Analysis Of E-business, Microsoft’s Strategy, Intranet Implementation, And Progressive Model

Part 1: E-business Strategies

The above statement mentioned by David Bowen could have developed a sense of doubt among the readers of the article in that time. However, in the present there is no doubt that it is time that E is dropped from E-business and referring to the article in Financial Times illustrations can be provided to defend the above statement. Globalization has changed the perspective of all the global organization and e-commerce has become an integral part of the business model (Bowen, 2012). Globalization has provided access to consumers and organization in such a level and there is free two-way communication between them.

Moreover, it has become essential for all the global organization to incorporate ecommerce in to their respective strategies so that they can maintain their long-term sustainability and competitive advantage in the market. on the other hand, Amazon effect is another big reason which has led to the dawn of a new age in global business market.  The disruption and evolution of the retail industry is due to the strategies implemented by Amazon. The impact of online retailing strategies taken by Amazon has affected all the organizations and thus, in order to compete in that market various companies are using similar strategies to improve their market and maintain their long-term sustainability in the market (“The Amazon Effect” and the Future of Retail Competition | Millennial Marketing, 2017). Thus, the companies that were totally dependent on their physical stores had to make changes their business strategy. Thus, Amazon started using hybrid models in E- commerce and many companies followed them, which affected the overall business mindset.

Digital marketing is the new era and it is seen that most of the companies are making use of the digital marketing to improve their penetration in the market. It has been seen that improvement in the online retail business has affected the physical stores of all the organization and is directly proportional to it. The global market trends are changing rapidly and digital has taken over majority of the market where the organizations are making sue of the social media for improving the online business segment (George Wynn, Turner & Lau, 2013). Moreover, the availability of online media has increased significantly and can be accessed by majority of the population form different parts of the world. Thus, online media has been able to provide transparency to the consumers and companies excelling in online retailing have gained competitive advantage in the market. Thus, dude to the change in the market trends, demand of online business has increased significantly and most of the organizations are more focused on new forms of marketing than on the conventional media. Moreover, due to Amazon effect, customer experience management has become one of the crucial aspects of gaining competitive advantage in the market.

Part 2: Strengths and Weaknesses of Microsoft’s Strategy

Thus, from the above facts it can be stated that E- commerce should be labelled as commerce as it is not a separate wing of the organization business and has become the essential part of gaining competitive advantage in the market. Thus, instead of addressing it as e-commerce, digital marketing is the name that has been adopted. Thus, in the present scenario there is no distinction between commerce and e-commerce. Therefore, digital marketing is the aspect, which deals with development of strategies in improving business in online medium.

Table 1

(Source: created by author)

The organizational brand is well known over the world due to its presence in 100 countries. Microsoft is one of the market leaders in providing hardware and software solutions, products and various other services all over the world. Thus, the main focus of the organization has been in the field of manufacturing, developing, marketing, licensing and providing support to software products (Microsoft – Official Home Page, 2017). Microsoft has high capital adequacy, which enables them to spent huge amount of capital on research and development. Moreover, it has made collaborations with top universities in different parts of the world to advances in the field of computer science. The organization consists of diversified portfolio that consists of software products, hardware products and other services. Microsoft caters to different segments in the market and provides different products for different market segments. In order to leverage the operational performance, the organization maintains a strong and efficient marketing and distribution system. There are mainly three channels used by the organization, OEMs (Original Equipment manufacturers), resellers and distributors in the physical medium and virtual stores at the online platform. Moreover, the operating system provided by the company is wide sued and is the most popular and efficient operating system in the past decades.

Microsoft has been involved in lot of legal proceedings related to manufacture, product design, litigations to contracts, performance liability, intellectual property rights and employment issues. Thus, this has become an unwanted liability for the organization, which affects the overall reputation of the brand. Moreover, in most of the developing countries availability of fake software is easy. Thus, much of the revenue generation streams of the organization are hampered due to large of consumers are using trial version of the products and operating systems. Microsoft has not been able to mitigate this problem and still facing issues in this context ((Microsoft – