Microsoft, in Its Own Words -- Visual Studio Magazine

Desmond File

Microsoft, in Its Own Words

Last time we counted, Microsoft has been in the development space for 31 years. Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Todd Bishop has managed to sum up Microsoft’s history from Altair Basic to .NET and Vista in a short, easily navigable presentation.

Bishop injected some real methodology into the process, as he wrote: "We collected dozens of key Microsoft-related speeches, interviews, internal e-mails and other documents from the past three decades, and put them through a program that generated a timeline of tag clouds showing the 64 most commonly used words in each."

The result is a nifty scrolling timeline, built with the open-source (gasp!) Tagline Generator -- that provides a graphic representation of Microsoft’s most valuable verbiage, along with links to the original document.

Bishop has written a blog posting outlining the project's history here. The scrolling timeline is available here.

Does this unique accounting of Microsoft history offer useful context? What changes in the vocabulary over the years at Redmond surprise you most? E-mail us at [email protected].

Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/03/2007

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