Anyone who invested $1 in Microsoft when it became a stock market company would have seen a return of 423,908 per cent compared with a 2,705 per cent gain by the S&P 500 over the same period, in an extraordinary corporate journey that started with two high school friends in Seattle falling in love with computers.

任何人在微软成为上市公司时对其投资1美元，将会获得423908%的回报，而同期标普500指数的涨幅为2705%，这是一段非同寻常的企业历程，始于西雅图两名高中好友对计算机的热爱。

Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who met when they were teenagers, founded Microsoft in 1975 and developed a condensed version of the BASIC programming language for the personal computer.

比尔·盖茨和保罗·艾伦在十几岁时相识，于1975年创立了微软，并为个人电脑开发了一种精简版的BASIC编程语言。

The company had its first big break in 1980 when IBM asked Microsoft to provide the operating system for its new PC.

该公司在1980年迎来了首个重大突破，当时IBM请微软为其新的个人电脑提供操作系统。

When Microsoft was taken public in 1986, the stock price tripled in a year, making Gates a billionaire at the age of 31.

当微软于1986年上市时，其股价在一年内涨了两倍，使盖茨在31岁时成为亿万富翁。

In the early 1980s, Microsoft began working on Windows, a graphical user interface. It faced competition in the software industry from Lotus and WordPerfect, independent software vendors. However, it also recognised the potential of the Apple Macintosh and wrote applications for AppleOS, positioning it to become a principal supplier of Macintosh software.

在20世纪80年代初期，微软开始着手开发Windows，这是一个图形用户界面。 它在软件行业面临着独立软件供应商Lotus和WordPerfect的竞争。 然而，它也意识到了苹果Macintosh的潜力，并为苹果操作系统编写应用程序，这使其定位为Macintosh软件的主要供应商。

In the late 1980s, the developer behind Word and Excel began to attract customers away from rivals by offering a suite of applications at a discounted price.

在20世纪80年代后期，开发出Word和Excel的这家公司开始通过以折扣价提供一套应用程序来吸引竞争对手的客户。

By the mid-1990s, about 60 per cent of Microsoft's total sales were derived from applications software. As the internet was adopted more widely by businesses, Microsoft developed an internet browser to rival Netscape, Internet Explorer 3.0, and integrated it into Windows.

到20世纪90年代中期，微软约60%的总销售额来自应用软件。 随着互联网在企业中得到更广泛的应用，微软开发了一款与网景公司竞争的互联网浏览器，即Internet Explorer 3.0，并将其集成到Windows中。

Ballmer later said it was intended as a call to action because he believed teams were too focused on building infrastructure such as Windows and were not spending enough time engaging external developers to build on those platforms.

鲍尔默后来表示，这旨在号召大家行动起来，因为他认为团队过于专注于构建Windows等基础设施，而没有花足够的时间让外部开发人员在这些平台上进行开发。

The company also faced a major challenge in 2000 when a judge ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly and should be broken up. However, over several years, the company was able to win dismissals in states where class action suits had been filed and settled with the Department of Justice.

该公司在2000年还面临一项重大挑战，当时一名法官裁定微软是垄断企业，应予以分拆。 然而，在几年时间里，该公司得以在提起集体诉讼的州赢得驳回诉讼，并与美国司法部达成和解。

As the company's cash pile swelled and its legal troubles abated, Microsoft faced pressure from shareholders to pay a dividend and it finally agreed in 2003.

随着公司现金储备膨胀和法律纠纷减少，微软面临来自股东要求支付股息的压力，最终在2003年同意了这一要求。

The company entered the cloud market with the launch of Windows Azure in 2010 and Ballmer adopted a "cloud-first" strategy.

该公司于2010年推出Windows Azure，进入云市场，鲍尔默采取了“云优先”战略。

Satya Nadella, who was born in India and joined Microsoft in 1992, was appointed chief executive in 2014 with the challenge of continuing to implement the strategy change and help Microsoft compete better with Apple and Google. The company had faced slowing demand for its products as consumers and businesses increasingly turned away from PCs towards handheld devices made by rivals. Under Nadella's leadership, Microsoft hit a $1 trillion market capitalisation in 2019, following surging cloud sales growth as more businesses paid to offload their servers and data storage to Microsoft's Azure infrastructure.

萨蒂亚·纳德拉出生于印度，于1992年加入微软，在2014年被任命为首席执行官，面临的挑战是继续实施战略变革，并帮助微软更好地与苹果和谷歌竞争。 随着消费者和企业日益远离个人电脑，转向竞争对手生产的手持设备，该公司产品需求面临放缓。 在纳德拉的领导下，随着越来越多的企业付费将其服务器和数据存储转移到微软的Azure基础设施，云销售增长迅猛，微软的市值在2019年达到1万亿美元。

The company is now valued at $3 trillion after benefiting from the artificial intelligence boom that has further increased demand for cloud computing.

在受益于进一步增加了云计算需求的人工智能热潮之后，该公司现在的市值达到3万亿美元。

Microsoft made a big bet on OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, in 2019, and has since invested more than $13 billion, with OpenAI becoming a major customer of Microsoft's cloud services.

微软在2019年对ChatGPT的创建者OpenAI下了重注，此后投资超过130亿美元，OpenAI已成为微软云服务的主要客户。