Long Seen as Tech’s Sleeping Giant, Microsoft’s Stealth Approach Is Starting to Pay Off

As children, we are told that patience is a virtue, that slow and steady wins the race. But in Silicon Valley, where the spirit of "build fast, break fast" guides companies, being a turtle is a sin. Against this background, Microsoft, the wood giant located in the Pacific Northwest forests, took the financial and technological worlds by surprise at the end of November, briefly surpassing Apple as the most valuable company in the Stock Exchange. New York.

With a market capitalization of $ 812.93 billion, it was the first time in almost a decade that the technology company based in Redmond, Washington, was ahead of its rival in Silicon Valley. Apple, which had become the first company to reach the $ 1 trillion mark earlier this year, was not in second place for long. (It was less than a day). However, the reorganization of the classifications was enough to make everyone wonder: How did Microsoft, the father of Clippy and the Zune, become fashionable enough to dismiss, albeit momentarily, the King of Fidelity?

The history of Microsoft has had more ups and downs than its iconic Windows startup screen. Increasing power in the 1990s, before being hit by the dot-com bubble and a major antitrust case, the company missed the mobile boom of the aughts. Meanwhile, its Bing search engine business was dwarfed by Google, while Apple ate as much in the smart phone market as it did in the PC and social networks defined by Facebook. While many discarded Microsoft as nothing more than that nerdy guy in those old posts of Mac against PC, the last few years of updating have taken Microsoft to a completely different company and culture.

Analysts and investors say that 2018 was the best year that Microsoft has had in a decade. During the past year, Microsoft acquired 15 companies, from cloud computing and games to artificial intelligence and open source. His tablets and laptops have received rave reviews. According to Gartner, Microsoft shipped 602,000 PCs in the third quarter of 2018, compared with 591,000 in the third quarter of 2017, and placed them among the top five suppliers in the US. UU (The fourth place went to Apple, which sent 2.02 million during the same period.) The software, including the Azure cloud and the team's workplace chat, has made great strides, with Spiceworks predicting that Teams will capture 41 percent of the market share by 2020. And somehow, in a year full of obstacles and obstacles for the industry for two of its main competitors, Google and Facebook: Microsoft has remained stable.

"Microsoft is incredibly boring," says Piper Jaffray analyst Alex Zukin. "And that's really a big positive for investors, since they're not dealing with iPhone spikes, social spikes, macro or regulatory backwash, they're not dealing with misconduct judgments, they can stay below the radar because the The trends they are playing are trends that last for decades, they are not a flash in the pan. "

Past and present employees say that the company has undergone a radical transformation of culture and mission. It's no coincidence that, as the fifth month marks the fifth anniversary since CEO Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer's Microsoft, Nadella's focus on empathy, a stark contrast to other technology CEOs who are often They see it as emotionless, contactless or non-profit. -It looks like the driving force behind the company's reversal. That focus on empathy applies to everything from the internal mindset to customer relationships and competition. And, yes, even marketing.

According to Microsoft CMO, Chris Capossela, the company spent last year focusing on its "fanatics" to better understand them in all vertical sectors. And that does not always mean that fans have a consumer mentality, but rather duplicate with existing customers instead of trying to take market share away from Microsoft's competitors. He says the company has spent more time listening to its customers this year than in the last decade. With so many different fan bases to monitor, this approach has led to refinements in multiple products. Microsoft has created an adaptive driver for Xbox players with disabilities, for example, and designed the Surface Go with a smaller form factor to accommodate women who ordered a device that fits in a bag.