Featuring the first graphical user interface (GUI) for IBM -compatible PCs, the Windows OS soon dominated the PC market.

Approximately 90 percent of PCs run some version of Windows.

Microsoft also developed specialized Windows packages, including the networkable Windows for Workgroups and the high-powered Windows NT, aimed at businesses.

With the 2001 release of Windows XP, Microsoft united its various Windows packages under a single banner, offering multiple editions for consumers, businesses, multimedia developers, and others.

Microsoft For Os X Code Base And

Windows XP abandoned the long-used Windows 95 kernel (core software code ) for a more powerful code base and offered a more practical interface and improved application and memory management.

The highly successful XP standard was succeeded in late 2006 by Windows Vista, which experienced a troubled rollout and met with considerable marketplace resistance, quickly acquiring a reputation for being a large, slow, and resource-consuming system.

Responding to Vistas disappointing adoption rate, Microsoft in 2009 released Windows 7, an OS whose interface was similar to that of Vista but was met with enthusiasm for its noticeable speed improvement and its modest system requirements.

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In 2015 Microsoft released Windows 10, which came with Cortana, a digital personal assistant like Apple s Siri, and the Web browser Microsoft Edge, which replaced Internet Explorer.

Microsoft also announced that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows, meaning that users would receive regular updates to the OS but that no more large-scale revisions would be done.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen, Corrections Manager.

Year after year, Microsoft refined and improved Windows so that Apple, which failed to come up with a significant new.

Microsoft For Os X Mac OS Itself Drew

Apple litigated for years, in vain, to stop Microsoft from copying the look and feel of its operating system, though the Mac OS itself drew upon the PARC GUI.

Meanwhile, as successive versions of Windows were improved and as.

By 1993, Windows 3.0 and its subsequent versions were selling at a rate of one million copies per month, and nearly 90 percent of the worlds PCs ran on a.