Marketing myopia and Microsoft's failed mobile strategy

Marketing Myopia

Of the many examples of marketing myopia in progress today across a wide variety of industries, one of the most visible is that of Microsoft' efforts to get back into the mobile phone and operating systems business. With Apple having the world's leading market share from a device standpoint and Google Android challenging them for leadership, Microsoft shows how devastating it is to rely on the five factors defined in the section a Manifesto, Not a Prescription in the well-known article Marketing Myopia (Levitt, 1975). The intent of this analysis is to define a product strategy for Microsoft's mobile device and operating system business that will maximize their brand value and mitigate and help avoid historical marketing errors made in the past.

Marketing Myopia at Microsoft

Companies that often have an exceptional level of commercial success based on technological prowess alone often fall victim to the worst strains of marketing myopia. When technology alone is relied on as a means to differentiate a product and define a market instead of customer orientation, innovation is stifled and avenues of growth ignored (Drucker, 1985). Microsoft had initially entered the mobile device industry with a de-featured version of the operating system, reasoning that a lower level of cost could be achieved by reducing feature count. The economics of building products need to be secondary to making a product that can address current and future customer expectations, needs and deliver exceptionally strong experiences. Microsoft however did not operate from this perspective, and chose to research only the adoption of their existing line of operating systems against low-end price bands, not against an entirely new paradigm of collaboration and communication. One of the more prevalent aspects of a marketing strategy that becomes myopic over time is the tendency to rely on research to further justify and protect its position as a product-centric business (Andrus, Reinmuth, 1979). Microsoft had done this with the first iterations of their mobile computing strategy including the initial development efforts on the Windows Phone operating system.

Another aspect of Microsoft's myopic vision of mobile computing is the lack of focus on partnership alliances and the ability to define a suitable 3rd party platform framework. The inclusion of Nokia at present is only after several failed attempts with other partners who could not align with the requirements Microsoft had at the operating system and platform level. Instead of creating a series of Application Programmer Interface (API) routines Microsoft chose instead to require hardware partners to pay for an OEM contract for the software. Competitors including Apple and Google make API toolkits, development systems and free versions of their operating systems to further promote the development of next-generation applications on their platform. Microsoft, again forced into a myopic mindset, chose to look at partners and service providers not as part of a customer-driven ecosystem but as another source of potential revenue over time. This limited the brand value of Microsoft in mobile and initially made hardware partners and service providers consider moving more in the direction of Apple and especially Google, two companies who were, as Peter Drucker observed, using customer insights to drive greater disruptive innovation (Drucker, 2002) Microsoft's recent decision to launch latest mobile operating system without an actual launch date of the devices further shows their myopic nature as well.

Conclusion

Microsoft's reliance on technological prowess alone has helped the company in the past to dominate desktop and server operating systems markets. It has however not served them well as they have moved into the smartphone business, where a services-based, not product-based approach is critical. The intent of this analysis is to show that the Five Forces Model can guide Microsoft beyond its product-centric, very myopic view of smartphones and the ecosystems they require to embrace a more integrative market-driven strategy. Google will win the battle for smartphone operating systems if Microsoft doesn't' change its approach quickly, as the company continues to rely on a very myopic strategy as exemplified by Dr. Levitt in his published research and articles.