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  • 2006-06-17 (xsd:date)
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  • Would You Have Invested? (en)
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  • One of the lessons of the personal computer revolution that began in the 1970s was that tremendous business success was no longer entirely the province of staid, conservatively-dressed, mature adult males with expensive business school educations. As Microsoft, Apple Computer, and hundreds of other technology-driven companies demonstrated, plenty of young, sartorially-questionable, self-taught young people of both sexes could achieve business success on a par with some of the world's oldest and biggest corporations. A photograph of Microsoft staff members in 1978 has been circulated online for many years bearing titles such as Would you have invested? It reflects the notion that, back in 1978, not many people might have predicted that a small group of casually-dressed, long-haired youngsters was creating a corporation that would, four decades later, reach an estimated market value of $330 billion, themselves becoming millionaires (and a few even billionaires) in the process. In December 1978, Microsoft had just completed its first million-dollar sales year, and the decision was made to decamp from the company's Albuquerque, New Mexico, headquarters and relocate to bigger and better digs in the Pacific Northwest state of Washington. The formal studio photograph displayed above was taken on 7 December 1978, shortly before that move, and captured all but a couple of the current Microsoft staff: (Technically, Microsoft wasn't yet Microsoft Corporation at the time this photograph was taken — the company was founded as a partnership and officially became a Washington State corporation on 1 July 1981.) As for the identities of the persons pictured, and their lives after Microsoft: Nearly thirty years later, just before Bill Gates stepped down from being involved in the day-to-day operations of Microsoft, the eleven staffers pictured above reunited for another photograph, with office manager Miriam Lubow (who missed the original sitting) taking the place of Bob Wallace (who died in 2002): (en)
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