Tech race: Microsoft’s slow-and-steady comeback
Microsoft briefly passed Apple this week to become, once again, the world’s most valuable technology company, said Shira Ovide in Bloomberg.com. Don’t be surprised. In the past five years, no major tech firm “has operated as effectively both technologically and financially.” What’s happened at Microsoft—now neck-and-neck with Apple at a total value of just over $800 billion—isn’t a revolution. The company has gone back to what it does best and become “even more Microsoft-y, doubling down on its products for businesses.” It has backed away from failed consumer ventures such as the Windows smartphone, and focused instead on its Office bundle, database software, corporate sales software, and cloud-computing business. Microsoft has sidestepped the data and privacy crises that have afflicted Google and Facebook. It’s not tied to a flatlining phone business like Apple, and it has steered clear of most of the U.S.-China storm winds. Thank Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, for the comeback. He’s proven himself the best big-company chief executive of recent years. “Microsoft is the tortoise in a technology world obsessed with hares. We know how that race turned out.”
When Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer in 2014, Microsoft “was in the midst of an identity crisis,” said Justin Bariso in Inc .com. The company had become lethargic and acted as if its best days were already behind it. Nadella believed that in a race be- tween a“learn-it-all” and a “know-it-all,” the learn-it-all would triumph, and he made Microsoft a “learn-it-all” culture again. Microsoft expanded into promising areas, said Emmie Martin in CNBC.com, and showed a “willingness to embrace new technology.” It bought the job-networking site LinkedIn in 2016, and two years later snapped up GitHub, a code-sharing site that inspires fierce devotion in programmers, a key audience for Microsoft since its early days.
In its core businesses, Microsoft is executing perfectly, said Samuel Axon in ArsTechnica.com. Its corporate cloud-computing services—Azure, for big data applications, and Office 365—are thriving. And don’t count out its consumer ventures. Microsoft’s game platform, Xbox, is the second-bestselling in the world, after Sony’s PlayStation, and new deals with video game studios and a powerful new game-streaming strategy “make for an advantage Sony likely won’t be able to match.” Microsoft is betting on the future, too, with a massive investment in artificial intelligence, said Chris Neiger in MotleyFool.com. Nadella has called AI—technology that lets computers learn from experience, useful in everything from self-driving cars to streaming video—“the defining technology of our time.” The company now has a stunning 8,000 engineers and computer scientists working on AI. “As demand for AI services grows, Microsoft should be able to take further advantage.”