Microsoft: A case in cross-company transformation Essay

One of the key challenges facing this company is the lack of proper innovation. Most of the products that are produced by the company for the past years are mainly influenced the existing products from their competitors. This is very evident from the fact that the Windows operating system was much influenced by UNIX which had been incorporated in the Apple operating systems. Also, Microsoft office suite was greatly influenced by lotus and also word perfect. The lack of innovation in Microsoft Company does not stop here (Terwiesch & Ulrich, n.d.). It has gone further to produce the product that is similar to those that are on the market. This browser, internet explorer resembled Netscape and recently they have produced a search engine Bing, which is very similar to Google. This implies that there is a continuous strategy that is followed by Microsoft when it keeps on producing imitations of other products with the help of very heavy managers of marketing to help in promoting these par ticular products among the people in the bid to get a very big share in the market. Due to this, it can be easily criticized that despite the fact that million dollars have been used on the search engine Bing, it has not offered anything worthwhile or anything that can be termed as extra better as compared to whatever is being offered by the search engine google however, it is expected that Bing would contain some more features as compared to google. This would mean that Bing will contain a little more features that are not available for google. This is only thin that may favor the low profile Bing and give it an added advantage to Bing and give a better platform to the users. I realize that without getting proper innovation ideas, it will be very difficult for Microsoft to generate the same amount of profit and sustain this amount that they are currently earning backed up by the company’s cash cow which is Microsoft office and also Microsoft windows. Going by the I production of this Microsoft cloud computing, Microsoft has to prepare itself very well for the purpose of the incoming web based computing and not give much attention to their traditional desktop computing. For it to continue with the innovations, it has to be very careful on how to plan the prices that it will be charging for its operating systems and its applications which are usually available free of charge through the internet (Vermesan & Friess, n.d.). It should now continue with the innovations on the basis of its new Bing search engine and make sure that there are some unique features and this will give it enough reasons to the customers as to why they should consider this parti cular search engine. Microsoft should try to analyze this issues keenly and tap resources and extract its full potentials for the purpose of innovation. Addressing this challenges will help Microsoft in the future in a lot of ways. For instance, it will make sure that Microsoft is stable in the market and that the competition that it may receive from other competitors in the market will not derail it (Terwiesch & Ulrich, n.d.). Addressing this challenges will make sure that Microsoft Company gets unique features that stand out in various ways thus rendering the company a unique and different face in the market thus more customers will be drawn and maintained in the company for the purpose of the unique products. Low pricing strategy.If this company adhere to this strategy strictly, it will now be very differentiating candidly among the monopolistic practices that it had adopted previously on the basis of their operating systems. Microsoft company can just continue to operate under this strategy and also provide its regular products but maintain the price at its minimum and this will go a long way helping Microsoft in that it will be very difficult for other new entrants to diffuse into the market (Vermesan & Friess, n.d.) .aided by this low pricing strategy, Microsoft a s accompany will gain a lot of popularity by reaching out very many users. This will see Microsoft gain a very large market share .this will work effectively since the majority of the users will prefer to use the low price products and services as compared to the pricey ones. Another strategy that Microsoft can use is the no-frills strategy. Due to the introduction of the cloud computing idea, the majority of the computing will be online based and this means that the customer loyalty to the web-based applications and online soft wares is foreseen to be low. This means that customers can change their online web-based applications and the software if they are given good quality products at relatively reduced prices (Vermesan & Friess, n.d.). If Microsoft keeps their main focus on the innovations, this idea will be attractive to the customers that are price sensitive and do not care about the product quality. If this strategy is adopted by Microsoft, it can retain its customers while ensuring that their customers get best products with reduced prices. I would strongly recommend these particular initiatives to be implemented in Microsoft I at all they are interested in grabbing the future market and through this, they will remain to be the best company that p rovides the services of their kind. Reference Vermesan, O., & Friess, P. Building the hyperconnected society. Terwiesch, C., & Ulrich, K. Innovation Tournaments.