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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