Microsoft started its India journey in 1990 with one office in Hyderabad. Since then, the iconic IT company has changed with time—from being known as the Windows and Office pack to becoming a dominant cloud player. It has steadily increased its presence in India with offices in 11 Indian cities, employing about 16,000 people. However, the company seems to have withdrawn from the public eye.
Digital natives in India identify more with Google, Apple and social media giants than with the overarching lord of the PC. Outlook Business speaks with AnantMaheshwari, President, Microsoft India, to find out if the company has lost out in a crowded Indian tech market or if it no longer wants to “look cool” in public for strategic reasons
I value competitive intensity as it helps drive innovation faster and deeper, keeping the customer at the centre. B2B is the defining feature of Microsoft. A large part of our global business is B2B which may be quite unlike our peer group where B2B is relevant but the focus is the consumer. This is a distinct business model difference.
The “your data is your data” idea becomes more relevant in the B2B context because businesses know that we will not compete with them. We will not be a retail, logistics or media player or have a banking or finance approach. Microsoft brings businesses the widest end-to-end offerings so that they would not need multiple tech providers. We focus on B2B because as Satya [Nadella] says, “Our job is not (to) be cool ourselves but to make sure that others look cool”
The cultural reset that Microsoft underwent about seven years back when Satya took charge was the turning point in driving this philosophy. The Microsoft of today is quite different from the Microsoft of a decade or two ago when we may not have had this level of focus on the B2B business model.
When Satya took charge, he asked his leadership team some questions—“What will happen to the planet if Microsoft disappears? What are we here for and what will we want to be remembered for?” They are existential questions that are also mentioned in his book Hit Refresh. That is what caused the leadership to say that the end-to-end B2B play was our core. It was more to do with the change in the leadership than an external market event.
Microsoft did this reinvention when it was among the top few companies on the planet. Office 365 was a leading franchise in its prior avatar. Satya drove disruption from within to take a significant franchise, disrupt it and take it to the cloud.
An important tech leader once said that one of the biggest innovations that Microsoft drove in its transformation was changing from Office to Office 365. So, it is not the external market events that drove this change. It is a strong, strategic focus on what we want to be.