Microsoft's new marketing strategy

Microsoft is a giant company with a unique history. It has dominated the software industry for the past 25 years, but it’s finally starting to feel the pressure of a sluggish market and more intense competition. Considering trends in today’s desktop market, I’m going to make some predictions about what Microsoft is going to sell at its new stores.

The competition: iPods, Netbooks, and Linux

Microsoft was caught completely off guard by a large number of technological innovations in the last 10 years and has been playing catch up ever since. The iPod is a good example, but I think that the XO laptop and the subsequent explosion of net books that followed has made Microsoft reconsider its long-term strategy. These new machines have really taken a sizable portion of the market and with many running Linux based software. This is obviously a big deal to Microsoft, so much so that they’re trying to find a way to handle the problem that doesn’t involve empty patent threats.

Retail Markets

It’s my opinion that Apple’s success in the retail market has given Microsoft the idea that doing the same thing will help them sell more products. The key question here is what kind of products will they be selling at their new stores?

Microsoft’s hardware offerings: Xbox, Zune, keyboards and mice.

It seems highly likely to me that Microsoft will release it’s own net book to sell along side the Xbox 360 and Zune player. I believe that this net book will likely be loaded with an XP variant. It also seems increasingly more likely, that they will release their own iPhone clone. My reasoning for this is that there really isn’t any reason you would want to go to a Microsoft store to shop for a computer, unless they had something the competition didn’t. I really can’t see them having a huge selection of computers, and if they did, I don’t think it would be successful. I’m guessing they will be following Apple’s lead closely and be concentrating more and more on hardware products in the future.

2 thoughts on “Microsoft's new marketing strategy

  1. Agree with you 100%. Even a year later, this argument stands true. Microsoft is also trying to catchup in the browser area (we would still have IE6 if it were not for Firefox putting the heat on MS), search (Bing is the nth iteration of Microsofts strategy to dominate the search space) and maps (which I use about 15% of the time). They have a tendency to rush things to market and thus experience unbelievable hardware failure rates (xbox 360) or just poor design (original Zune, Vista, etc..).

    I think MS has done a lot for the industry but they have grown almost too big and they are fighting to maintain their supremacy in all areas which will be their undoing. They need to pick a few areas, innovate and dominate once again.

    I used to be a developer on their .Net platform but they are changing things too much with every release and forcing the developers to invest massive amounts of time into each release which should not be the case. It’s like they have someone new at the wheel for every release so they keep going in different directions. They need a 10-15 year plan instead of a 2 year one.

  2. Can’t believe it’s been a year already and I still haven’t been to a Microsoft store!

    Microsoft has definitely done a lot for the computer industry in general. Heck they’ve even given me a bunch of free software and hardware. At any rate I really don’t know what to think of Microsoft or there game plan, but yes they do need to focus in a few areas and stop branching out all over the place. Only time will tell, but to me a Microsoft just doesn’t make sense.

    I don’t know much about the whole .Net development scene, but that’s too bad they are mixing things up so much with each new release.

    Thanks for reading!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *