Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires from Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion in its largest acquisition to date.
Rackspace Inc. is a managed cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, USA, a suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel, and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hong Kong. The company's email and apps division operates from Blacksburg, VA; other offices are located in Austin, Texas and San Francisco, California.