Microsoft's Critical Decisions
The most critical decisions the company has is in regard to its search and advertising business, specifically how to compete against Google's AdWords success and the OEM relationships that Google is increasingly creating across enterprise, medium and small businesses. As a result, the critical decisions Microsoft has are first in its pursuit of selling OEM accounts its search engine technology followed by the re-vamping and more focused strategies regarding online advertising. Secondly, the major decisions on product direction in terms of licensed vs. SaaS need to be more clearly determined and decisions of which products to keep on this SaaS, or as the company calls it, Dynamics, platform also need to be decided on. Third, the pricing models for enterprise products need a major re-vamping and re-writing to make Microsoft easier to do business with at an enterprise level. Fourth, strategies for countering the threat of open source in their office automation, server, browser, development tool and file format areas all need much greater competitive focus and intensity if Microsoft is going to be able to continually growth. Fifth, Microsoft needs to again take a leadership position specifically in the area of new product development and lead through innovation, rather than its practice of the last three years of responding to open source and Google threats in the market. Finally, Microsoft needs to trim back the complexities of their new product development process and focus on how to be more agile in getting products...
The many challenges mentioned in this paper can be overcome, and for Microsoft there is no choice but to compete aggressively against open source in several of its key business units, in addition to competing against IBM, Oracle and others in its enterprise database arena. The crux of Microsoft's growth however will be in its competitive maneuvering against Google for both online advertising and search engine business models. Competing with Google will dictate the future of Microsoft more than even open source, and the selectively applying of the company's impressive engineering talent will be the major factor in changing the future of the company.
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