As of today, it has been confirmed that Microsoft co-founder William Henry Gates III, fondly known as Bill Gates, has switched his cellular device to that of an Android, therefore personally reducing the quantity demanded on his own company’s Windows-powered phones. Although not explicitly stating which model of his competitor’s product range he now uses, Gates still ensures it has “a lot of Microsoft software” on it.

Due to the mass competition in the software and IT industry, the particular needs of customers that Microsoft aimed to meet during the development stages of their phones were already being met by other companies, e.g. Apple and Samsung. This means that the need of customers in having to have a phone because a choice of want as they now have an array of products to choose from to satisfy their ‘need’. But in the context of the technology of phones in the 21st century, because the basic requirement of a phone’s function is met (as they can all proceed to process txt messages and phone calls), this means that in order to create, keep and grow the company’s customer base, you must adhere and entice the ‘wants’ of possible customers to give yourself a unique selling point. To maintain adequate business activity, successful companies may use innovation to produce new products that can create and satisfy new wants for the customers, wants they didn’t know they desired prior to the release of the new product.

To reduce this heavy competition, Microsoft spent $7.2 billion to acquire Nokia in 2014, but despite the effort, Microsoft’s Windows phone operating system still failed to succeed in accounting for more than 1% of the global smartphone sales in the year 2016. From this disconcerting lack of demand and customer interest in their product line of phones and cellular software, the company officially killed off this product range in July of this year. As evidenced, this can be considered to be a direct result of having the company’s fundamental value proposition be weak in terms of having a unique selling point to differentiate from competitors.

In consequence to this, current chief executive Satya Nadella updated the company’s business strategy to fit it’s current consequences and position in the market, as stated by Ian Fogg, analyst at the tech consultancy IHS Markit, “to make Microsoft apps and services widely available on Android and iPhone“. With this new concept, this allows Microsoft to fully facilitate and build on their current strengths, being Microsoft Word, Excel, etc, and additionally, it can allow the alteration of the previous threat of other competitor companies in the IT industry to becoming possible opportunities of key partnerships in the future.

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Recently on the social media platform ‘Reddit’, numerous employees from different franchises of the fast-food giant ‘McDonald’s’ have revealed the inner-secret of their efficient packaging in the post “What did your job want you to hide from customers?” They write explaining that they are trained, or in their words ‘encouraged’, to under-fill their famous fry cartons by first pinching the sides of the paper packaging, then gently sliding the fries into place to create an illusion of having a seemingly full container upon purchase as the fries are propped up and elevated on the indented carton.

From a customer’s perspective, this method of ‘reducing costs’ from the company’s point of view can ironically catalyse customer dissatisfaction and distrust towards the company and their products as we feel victimised in a case of false advertisement in which our expectations of the product are not met. This in turn may lead to a decrease in total sales and resultantly revenue, therefore causing a correlated drop in profits despite the original effort to reduce costs via under-filling their fry cartons (as they can fill more cartons in the future using the saved fries).

But in contrast to the argument regarding customer dissatisfaction, due to the product nature of french-fries typically being an add-on to a full meal combo, the factor of satisfaction may already have been fulfilled as the customer’s incentive for happiness was already met via the meals main dish, which in McDonald’s case is the burger. This means that although there may be a reduction in the quantity of french-fries, the importance of this reduction is minimal as it is seen as an additional benefit in the scope of the customer’s main objective.

But, not only may the customer be affected by this unethical business practice of false advertisement, but on the other side of the cashier, employees may also experience mental and psychological impacts. From working with an business that exercises unethical practices, workers may become unmotivated as they have less pride and drive to work in that particular company. With an unmotivated workforce, this may cause for a drop in productivity and service quality, resulting in a drop in total sales and a decrease of revenue and profit. This makes me question that while the business itself may be practicing unethical behaviour, is making employees follow the company’s unethical methodology and ways another case of unethical behaviour?

So while unethical business practices usually root from companies trying to over-exploit an area within the business, the repercussions of these dishonest behaviours may cause unfavourable and regrettable circumstances that may ultimately cancel out or even overrun any benefits gained from the result of the original unethical business practice.

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