A smart digital dinosaur

What also distinguishes the Seattle-based company is its costs structure : the production cost of each copy of its software distributed by diskette or CD Rom is very low, and practically nothing when it is distributed by Internet. Most of its price lies in the cost of research and development, and in the world-wide marketing process.

This is one of the basics of the digital economy : as brainpower is fundamental to all its assets, the research and development department, and associated branches (notably training) become investment priorities. This is what allows the electronic butterfly, whose life cycle is short by nature, to renew and permanently reinvent itself.

A few key dates in the history of Microsoft :
1975 : Beginning at Albukurque : development of BASIC language for Altair
1981 : Development of MS DOS for IBM
1986 : Entry on the stock market
1990 : Explosion with Windows 3.11
1998 : 23 years in business and a 12 billion dollar turnover

Now, discover in Chapter 2, why Butterflies will be springing from nowhere