On Friday, September 23, Microsoft turns 30.
The event will be celebrated at Safeco Field in Seattle, where Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer will present all the software giant's achievements in front of the 16,000 Redmond employees.

Gates and Ballmer will also use this event to reveal the company's direction, especially since Microsoft has recently announced a new top management scheme.

In the press release related to the event, Ballmer stressed again the importance of the following 18 months for the company. In this interval, Microsoft is preparing to launch several products, twice as many as last year, among which Windows Vista and Office 12.

Along its 30 years existence, Microsoft's activity has diversified, the company's fields of interest including now graphics, voice recognition technologies, supercomputing and many others.

Microsoft got seriously involved in digital entertainment, with products like Xbox and Windows Media Center, the Redmond giant aiming to become more than just a software company.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen; the company currently has 60,000 employees in 80 countries.



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