Microsoft: Competitive Intelligence Research

Rachael Riggs

National American University

Henley-Putnam

10/2019

Microsoft: Competitive Intelligence Research

What does the Company do?

“Microsoft Corporation is a technology company. The Company develops, licenses, and supports a range of software products, services, and devices. The Company's segments include Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing. The Company's products include operating systems; cross-device productivity applications; server applications; business solution applications; desktop and server management tools; software development tools; video games, and training and certification of computer system integrators and developers. It also designs, manufactures, and sells devices, including personal computers (PCs), tablets, gaming and entertainment consoles, phones, other intelligent devices, and related accessories that integrate with its cloud-based offerings. It offers an array of services, including cloud-based solutions that provide customers with software, services, platforms, and content, and it provides solution support and consulting services.” (Reuters, 2019)

What is the Company's mission?

Microsoft’s Mission Statement:

“to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Microsoft’s corporate mission statement:

1. Empowerment
2. Every person and every organization on the planet
3. To achieve more (Gregory, 2019)

Microsoft’s Vision Statement:

“to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.” (Gregory, 2019)

What is its Strategy?

Microsoft's current business strategy focuses on cloud services and the people that use the cloud. Their primary focus is a cloud-first, mobile-first approach that intends to bring mobility to cloud-based services. (Analytics Insight, 2019)

“Microsoft business strategy can be classified as product differentiation. The Company develops advanced technological products and services and sells them for premium costs. Moreover, Microsoft's business strategy is currently focused on "cloud-first, mobile-first," growth through mergers and acquisitions, and exploring business opportunities related to augmented and virtual reality. Recently, the multinational technology company has also included 'tech intensity' as one of the important pillars of its business strategy” (Company profiles and analysis, 2019) (Dudovskiy, 2019)

Who is on the Executive Team?

• Chief Executive Officer: Satya Nadella
• Executive Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business: Judson Althoff
• Chief Financial Officer: Amy Hood
• President: Brad Smith
• Executive Vice President, Human Resources: Kathleen Hogan
• Chief Digital Officer and Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy, Core Services Engineering and Operations: Kurt DelBen
• Chief Technology Officer: Kevin Scott
• Chief Marketing Officer & Executive Vice President, Marketing Consumer Business: Chris Caposella
• Board Members: John W. Thompson, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Hugh Johnston, Teri List-Stoll, Satya Nadella, Charles Noski, Helmut Panke, Sandra E Peterson, Penny Pritzker, Charles W Scharf, Arne Sorenson, John W Stanton, Padmassree Warrior (Microsoft, 2019)
• General Counsel: Dev Stahlkopf

(McGrane, 2018) (Stahlkopf, 2015-2019)

Who is on the Company's Board of Directors? (List all directors).

(Microsoft Corporation, 2019)

What is the Company’s Revenue According to its Most Recently Filed Annual Report?

125.8 billion (DELOITTE & TOUCHE LLP, 2019)

How Many Employees Work For This Company?

“Microsoft employs approximately 144 thousand people in full-time positions worldwide.” Around 60 percent are employed in the United States. Microsoft has four business units-operations (manufacturing, distribution, product support, and consulting services), research and development, sales and marketing, and general and administration. (Liu, 2019)

What is the Address of its Headquarters?

One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 United States

(Headquarters Office, 2019)

In Which State, and in Which Year, was the Company First Incorporated?

Founded: April 4, 1975, Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. (Headquarters Office, 2019)

Has the Company Filed for any Recent Copyrights or Patents?

I found a lot of information regarding patents, copyrights, and trademarks. I have listed what I thought to be the best of the list. USPTO has an extensive list of all of Microsoft's patents, but I felt the amount was too large even to begin listing them individually. (USPTO, 2019)

• Espacenet Patent Search displays 136 Results for the date range of 10/22/2019-10/26/2019 and Microsoft as the applicant. I have attached that exported list. (Espacenet, 2019)
• Microsoft acquires Mover October 21, 2019 (Teper, 2019)
• Microsoft patent application for a VR floormat (Jeffrey, 2019)
• Microsoft Company Profile-This site lists Microsoft patent grants and applications, Federal court decisions, federal litigation findings, state court decisions, and federal appellate court decisions, (Justia Microsoft Profile, 2019)

Who are its Closest Competitors?

Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, Sap, Okta, Proofpoint (Owler, 2019)

What are people saying about this Company?

According to Microsoft’s Facebook profile page, many people are complaining about the updates making their computers slower as well as causing crashes. The majority of the complaints are regarding the updates and Outlook, which as a Microsoft user, I can relate to the problems in Outlook. Outlook has problems with repeatedly crashing and causing the computer to slow down while in use. Their social media comments also include complaints of Microsoft's customer service. Allegations with customer service relate to long wait times, and surprisingly many of the claims are regarding no answers at all for customer service. (Facebook, 2019)

According to www.consumeraffairs.com, Microsoft has a 4.75-star rating; however, the most recent reviews that are listed are only 1-star ratings. Most of the complaints on this website are regarding Outlook or Customer Service. Outlook complaints here include that of spam, crashes, and overall dislike of the updated version. Customer service complaints are regarding long hours waiting to speak to someone, callbacks that never occur, having to wait days or weeks to have the appropriate person return a customer's call, or customer support not having enough knowledge in the issues the customer addressed. (Consumer Affairs, 2019)

Reviews on Facebook, as well as employees, have shown concern with Microsoft and their work with the government. Employee activists demanded Microsoft CEO end its contracts with ICE. GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft, had CEO Nat Friedman respond. "We recognize that ICE is responsible for both enforcing the U.S. immigration policies with which we passionately disagree, as well as policies that are critical to our society, such as fighting human trafficking." With the current expansion of employee activism taking place throughout the United States, Microsoft likely feels pressure to respond to its employees as well as its customers. Still, as president Brad Smith has stated, it is unreasonable to cancel contracts. His response shows where the Company stands with the issue," Imagine if you're the electric Company and you say, 'hey we don't like what this government agency enacted, so we're going to unplug them. They no longer get electricity.' There's a lot of unforeseen, unintended consequences that can result from this." He goes on to say, "We felt very strongly about it. But if we turn off email, we turn off databases, we'll never get people and families back together. The government won't be able to figure out who belongs with whom.” (Nickelsburg, Why Microsoft won’t unplug government agencies despite opposition to Trump policies, 2019) (Nickelsburg, Microsoft and GitHub workers protest ICE contracts in latest demonstration of employee activism, 2019)

It is problematic that Microsoft has an overall rating at 4.75, yet the most recent reviews on the Company are all 1-star reviews. This evidence indicates that there are current problems that need to be addressed. Possibly providing employees with more training on the products to better serve customers with customer service calls. The updates and the issues associated with Outlook also need to be addressed, and a fix for the problems related to this should be of top concern. Going from 1-star customer reviews to 5-star reviews should be a top priority for this Company right now.

References

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