- Published: September 15, 2022
- Updated: September 15, 2022
- University / College: Purdue University
- Level: Secondary School
- Language: English
- Downloads: 7
EFFECTS OF MICROSOFT ON THE BUSINESS WORLD How Microsoft Has Affected the Business World Notably, Bill Gates andPaul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975. Nothing in the 21century has contributed to immense growth in the business world like the invention Microsoft. Microsoft has effected business communication around the globe where emails and documents exchange is via the internet. It has proved to be user-friendly thus making training for basic functions such as world and email easier and effective. Through this product, businesses are able to serve their customers online efficiently. It has also made financial reporting easier, which is a core pillar in the success of a business. The business world has embraced Microsoft as a boon in the business word especially the effectiveness of Microsoft excel and Microsoft word, which has made business operations easier, manageable, and accurate.
Microsoft has contributed to the business world and shaped the face of the modern business primarily through its major creation called Windows and such products as Word and Excel, and it also shaped the Internet and internet-related practices as people know them now. Since the creation of Windows 1. 0, Microsoft has dominated the lives of people not only in daily life but also in business life. Nowadays, Windows is on ninety percent of the worlds desktops including those in offices. The creation of Windows granted people, including business people, easier and faster access to the Internet. True to what Bill Gates posits, the Internet makes the world smaller (Sparacio, 2010). Just as personal relationships are all about connections and connectedness, establishment of business relations is through connecting to individuals, other businesses, and economy in general. These connections go a mile in maintaining the thriving of the business. Thus, staying connected has its business value. Internet is responsible for the Modern and the most advanced mode of connecting. Regardless of location, small, medium-sized and large, corporate businesses connect to one another by means of the Internet, which effectively and efficiently substitutes phone calls and faxes and often eliminates a necessity to pay visits in person. The global net allows businesspersons to organize international meetings in a form of web conferences, discuss business matters in chats, or study the companies’ profiles on networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Gate sees the Internet as the center of attention for businesses around the globe. In the years ahead, the Internet will have an even more profound effect on the way we work, live, and learn” (Sparacio, 2010).
Apart from shaping the way people use the Internet to do business, Microsoft has shaped the way business operations in each particular office and organization. One of the cornerstone software devices upon which businesses rely is Microsoft Excel. Most remarkably, the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Excel was celebrated In 2010. The program started as a simple idea of creating a new, better version of a spreadsheet than the existing ones. Klunder, one of Excel creators, and his team designed what they called an “ intelligent recalc”. The program was based on an approach where only the cells affected by the data change were updated instead of all the formulas in the spreadsheet. In other words, slight necessary changes introduced to the data did not result in a chain reaction of unnecessary changes and a subsequent halt of all the calculations. This was a revolution in data based business making. The latter no longer suffered from accidental data losses and distortions, which once led to inevitable re-calculations. This overcame the limitations of old spreadsheets. Soon enough, Excel pushed Microsoft to the “ forefront in business applications” (Weber, 2010). Number processing is in the core of every business at least in a form of budget calculations, but there are also businesses that specialize in data processing and/or systematization and rely heavily on MS Excel. However, this software is quite ambiguous since it can be both a powerful business tool and a manipulation tool. According to Klunder, Microsoft Excel make things appear professional, deceiving people there is substance in it (Weber, 2010). What the program creator wanted to say is that Excel itself has a business look, and it alone can misguide people. Apart from this ambiguity, Excel as a business tool is still actual and beneficiary for businesses that use it fairly.
Another technological marvel that changed business life is Microsoft Word, which Like Excel, is a part of the Microsoft Office package for Windows. Charles Simonyi created MS Word and introduced it to the world in 1983. Since then, MS Word has enjoyed thirty years of existence and popularity. Sparacio (2010) advanced that MS Word redefined the old standards of word processing. This is a piece of software actively used in offices on a daily basis. The program made the documentation- and information-related processes much easier. Through Word, one can create and edit document on the computer. The era of manually filled forms is outdated, and the whole “ paper office” started to give way to “ digital (i. e. paperless) office.” Such operations as typing away, deleting, backspacing, as well as overwriting and revisions became available and made the sheet look like it was a newly created document and not a rough draft, with several editing. In addition, formatting options like bold or italics face type, indentation, justification and other features made documents created in MS Word look like “ proper printed text” (Naughton, 2012).
Apparently, it is indisputable that the effects of Microsoft on businesses are awesome and overwhelming. One can imagine the internet world without the internet; Microsoft word and Microsoft excel among other computing related products. Remarkably, Microsoft has brought immense advancement changing from the era of tiresome paper work to now ‘ digital’ or ‘ paperless office’. The result is efficiency and accuracy in the work carried out. For instance, Microsoft word, one can edit and format the document without the necessity of rough work thus ensuring neat results. Microsoft has enabled the doing away with the manually filed forms, which ended up consuming unnecessary time. Microsoft excel is also a major boost to businesses as it enables them prepare efficient spreadsheet within a very short duration of time. Internet has turned the business world into a global village where enterprises can interact and transact around the globe online. Owing to these advancements, Microsoft is therefore undeniably a blessing to the business fraternity without which the advancements we are experiencing today would be unheard of.
References