Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp, is landing in the country on Monday at a time when his company is “streamlining” its troubled global smartphone hardware business even as the growth of India’s smartphone business is accelerating.
Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO, Greyhound Research, believes that while Nadella “has done exceptionally well to dream up a new and improved Microsoft and steer the company strategy accordingly, the company’s ability to actualise this on the ground still remains to be largely work-in-progress and in many ways a distant dream. Albeit this applies to nearly all global markets, it is particularly true for India where the company is up against more aggressive competition like AWS, Google, SAP, Oracle, Ramco among others,” he added.
According to Gogia, despite Microsoft building huge data centres, a Greyhound Research study showed that “more than 70% developers in the Asia-Pacific including Japan (APJ) region continue to focus their investments on Amazon Web Services that allows them a host of opportunities including participating in the swelling ecosystem to help in monetization”.
Also, Microsoft’s efforts to offer Windows 10 as a free upgrade has received “a lukewarm reception”, Gogia said.
Moreover, Gogia has a different take on why Microsoft is actively collaborating with its former opponents.
He argues that “despite Microsoft’s efforts to make architectural changes to their customer relationship management (CRM) and ERP products to make them better suited for a MobileFirst, CloudFirst era, not much progress has been made. This puts Microsoft miles behind its ace competition Oracle and SAP who are aggressively investing muscle to either make code-level changes to their products or acquire smaller companies to make their suite offerings more comprehensive. This inability to compete is also evident in some of the recently made announcements to partner with Salesforce.com and SAP.”
Source: Live Mint