Microsoft is an American multinational computer technology corporation founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. This hugely successful company develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. (Microsoft, n.d) Microsoft makes Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, MSN and Xbox 360. (History of Microsoft, n.d) Its head quarter is located in Redmond, Washington, United State of American. The starting of Microsoft Corporation is by Bill Gates and Paul Allen who addicted to programming and computer. They get inspired by the MITS Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics to develop a BASIC language of Altair. Gates and Allen worked days and nights to make BASIC compatible with MITS Altair and finally they succeeded with Basic Altair. They then established Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. Afterward, it rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. (Microsoft, n.d) Since year 1993, Microsoft Corporation launched its first Windows, named as Windows NT. Microsoft corporation continuously developed Windows operating system to be more advance such as Windows 95, Windows 97, Windows CE ,Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows 2007, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8. (Microsoft corporation history, n.d).
During year 2011, Microsoft had introduced forced ranking evaluation system to establish a clear link between performance and compensation. In other word, it is an attempt to reward the excellent and weed out the weak. Forced ranking is a system brought to General Electric (GE) by the Chief Executive, Jack Welch. It is soon followed by a lot of big corporations such as Cisco Systems, HP, Intel and etc. (Bashir, Bashir, & Rohra, 2011) Forced ranking is a performance appraisal method of forced distribution, where managers are required to distribute ratings for those being evaluated, into a pre-specified performance distribution ranking.
