Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

3 Tenets: Navigating change for growth

As consumerism further evolves, companies need to look at different ways to innovate and stay relevant

Gone are days when superior quality of product or being the best of breed was a sufficient barrier to entry and protect market leader positions. Nowadays, there is increased reliance on the softer aspects of business such as building brand awareness/ brand loyalty through marketing communications strategies, establishing strategic partnerships, keeping product features fresh, new and relevant; all while leveraging innovative platforms such as social media.

In these modern times of technology, rapid gratification and labour market mobility, organisational change is a way of life. This change could mean any number of things from shifting organisational culture, to operational processes to strategic directions. One needs to learn to expect it, and plan for it. Microsoft has created a plethora of great examples for dwindling companies that did not prepare for change. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect were all at the top of their game when a little known company called Microsoft entered the market with Windows/Office. These companies underestimated the competitive landscape and now they are struggling relics of the information age. Much as this is true for large businesses, it is also true for small businesses as information savvy consumers will now gravitate towards competitors who are able to offer the best value for money and/or a differentiated buying experience. In order to protect your financial bottom-line, you need to be able to understand the rhythm of your market, separate out the urgent from the important, and build in enough flexibility into your system to be able to change with market needs.

360° Vision
I love the quote, “Without a destination, it is difficult to know which road to take.” When you know what to change, putting the ball in motion becomes the easier part. Some of your change will be a result of internal growing pains e.g. evolution of your product and story, and some of it will have to be driven by your competitors. There has been an explosion in small business growth as, in addition to the traditional groups, several laid off workers have struck out on their own. It is becoming a busy, and noisy, marketplace. With consumer knowledge at an incline, it is imperative to understand competitive positioning so that you can react and change direction when needed. Monitoring competitors’ pricing, product features, sales strategies and anticipated strategic directions are key in prioritising areas of change.

Empowered Organisation
If there is one thing you need to instill in your organisation’s work habit, it is the ability to separate the urgent from the important. Business execution and putting out daily fires is necessary but not sufficient. In doing so, you are probably inhibiting your growth as it becomes difficult to anticipate opportunities, let alone prepare for it. If need be, enable the appropriate employees to take on the lower priority tasks while you shepherd the strategic direction for your company. This means establishing well-understood processes that give employees some degree of freedom to make responsible decisions. Their solution may not be your first pick, but ask yourself, ‘does it get the work done?’ And if so, move on. This sense of ownership of problems will bring efficiency of epic proportions, and will help build a workforce ready to react.
 

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Yahoo! to Boohoo!

Yahoo! had a chance to grow & survive. It ‘had’!

So what’s the biggest mistake that Yahoo! ever made? Well, allow us to rephrase that... what are the biggest mistakes made by Terry Semel and his successor Jerry Yang? Allow us to reflect back on what happened in 2001. That year, Yahoo’s chief, Terry Semel met the co-founders & co-Presidents of Google – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – to discuss the acquisition of Google. Semel offered them much lower than the $5 billion, that the co-founders asked for. As a justification, Semel stated that “no one could truly value Google,” and that there was “no way he would shell out such a hefty amount” for the search-engine start-up. Eight years later, Google commands a market value of $121.1 billion, while Yahoo!, a lamentable $19 billion! Then there was Semel’s successor, Jerry Yang, who in 2007 brushed aside Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! for a mind-blowing $46 billion.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

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Thursday, December 06, 2012

You’d do ‘Neutron’ Jack proud!

Jobs cuts, during recession become a ‘necessary’ evil; and this is the only quick solution for companies...

The thrice-marrried, former GE CEO, Jack Welch could never find another reason to be happier. Excuse us here; we’re not talking about Jack becoming a father again (he has already celebrated 73 years glorious years on the planet for Chrissake!); but about others preaching the layoff culture at GE, many years after he quit GE (strict reference to his act of firing about 120,000 ‘bottom 10%’ employees). And it is his two ‘action-packed’ decades long terrific tenure at GE that on one hand deserves all the credit for a tub-thumping appreciation of 4,100% in GE’s market value (making it the most valuable company by 2001!) and on the other, seems to have created a model of leadership that fellow-American MNCs and those from the Eurozone & First World have begun to emulate. Yes, we’re talking about the lay-off announcements that were made in the past week; there was GM confirming 2,000 cuts, Caterpillar – 12,000; Pfizer – 19,500; Sprint-Nextel – 8,000; Intel– 6,000; Philips – 6,000; Corus – 5,500; Corning Inc. – 3,500; ING – 7,000; Texas Instruments – 3,500; Home Depot – 7,000; Microsoft – 5,500; Hitachi – 27,000; Ford – 1,200, UAL – 1,000… and the list continues.

