They probably outsource their work, buy it, or outright steal it from someone else. The original product MS had was its BASIC programming language. After that, Bill Gates made a real stink about "unauthorized copying" of his stuff in the Open Letter to Hobbyists which kicked off the modern software copyright regime.
It seems that there's a lot of Merger & Acquisition growth in MS's past. Bill Gates bought a cheap knockoff of CP/M to edge out DR-DOS. Excel was based on a product from Apple. Windows is a clone of Xerox PARC ideas. MS used the BSD licensed TCP/IP stack for its internet backend. There's references to the NSA in some of MS's Cryptography DLLs.
More recently, they bought up services like LinkedIn and GitHub.
It makes you wonder how much of their stuff is truly original.
They probably outsource their work, buy it, or outright steal it from someone else. The original product MS had was its BASIC programming language. After that, Bill Gates made a real stink about "unauthorized copying" of his stuff in the Open Letter to Hobbyists which kicked off the modern software copyright regime.
It seems that there's a lot of Merger & Acquisition growth in MS's past. Bill Gates bought a cheap knockoff of CP/M to edge out DR-DOS. Excel was based on a product from Apple. Windows is a clone of Xerox PARC ideas. MS used the BSD licensed TCP/IP stack for its internet backend. There's references to the NSA in some of MS's Cryptography DLLs.
More recently, they bought up services like LinkedIn and GitHub.
It makes you wonder how much of their stuff is truly original.