Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Often those calls go unanswered. Ashton-Tate, the Torrance, Calif., publisher of Framework, has 42 full-time service representatives who take 1,100 telephone calls a day; Microsoft's 50 operators field 1,800. The current ambitious goal of WordPerfect is to have its 70 support staffers answer at least half of its 1,500 daily calls. Says Adam Osborne, president of Paperback Software: "You have a better chance of winning the lottery than of getting through on some toll-free lines...
...record-smashing Wall Street rally that started last fall, even the long-moribund technology stocks have come back to life. Since October, according to the California Technology Stock Letter, shares in its index of 30 high-tech companies have climbed about 22%. Cashing in on that market strength, Microsoft, the second-largest independent manufacturer of computer software (1985 revenues: $163 million), announced last week that it will make an initial public offering of 2.5 million shares in March. The Bellevue, Wash., company hopes to garner $16 to $19 for each share. Microsoft may serve as a bellwether of the high...
...offering will enrich Chairman William Gates, 30, the boy wonder who dropped his undergraduate studies at Harvard in 1975 to help start Microsoft, which produces best-selling business software for IBM and Apple personal computers as well as the popular computer game Flight Simulator. If the stock goes for $19, his 45% holding in Microsoft will be worth $211 million...
Last June Steven Ballmer, a vice president of Microsoft, told the press that his company would ship an important new program called Windows "before the snow falls." Microsoft made the deadline with a day to spare, despite early blizzards last fall. But the arrival of Windows, which gives an IBM computer the look and feel of an Apple Macintosh, could hardly be described as timely. Ballmer had previously announced four different release dates for the program, beginning with April 1984, and Microsoft had missed them all. In the parlance of Silicon Valley, the software had turned into vaporware, a product...
...Microsoft...