What it needs to stay one of the top 5 valued companies for over 20 years

Thomas Heigl
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read
Top 5 of the most valuable companies over the last 20 years

In times where everybody talks about the digital transformation, the next big network or which startup already works on technology that will change our lives forever it is more important than ever to focus on culture and long-term value as an enterprise.

the club of tech giants rule the world

When tech is all around it doesn’t seems surprising that the tech giant Microsoft is one of the five companies on the planet with the highest market capitalization. After 5 years of broad investments in their cloud platform (Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365) they made a successful turnaround in their business by building a whole new revenue stream besides traditional license sells of Windows and Office.

Looking back 20 years from now in 1997 Windows was dominating the PC market and Office began to grow on the shoulders of the vast distribution of Windows. The only companies with similar value at this time where from complete different industries like General Electrics or Coca Cola.

10 years later only General Electrics and Microsoft remain in this elite club surrounded by oil companies. Microsoft used this decade to grow new product categories beside the PC like Windows Server, Exchange or SQL server as the prime standard in nearly every enterprise in the market.

And today it is the club of tech giants that rule the world. Companies like Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Amazon and Apple are the highest valued enterprises on the planet … and still Microsoft.

Microsoft recollected their roots of being a platform company

With their inspiring CEO Satya Nadella, the most diverse portfolio of products and revenue streams in the market and crucial assets like their cloud platform and their solutions for Artificial Intelligence Microsoft is again best positioned to stay in this league for another decade. There are a ton of reasons for this but most important the company learned to not look in the mirror and see their highly successful past as a given right for the success of the future. Under Satya Nadella they changed their products and their strategy but primarily their culture and they recollected their roots of being a platform company.

Where the big 5 make their money

In the old days, the success of Windows was build on the fact that it enabled millions of developers to build software without taking care of the underlying hardware and operating system. 10 years later it was the enterprise software and tools like Active Directory, Windows Server, Exchange and Sharepoint that enabled enterprises to build their IT environment needed to run their business.

your business only exist because of your customers

2017 Microsoft is doing the same with the cloud but with new rules adopting the dynamics of the market. As a tech company, you no more can afford to be a closed shop and fight your rivals by not letting them on your platform. Azure hosts the biggest variety of solutions from OpenSource software like Linux and Redhat to Oracle, SAP and Docker. Office runs on iOS and Android as first-class citizens and the same time Dynamics pushes on Salesforce in the CRM market Office integrates Salesforce out of the box. The reason for this is as simple as obvious because customer wants Microsoft to do so.

the next decade likely to be ruled by the cloud and AI

So what can we learn from the lasting success of the Redmond tech giant? Success is a bad advisor. With success, you grow and with this growth your organization gets more complicated and sluggish. But even worse - it kills your culture and agility. Different parts of the company live in silos, in a subculture distanced to the market and the customer. Regardless which business you run it can only exist because of your customers. When companies start they are successful because they satisfy the needs of their customers. With growing success those companies tend to already know what their customers want even without talking to the customers and their success gives them right. Until the point where they loose customers or market share and that is the point they realize that they haven’t talked to their customers for a long time and then have to start to learn again what their customers really demands.

challenge your most valuable business

Microsoft sets sail to the next decade likely to be ruled by the cloud and AI and their belly is filled with a culture of growth mindset willing to change and to ask for what’s next and an Armada of platforms and tools and hundreds of thousands of partners to build the technology that others will use to build whatever is needed in the next 10 years.

Find your mission as a company and measure it just in the size of value you bring to YOUR customers.

If you work for a media company not just look after your channel, show or newspaper ask yourself when and how and on which device will your audience be available and open for your content in the future?

If you construct buildings not just look after materials ask yourself how people will work and live in the future?

If you build cars not just look after your manufacturing skills but ask yourself why people will need to be mobile in the next 10 years and what they will need — probably not just a car.

Stay open and challenge your most profitable business — someone else right now is doing exactly this!

Thomas Heigl

Written by

spending my whole career in tech with a favor of the complicated realtionship between user and technology making me a interpreter, diplomat and bridge builder

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