How do you avoid losing face from a volte-face? I am not sure you can ask Steve Ballmer, whose major contribution as chief executive of Microsoft so far seems to be to release an operating system, admit it is wrong, and then announce a planned ‘enhancement’ to remove much of the ‘new’.
Of course that is not entirely fair because many commentators would note that he had successfully altered (improved) the culture at Microsoft and refocused the business. That he might have miscalculated with his first major release should not, however, justify him being fired. But there are lessons to be learnt from this debacle and, also, important parallels that should not in this case be drawn.
I wrote about Microsoft and the reason it is an attractive stock (at the right price) a while ago. Unfortunately, it seems, no one at Microsoft read that article since the fundamental reasons underpinning its value – its broad corporate client base – were seemingly overlooked with the release of Windows 8. Rather than building an enterprise-quality, efficient and clean operating system, Microsoft instead offered a slightly more modern-looking version of Apple’s iOS – tiles, colours and everything you need to instantly see your friends’ Facebook status or the weather. But not so great for those of us who spend our lives in spreadsheets, Datastream and other such programs. Indeed, just finding a program got a whole lot harder than it used to be with the seeming disappearance of the ‘Start’ button. For a company that must have spent many millions of dollars hyping that ‘Start’ button with Windows 95 (I feel old remembering back to then) it seems quite amazing that it would make searching for the ‘Start’ button now feel like a game of Where’s Wally.
So what did Microsoft do wrong? Ultimately, it made the same error any middle-aged father seems to make when trying to appear trendy to his children – it tried to steal some of Apple’s ‘cool’ thunder by building a consumer-friendly and, indeed aesthetically pleasing, operating system.
But while Apple has carefully maintained segregation between iOS (tablet/phone) and OS X (desktop operating system), Microsoft effectively combined them into a riot of colour that was hardly suited to the average business user who values practicality over form.
While at home I might love the beauty in the design of an Apple computer’s exterior; at work I do not care that I have a large and ugly box under my desk. Likewise, I do not care whether my operating system is elegant or a ‘plain Jane’. What I want is something that works and in which I can find what I want quickly and with as little effort as possible. Workplace software upgrades are time-consuming and frustrating enough for users, without the added hair tearing and exasperation that comes when all your favourite, hard-learned and-well used functions moving to different places, or worse seeming to have disappeared all together. By offering an operating system which users have to, in effect, learn from scratch, Microsoft runs the risk of alienating its installed long-term customer base and potentially opening the door to its competitors to gain clients, so damaging one of the key underpinnings for any investment case for the company.
Now the technology-savvy of you might suggest that Apple will eventually consolidate its operating systems and that its slowness in so doing reflects more the different underlying computer architecture than a desire to segregate on the basis of different customer requirements. But I think Apple has been clever here while Microsoft has not: different things appeal to different markets, and segregating clients by their preferences and providing them with different products and services is essential for many business models. Just as airlines and trains have different classes of travel for those who will pay a premium for comfort and space even though they will get there at the same time, business users want (and will probably pay more for) a simpler technology experience with fewer bells and whistles and more simple functionality and, above all, clarity alongside consistency with what they have been used to.
So what conclusion am I drawing: simple – do not forget your core client base, and particularly the one that gives you a steady and long-term revenue stream. Fads and fashions are all well and good but, as I have said before, sometimes boring is best. A Windows 8 that looked the same as Windows 7 but with better security and reliability would have curried favour with the business market which Microsoft continues to dominate. And a consumer-friendly (and perhaps cheaper) version with beauty over brains might also have worked. But treating two very different markets as the same simply does not work. It seems unlikely that a company such as Unilever would expect to sell both Ben & Jerry’s and Slim-Fast to the same customer base – and Microsoft should not expect to succeed with such a strategy.
James Bateman is head of multi-manager and multi-asset portfolio management for Fidelity Worldwide Investment
