It dawned on me slowly this week that I have become a Microsoft enthusiast. It hit me while I was watching Netflix via the X-Box. I never took to Windows Media products but without realizing it, I already migrated my TV habits to a Microsoft domain. Not long before that I had a great conversation with Bryan Robbins who uses the Kinect to do motion capture for his animation work. Bryan has hacked together his own motion capture system for $99.00, courtesy of Microsoft. That’s cool, though it might not be cool to think Microsoft is…. cool.
And then there is Microsoft’s new tablet, Surface. Surface is coming at just the right time. Too late for me, as I just bought an ASUS Zen but just in time for CIOs who are sure to start issuing tablets to the workforce soon. Now that they can use the world’s most familiar office productivity suite, it will accelerate adoption of enterprise tablets, a field Apple could have had all to itself.
Microsoft also looks well placed with Windows 8, in mobile as well as the tablet space (and has intelligently created options away from Nokia). And there’s the Yammer acquisition. You have to question the price but not the intent. Every other big player in enterprise social networks (ESNs) has a bloated Intranet-type platform, almost guaranteed to give employees dashboard fatigue. Yammer has built its reputation and business on being a communications tool for the connected age, a quite different approach to the ESN. Microsoft has the bloated version, Sharepoint, at the heart of 80% of all enterprises. Yammer looks to me like a medium-sized business application that is also a Sharepoint app. But its lightness will broaden Microsoft’s range in the new complex enterprise, and no doubt help Microsoft’s CRM offer. What chance Microsoft chasing Salesforce.com into the social enterprise?
Right now I can’t see me making use of an Apple TV or TV related product. I use X-Box. Google TV is not even on my horizon. When it came to making a decision about a tablet I would have jumped at Surface, rejected the iPad because I need to type, and took the ASUS ultra only because nothing on the market at the time served my needs. These are two areas where I would not normally have opted for a Microsoft-based product. Clearly as a consumer I am gravitating towards Redmond.
But on a strategic level these developments show how Microsoft is adopting a new approach to its business. Its current strategy is being interpreted as a re-run of Apple’s tight software, hardware integration. But I think the similarity lies in the strategic options portfolio. The strategic options approach is very different from the past when Microsoft owned the downstream Wintel franchise.
The strategic options portfolio is new. It means innovating simultaneously across a broad range of possible futures in markets where a company’s oligopoly power is much reduced. Until this year, in fact until the past few weeks Microsoft struck me as a company stuck in oligopoly management techniques. But now it all looks different. It has multiple options, across multiple market segments and it looks capable of developing a very strong adjacency portfolio too. Microsoft is beginning to look like a very modern type of company.
You might also like to read this account of why RIM is failing through the lack of a strategic options approach.
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