Microsoft, while a dominant company in the computer industry, is often misunderstood and maligned by computing professionals. In this talk I will present an overview of both Microsoft the company and some of the key technologies that I worked with while interning in the Windows NT/Cairo group this past summer. Specifically I will discuss Windows NT, Microsoft's flagship operating system with which it hopes to capture much of the enterprise computing market share currently held by mainframes and UNIX; Cairo, the next-next generation of NT (due to ship in 1997), an object oriented distributed system; and COM, the Common Object Model used to implement much of the functionality of Cairo.