The rise, fall and rise of Microsoft
Microsoft has been a strong entity in the tech industry for over 4 decades. Yes, it’s been that long. Microsoft today is a company on the rise, but if you looked at it 10 years ago, they had an image of stagnation and decline.When we think of Microsoft we associate it with an all time member of top 10 richest people in the world, Bill Gates. And for the most part of the company’s existence, Bill Gates was at the helm of the company running things according to his vision. After his departure, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s 30th employee ever took over the reigns in 2000 after being a part of the company since 1980. Steve stepped down as the CEO of the company in 2014 when Satya Nadella took over his place. Today, Microsoft is at the top of the pyramid being the only country as of now to be worth over a trillion dollars in net worth as per the Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report.
After Steve took over the reigns of Microsoft, there was a shift in the philosophy and the way things were run at the company. Bill Gates was a technical guy, but Steve comes from a business background. He believed that Microsoft’s success was a result of the business side of things and hence he wanted to restructure the framework of the company and its leadership around the business people instead of the tech people. He knew that Windows was their biggest cash cow and hence he wanted to push it as much as he could. And hence the biggest move in his tenure was to spread Windows in the mobile market, first through Windows Mobile and then by Windows Phone. Some of you might be wondering what is Windows Mobile and how is it different from Windows Phone, for all of you, Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and Pocket PCs. Windows Phone on the other hand is a family of discontinued mobile operating systems which was developed by Microsoft as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Okay, I know I am just throwing in new words with every sentence, so, Zune, it is a discontinued media management software for Microsoft Windows that functions as a full media player application with a library, an interface to the Zune Marketplace, and as a media streaming server. As we all know Windows OS wasn’t exactly a hit in the smartphone market and this was probably Steve’s biggest failure in his time as the CEO. The reason for its failure was quite simple, it was too late to the game. Android and iOS had already grasped a strong hold of the market and a lack of app support made things worse for Microsoft. Taking a look at Microsoft’s stock price during his tenure, you could see a lost decade for Microsoft. He had ambitions of enterprising Microsoft’s business and strongly believed that open source is a cancer to a company’s growth. This is ironic because today Microsoft is thriving as a result of open source.
In 2014, Satya Nadella took over the company as the successor to Steve Ballmer. As soon as Ballmer announced his resignation, the stock price of Microsoft jumped 7%, telling us how badly the investors wanted Ballmer to leave. After Nadella took over Microsoft observed a steady growth. Satya had been in the company since 1998, but in 2008 when Steve announced the enterprise division of the company, he appointed Satya Nadella to be the Executive Vice President of the said division. Steve had already started the process of enterprising the company, unfortunately, the failure of Windows Phone and other setbacks resulted into Steve’s departure. But who better to take over the reigns than the one who had been chosen to work on the higher ranks of the enterprising project. Hence, Nadella was the perfect bet for them. Nadella might have been lucky to have picked up the reigns of the company which was already on a path to being more enterprise focused, which was essentially the way to go for them. Ballmer had started a process which he couldn’t survive to reap the fruits of. Seeing the growth of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft knew that cloud computing is the way to go.
Microsoft Azure is their cloud computing service which they created for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers.
And as soon as Nadella took over, the company started to see a rise in their stock prices after 10 years of stagnation. Azure was growing rapidly under Nadella’s supervision. Azure was actually a product developed under Ballmer’s reign, but it wasn’t yet time for it to flourish until Nadella started running things. What Nadella is being credited for is actually something that was set in motion by the former leader, Steve Ballmer. Microsoft’s stock might’ve shown that the company was not doing well under Ballmer but the company’s revenue had actually tripled under his reign. What Nadella managed to do was give the company a philosophical reincarnation, which might not seem like much but is actually as important as its economic growth. When Nadella took over, Microsoft was suffering from decades of bad reputation which was a result of a multitude of missteps like anti-competitive behaviour and suppression of open source development. When Nadella took over, Microsoft made a complete u-turn on its existing philosophy. And this helped Microsoft to build an image that is not despised by the public and especially by their investors. Nadella also brought Office to iOS and soon after to Android, because he believed that it is better for a company to make more friends than enemies. This attitude of productive collaboration helped him lead Microsoft to where it is today. The very top of the list of most valuable companies in the world. And hence I can say this with full confidence, that Satya Nadella, one of our own, has made Microsoft proud. Not just Microsoft, he has made Bill Gates proud of what he started. And has of course won our hearts along the way.
What the future holds for Microsoft is something we will have to wait and watch. As of now Microsoft is top leader in the world of technology and from how they are going, it seems like they plan to be there a while.
