Current and Past Marketing Strategies of Microsoft

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction:

Microsoft Corporation Overview:

Marketing Strategies Overview:

Microsoft’s Past and Current Marketing Strategies:

References

References

Abstract

In today’s hyper-competitive world, organizations must fight tooth and nail to become successful in an industry, and work even harder to maintain that success. Each component of an organization’s business must be as efficient and effective as possible, in order to create sustainable competitive advantages. This includes marketing strategies.

Marketing strategies must be developed and implemented to utilize an organization’s strength to take advantage of the opportunities the company has identified, while protecting it from any outside threats. Microsoft Corporation has been extremely successful for doing just that. This paper will give a brief overview of Microsoft Corporation, a discussion of marketing strategies in general, and finally what strategies Microsoft has used in the past and the present to reach the pinnacle of their industry.

Current and Past Marketing Strategies of Microsoft

Introduction

In today’s hyper-competitive world, organizations must fight tooth and nail to become successful in an industry, and work even harder to maintain that success. Each component of an organization’s business must be as efficient and effective as possible, in order to create sustainable competitive advantages. This includes marketing strategies.

Marketing strategies must be developed and implemented to utilize an organization’s strength to take advantage of the opportunities the company has identified, while protecting it from any outside threats. Microsoft Corporation has been extremely successful for doing just that. This paper will give a brief overview of Microsoft Corporation, a discussion of marketing strategies in general, and finally what strategies Microsoft has used in the past and the present to reach the pinnacle of their industry.

Microsoft Corporation Overview

Microsoft is the #1 software company in the world. They have created a variety of products and services, most notably their Windows operating system and their Office software suite. While these products serve as the cornerstone of their business, Microsoft also has entries in the video game consoles, interactive television, enterprise software, computer peripherals, software development tools, and Internet access service industries (Shafer, 2004b).

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft (originally Micro-soft) in 1975, to sell their version of the programming language BASIC. Gates and Allen had written the language for Altair. The company grew “by modifying BASIC for other computers” (Shagfer, 2004a) and four years later, the company moved from the hotel room it had started in in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Gates hometown of Seattle, Washington.

In 1980, IBM chose Microsoft to develop the operating systems for their new line of personal computers. Gates purchased QDOS (quick and dirty operating system) for $50,000 from a local Seattle programmer, renamed it Microsoft’s Disk Operating System (MS-DOS), and the revolution began. By the mid-1980s, Microsoft had developed Windows, their graphic-based version of MS-DOS to compete with the Apple Macintosh operating system. In 1993, Microsoft introduced Windows NT as their entry in the mainframe and large networks segment of the industry, competing with UNIX (Shafer, 2004a).

Along with their phenomenal success, Microsoft garnered antitrust concerns from the government and its competitors. Monopoly charges were presented from both inside the industry and outside. And, because of antitrust concerns, Microsoft was unable to complete their $1.5 billion acquisition of Intuit, a personal finance software developer. And, in 1998, the US Justice Department, with the backing of 18 states, filed antitrust charges against Microsoft. They claimed that Microsoft was smothering Internet browser competition, limiting consumer choice in the industry segment (Shafer, 2004a).

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