Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions, their largest being the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in December 2016, followed by their acquisition of Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in May 2011. The company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. Microsoft (the word being a portmanteau of " microcomputer software" ) was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.
It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta.
21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2016. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers.
Its best-known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Only the most recently released version listed below is supported.Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation which produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.
The table is ordered by release date, with the most recent release date listed first. The following table provides release history information and download links for Office for Mac. To view release notes, see Release notes.
The install package is used if you don't have the application already installed, while the update package is used to update an existing installation. The Office suite includes all the individual applications, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The following table lists the most current packages for the Office suite and for the individual applications.
For early access to new releases, join the Office Insider program.For information about the features, security updates, and non-security updates that are included in a given release of Office for Mac, see Release notes for Office for Mac.The information below also applies to Office 2019 for Mac, Office LTSC 2021 for Mac, and Office 2021 for Mac, which are available as a one-time purchase from a retail store or through a volume licensing agreement.For security reason, Microsoft has deprecated the use of SHA-1.For more information, see Microsoft Teams installations on a Mac. Starting with Version 16.21, Microsoft Teams will be installed by default for new installations if you're using the Office suite install package.