Strategic Moves in Technology

Microsoft strategic decision making process is puzzling at best. Once upon a time Microsoft woke to find out that the internet train had left the station when they didn't notice. After Bill Gates "woke up" the troops, Microsoft responded with the Internet Explorer browser and the launched the "internet friendly" version of Microsoft Office. Fast forward to 2009. After capturing over 95% of the browser market, Microsoft market share has shrunk to approximately two-thirds. Meanwhile Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome keep gaining market share consistently each quarter. Microsoft has not been totally asleep as it launches the Bing search tool and signs a deal with Yahoo. So far Bing has made a dent, although it is a small dent in the overall search market. For it's part, Google has launched Google Doc's which are OK but not great...yet. However, they could still prove to be a viable thorn-in-the-side low cost alternative to Microsoft Office. Although it can be said Microsoft has some moves of its own to be aggressive in the internet security space as it has recently launched a free version of Microsoft Security Essentials, which is enough to ruffle the feathers of McAfee and Symantec.

When we look at Google Wave, a comprehensive communication too, which has previewed this year, we see a very innovative product which is well regarded by the industry with a lot of potential. When we look at Microsoft's equivalent.....well lets just say that Microsoft is still are trying to figure out how Google came up with this product.

Two big growth areas on the horizon seem to be mobile communicating/computing and cloud computing. For cloud computing Microsoft has been making moves to fully participate, on mobile computing, not so much. Microsoft has been investing heavily in software for cloud computing and in building datacenter hubs containing huge compute and storage infrastructure. Google is heavily investing in this space as well as virtually all of the other technology industry heavy weights. Microsoft's effort to secure a place in the mobileOS market seem half-hearted at best. For its part, Google Android is beginning to carve out a substantial part of the mobile OS marketplace. According to Gartner, Google Android is projected to have 14.5 percent of the mobile OS marketplace by 2012. The Gartner 2012 projection will put Symbian in first place with 39 percent share , with Android in the 2nd place and iPhone OS in 3^rd. The the projections seem to indicate that Windows Mobile from Microsoft will be most likely struggling to stay in the game by 2012. Stay tuned as the giant chess game continues.