In the spring of 1975, a college dropout and his childhood friend launched a tiny software company in Albuquerque with a singular mission: put a computer on every desk and in every home. Five decades later, Microsoft stands as a survivor of tech’s brutal evolutionary cycles, transforming from a scrappy BASIC interpreter vendor to an operating system kingpin, an internet also-ran, a stagnating giant, and now a cloud computing and AI player worth almost $3 trillion. While many tech giants have