Reacting to these announcements, an emotional US President, Barack Obama said, “These are not just numbers on a page... these are working men & women whose families have been disrupted and whose dreams have been put on hold…” Indeed, Obama puts his emotions in good light here, but are not these actions mere rampages sans rationale?

We need to question the very ‘fundamental necessity’ of job-cuts, especially with unemployment rates having grown meteorically from 4.7% in December 2007 to 7.2% in December (a 15-year high!) as per a January 2009 report by IHS Global Insight The report further suggests how during just the last four months, 2 million jobs were slashed – representing 80% of total cut during the current downturn. Worst, the report proves how, we are “just halfway to the total job loss anticipated during this cycle,” thereby forecasting the unemployment rate to rise above 9% by early-2010 (highest in 30 years). Surely, we are on the verge of making some ‘bitterly forgettable’ history! 
 
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

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Friday, November 09, 2012

Microsoft should takeover Yahoo!!!

Over the past few days, the internet search turf has been heating up. And the evolving dynamics are changing at such a fast pace that it is becoming increasingly difficult for analysts to predict the final outcome. The recent bid by Microsoft on Yahoo would not have come as a surprise to anyone as for long it had been talked about. It all started on the 1st of February, when Microsoft, the software giant, made a staggering $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo (at $31 per share – a 61% premium on Yahoo’s previous week’s closing price).

For long, Microsoft, a compulsive monopolist in the software market, has been feeling very uncomfortable with Google’s growing dominance in the internet space. It is no secret that in the internet space, Google had been a clear market leader cornering almost 60% of the web searches on the internet, followed by Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN Live at a distant 20% and 7% respectively. This enviable position that Google has been commanding has given the company an indisputable control over the advertisement market. And much to Microsoft’s displeasure, Google has been using its monopoly position in controlling the online advertisement revenues to such an extent that it alone manages to corner almost 42% of the ad dollars, which Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL put together earn. And that’s not all, Google’s online ad revenues have been growing almost at 30% annually! Such is the growing dominance of Google that Microsoft for long had become a follower in this virtual duopoly market. So much so that since 2004, for every acquisition that Google did, Microsoft did another.

So as Google bought Marratech, YouTube, Android, Orkut and the likes, Microsoft followed it up with Unified Communications, Soapbox, MessageCast Inc., Facebook respectively. But that’s not all, Google had been giving sleepless nights hitting into Microsoft’s bread and butter software business by offering free solutions. Consecutively, for long, Microsoft had been eyeing an opportunity to strengthen its own position; and what better than this opportunity to bid for Yahoo, and that too exactly when Yahoo had shown disappointing results in January when its share prices fell to a four year low, wherein the company announced its plan to retrench 7% of its workforce.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Intel inside: For how long?

Could technology be weakening the ability of our minds to learn?

Movies like Inception are setting the box-office cash-registers ringing for their portrayal of how technology can be used to invade our dreams. At the same time, there is a real-world debate on how the constant presence of technology is weakening the ability of our minds to learn. The American technology expert and author, Nicholas Carr recently mentioned that Google may be responsible for us “losing our ability to engage in more attentive ways of thinking.” This isn’t the first time that Carr has raised this question, whose 2004 book, Does IT Matter?, raised a furore among top executives from HP, Microsoft and others. In 2008, he wrote an article titled – Is Google Making Us Stoopid? – where he highlighted that the Internet may have adverse effects on our minds’ capacity for concentration. In the same vein was his recent interview, where he proposed that Google should make its products tougher to use in order to give our brains some exercise. His stand contradicts Google’s philosophy, which is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

Carr’s discontent is not with Google alone; he has expressed his worry about the ease with which we have information available. Prolonged and unchecked Internet usage could cause Attention Deficit Disorder, Internet addiction, or even social isolation. We are also getting used to reading information in snippets from various sites instead of spending time on a single web page. Prof. Maryanne Wolf at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, has expressed her concern over the effect technology could have on the reading abilities of the coming generation. “The problem of a less potentiated reading brain becomes urgent in the discussion about technology. We human beings are not just the product of what we read, but how we read. The essential question is: how well will we preserve the critical capacities of the present expert reading brain as we move to the digital reading brain of the next generation?” said Wolf.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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