For a significant amount of years prior to the new millennium, the corporate tech giant known as Microsoft dominated the industry of Information Technology; going as far as evolving into the wealthiest company in the world.
Unfortunately, as technology’s exponential growth and increasingly larger-sized consumer base progressed, Microsoft’s attempts to enter the arenas of music, social networking, and e-books were massive failures.
For the past 10 years specifically, the industries that Microsoft struggled most to influence under the leadership of former CEO Steve Ballmer included cell phones, search engines, and modern operating systems (OS). These failures are particularly notable by the examples presented by Windows Phone, Bing, and the Windows 8 OS.
Lack of focus
While the Canadian developer known as Research In Motion (RIM) slowly ruled over the cell phone market with their novel series of devices known as Blackberry, Apple had begun to show the world where the future of the industry was headed by the year 2007 with its introduction of the revolutionary iPhone.
Microsoft, arrogant that a fully touchscreen-based device would pose such a threat, finally introduced their own solution by the year 2010. Unfortunately by this time, it was considered too late for additional competition; as Apple’s iPhones with iOS and nearly the entire rest of the industry running Google Android OS completely dominated the market share.
According to Balaji Viswanathan, a former Microsoft engineer, this failure was due to a lack of priority and planning. As Apple solely focused on the iPhone during the late 2000s, Microsoft was focused on approximately 40 different products at one time.
Late to the competition
In an attempt to create their own response to the massively successful and world’s favorite search engine Google, Microsoft introduced the next generation of Windows Live Search known simply as Bing.
Developed utilizing an active server page, it provides much of the same services that competing engines offer; including web, image, map, products, and video search results with the facilitation of algorithms that navigate the Internet and compile a relevant list of links based on user-generated keywords. Despite the fact that at the time of its inception it offered multiple innovative features including search suggestions in the middle of user queries and the famous partnership with Yahoo!, Bing was ultimately considered a failure.
As told by the Senior Vice President of the division’s Online Audience Group Yusuf Mehdi, this was due to the simple fact that “it failed to retrieve relevant results for a long line of less popular queries”; a critical feature included and emphasized by the superior Google search engine. By only targeting the popular results, the obscure queries would fail to load accurate listings and users would struggle to locate websites providing the information they desired.
Forward into the future
After Steve Ballmer retired and stepped down from the position as Microsoft’s boss, the engineer and staff member of the company for 22 years known as Satya Nadella succeeded him. Under his leadership, the corporation has revitalized itself from the failures of the past decade by an impressive scale; with up to a 60 percent increase in the value of the company’s stock over less than 5 years.
Through a priority of agile development methodology and the new mission statement “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”, Nadella has succeeded in cutting through much of the bureaucracy that has stagnated Microsoft’s innovative habits and products. With this new vision in place, Microsoft has begun to embrace more open source technologies; especially in the field of cloud computing such as Node.js.
Furthermore, it has allowed a significant amount of its own projects to become open source including the .NET framework and the JavaScript engine for Microsoft’s web browser Edge known as ChakraCore. Rather than separating R&D from core business activities, Nadella’s spin-off of Microsoft Research known as Next allows innovation to be delivered to products far quicker than before. Finally, Microsoft’s recent introduction of their final OS known as Windows 10 has been both a commercial and critical success.