to create Altair BASIC, helping transform an idea into the company's first product. Allen's background was less publicly combative than Gates', but he brought deep technical imagination and a broad view of computing's possibilities. He helped push Microsoft into existence at the precise moment when software was ready to become a separate industry.

Role at Microsoft Corporation

Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft and was crucial to its earliest technical and strategic decisions. He helped develop Altair BASIC, gave the company its original name, and participated in the operating-system opportunity that led to MS-DOS. Allen left active management in the early 1980s after being diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, though he remained a major shareholder for many years. After Microsoft, he became an investor, philanthropist, sports-team owner, and backer of science, space, music, artificial intelligence, and cultural institutions through Vulcan Inc. His lasting influence on Microsoft is easy to understate because he exited daily operations early, but the company might not have existed without his ability to see the Altair as a commercial signal rather than a hobbyist curiosity. Allen represented the imaginative technical side of Microsoft's founding: the belief that small computers would become general-purpose tools if software could make them useful.

Microsoft Corporation: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Brad Smith

President and Vice Chair

2015 – Present

Brad Smith has shaped Microsoft's public policy, legal, regulatory, and trust posture during an era when technology companies face scrutiny over antitrust, privacy, cybersecurity, AI, labor, and national security. His work has included negotiating regulatory commitments, representing Microsoft in government debates, and framing the company as a responsible infrastructure provider rather than merely a software vendor. That role became especially important during the Activision Blizzard review process and the rise of AI regulation. The measurable outcome is not a single product metric; it is Microsoft's ability to keep operating and acquiring at global scale while maintaining relationships with governments and large regulated customers.

Satya Nadella

CEO

2014 – Present

Satya Nadella's era is defined by the decision to stop making Windows the center of every strategy. He pushed Azure as the core growth platform, embraced Linux and open source, made Microsoft 365 a subscription engine, acquired LinkedIn and GitHub, and placed Microsoft at the center of generative AI through the OpenAI partnership and Copilot rollout. He also expanded gaming through ZeniMax and Activision Blizzard. The measurable outcome has been a dramatic rise in revenue, profit, and market value, plus a restored developer reputation. The unresolved test is whether AI infrastructure spending produces returns that match the market's expectations.

Amy Hood

CFO

2013 – Present

Amy Hood helped reshape Microsoft into a more disciplined recurring-revenue and capital-allocation machine. As CFO, she supported the shift from license cycles to cloud subscriptions, funded major acquisitions such as LinkedIn, GitHub, Nuance, and Activision Blizzard, and maintained valuation support through a period of heavy AI and cloud infrastructure spending. Hood's decisions matter because Microsoft's transformation required both product strategy and financial translation. The measurable outcome is visible in the company's FY2025 profile: $281.7B in revenue, $101.8B in net income, large shareholder returns, and continued willingness to invest aggressively in data centers and AI capacity.

Steve Ballmer

CEO

2000 – 2014

Steve Ballmer led Microsoft through the post-PC transition, and his record is more mixed than the usual caricature suggests. He expanded enterprise software, Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, and the commercial sales engine that later helped Azure scale. He also backed Xbox, turning Microsoft into a durable gaming platform owner. The weaknesses were severe: Microsoft missed the smartphone platform shift, Internet Explorer lost developer trust, and the Nokia handset deal failed to rescue Windows Phone. During his tenure, revenue increased substantially, but Microsoft's valuation and innovation reputation lagged faster-moving consumer and mobile rivals.

Bill Gates

Co-founder and CEO

1975 – 2000

Bill Gates led Microsoft through the era that created its core licensing economics. His most important decisions included commercializing Altair BASIC, retaining MS-DOS licensing rights beyond IBM, pushing Windows as the standard PC operating environment, and building Office into a bundled productivity suite. Gates also shaped Microsoft's aggressive competitive posture, which drove scale but triggered antitrust scrutiny. The measurable outcome was extraordinary: Microsoft went public in 1986, Windows became the dominant desktop operating system, Office became a corporate standard, and the company entered the 2000s as the defining software platform owner of the PC era.

Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.

Founders

Who Founded Microsoft Corporation?

Bill Gates, Paul Allen · Founded 1975 · Redmond, Washington

Last reviewed: June 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya

Quick Answer

Microsoft Corporation was founded by Bill Gates, Paul Allen in 1975 in Redmond, Washington. The company is currently led by Amy Hood.

Founding Story

Bill Gates

Co-founder 1975

Background

Role at Microsoft Corporation

Paul Allen

Co-founder 1975

Background

Role at Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Corporation: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Brad Smith

President and Vice Chair

2015 – Present

Satya Nadella

CEO

2014 – Present

Amy Hood

CFO

2013 – Present

Steve Ballmer

CEO

2000 – 2014

Bill Gates

Co-founder and CEO

1975 – 2000