This a collection of sources and comments about them meant to be in the used in the Microsoft article, it's not deliberate link hoarding, it's just a collection of sources
http://www.startupgallery.org/gallery/story.php?ii=20 - New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, but this part was(initially?) funded by gates and/or allen which might comprimise it, not even mentioning museums are a gray area in WP:RS
http://pctimeline.info/ibmpc/ - perfect, sites sources, but just a website, would have to verify the old nigh-impossible sources myslef
Allan, Roy A. (2001). A History of the Personal Computer. Allan Publishing. ISBN0968910807. - A book that's actually good, really good, but gets Windows NT 3.0 wrong (3.0 never existed, 3.1 was the first version ;p) and is unfortunately self-published.
Founding-1997 - Microsoft focuses primary on developers (think steve ballmer shouting the word over and over); early books focus on this
1997-200X - "Evangalism is War" powerpoint presentation and accomponying docs surface from Comes v. Microsoft revealing a switch from a focus on developers to totally on Microsoft, instead repositioning and trying to pit competitors against each other and making Win32 cross-platform and instead of competing simply collecting royalty fees. Source: "CTRL-ALT-DECEIT" from Harper... somehow
200X- - .Net surfaces, being built into Vista+; Microsoft helps Mono. Aims?
When searching for user culture, one isn't going to get much with the traditional "cult" and "fan" names, try to more subtle and unconventional business terms such as "enthusiast" or "advocate".
Microsoft also actively manipulates standards bodies to create standards that Microsoft effectively controls, regardless of technical or market suitability.[1]
Groklaw... way too sketchy of a source for the claim.... need more, even if it references a couple RS, it doesn't for the whole article - I may have put this in myself a long long time ago though ;p
In what is described as an "end of an era" by The New York Times, Apple surpassed Microsoft for the first time in ten years as the top technology company in market capitalization on May 26, 2010; Apple's sales came mostly from music and hand-held devices as opposed to the software (mostly Windows and Office) Microsoft develops.[2] Although the company's market cap at the time of the report was stagnent for years, Microsoft still had more short-term investments as of the report as well as higher revenue and nearly triple the net income of Apple for the fiscal year of 2009.[3][2][4]
After taking the trouble to write that decided it's a bit too nascent and violates my own comment about description of future events a little.
According to statistics taken in 2009, the company's client line of Microsoft Windows operating systems and Microsoft Office line of productivity software hold over a 90% market share in their respective areas.[5][6]
Something else I wrote for the intro, but ended up deciding it was unneccesary.
In April 2005, Microsoft received wide criticism for withdrawing support from Washington state's H.B. 1515 bill that would have extended the state's anti-discrimination laws to people with alternate sexual orientations.[7] Microsoft was accused of bowing to pressure from local evangelical pastor Ken Hutcherson who met with a senior Microsoft executive and threatened a national boycott of Microsoft's products.[8] Microsoft also revealed they were paying evangelical conservative Ralph Reed's company Century Strategies a $20,000 monthly fee.[9] Over 2,000 employees signed a petition asking Microsoft to reinstate support for the bill.[10] Under harsh criticism from both outside and inside the company's walls, Microsoft decided to support the bill again in May 2005.[10][11]
Removed due to concerns about the article promoting LGBT stuff..... which is sort of correct, so we'll stick to the fundamentals.
There are several other aspects to the corporate structure of Microsoft. For worldwide matters there is the Executive Team, made up of sixteen company officers across the globe, which is charged with various duties including making sure employees understand Microsoft's culture of business. The sixteen officers of the Executive Team include the Chairman and Chief Software Architect, the CEO, the General Counsel and Secretary, the CFO, senior and group vice presidents from the business units, the CEO of the Europe, the Middle East and Africa regions; and the heads of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Services; Human Resources; and Corporate Marketing. In addition to the Executive Team there is also the Corporate Staff Council, which handles all major staff functions of the company, including approving corporate policies. The Corporate Staff Council is made up of employees from the Law and Corporate Affairs, Finance, Human Resources, Corporate Marketing, and Advanced Strategy and Policy groups at Microsoft. Other Executive Officers include the Presidents and Vice Presidents of the various product divisions, leaders of the marketing section, and the CTO, among others.[12][13]
Anothor one I wrote. Mildly interesting but after consideration follows the "unneccesary detail" (sp) part, is impossible to keep up to date - and the source is an archived webpage.
Microsoft has often been described as having a developer-centric business culture. A great deal of time and money is spent each year on recruiting young university-trained software developers and on keeping them in the company. For example, while many software companies often place an entry-level software developer in a cubicle desk within a large office space filled with other cubicles, Microsoft assigns a private or semiprivate closed office to every developer or pair of developers. In addition, key decision makers at every level are either developers or former developers. In a sense, the software developers at Microsoft are considered the "stars" of the company in the same way that the sales staff at IBM are considered the "stars" of their company.[14]
For fun, Microsoft also hosts the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt, an annual puzzle hunt (a live puzzle game where teams compete to solve a series of puzzles) held at the Redmond campus. It is a spin-off of the MIT Mystery Hunt.[15]
Business culture stuff removed due to sourcing concerns (first paragraph has books without page numbers, for instance) and the fact that it's horribly outdated. Would be nice to have though and properly dated.
^Cite error: The named reference 10-K was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Charles, John. "Indecent proposal? Doing Business With Microsoft". IEEE Software (January/February 1998): 113–117. * Jennifer Edstrom (1998). Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from inside. N.Y. Holt. ISBN0-8050-5754-4. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) * Fred Moody (1995). I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier. Viking. ISBN0-670-84875-1. * Michael A. Cusumano (1995). Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets and Manages People. Free Press. ISBN0-684-85531-3. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
User culture in the DOS/XENIX and Windows 1.0->98 era - according to articles there were a lot of enthusiasts/cults (sp), can't seem to find much on it now though, and google searches keep leading back to wikipedia mirroring sites (lol?). Gonna need to comb through google books and the local library for this one perhaps.
