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•Eight Greatest Computer Innovations that Actually Make Life Easier 89
Internet Explorer became available to Windows 95 users free of charge, allow-
ing many more people to use the Internet. The facts and figures never stop being
phenomenal. There were 30 million Excel users in 1996.
Subsequent to this, Microsoft has produced and sold a plethora of software
upgrades, from Windows 98 to Windows NT and Office 2000. It does seem that
this idea still has terrific legs.
Perhaps the easiest way to describe this great business idea is to show a graph of
sales revenues to date (Fig. 1).
Disregarding the 1977 growth rate, which distorts the numbers, the average
growth per year is 60%. If this average continues, then the sales figures will look like
Fig. 2. This predicts that in 2008 Microsoft’s turnover will be more than $475
billion. To put that number into context, the UK Government’s total spend for
2000 is approximately $620 billion.
500,000 Sales 1800%
450,000 Growth 1600%
400,000 1400%
Sales350,000 1200%
Growth300,0001000%
250,000 800%
200,000 600%
150,000 400%
100,000 200%
0%
50,000
0
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Year
Fig. 2 Microsoft projected sales revenues to 2008 ($m).
