A month later, on March 13, the company went public with an IPO, raising $61 million at $21.00 per share. By the end of the trading day, the price had risen to $28.00. Soon Microsoft began introducing its office products. Microsoft Works, an office program which combined features in a word processor, spreadsheet, database and other office applications, was the first to be released.

It then went on to launch more remarkable products. However, the world's most used software programs did not have a smooth and speedy launch. It was challenging to develop advanced software, Microsoft faced several glitches and legal issues initially.

"The success of Microsoft is really due to our relationship with developers. From those early days of getting people to write applications in BASIC, to getting people to write applications for MS-DOS, to get people to write graphical applications for Windows, that's where we had our success. With things like Windows, it didn't happen overnight. There were many years of getbting the system better, taking advantage of performance, improving the tools before that became a mainstream thing," Gates told software developers at Microsoft's TechEd conference about his transition on June 3.

Image: A customer checks software packages of US software giant Microsoft at a Tokyo computer shop. | Photograph: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images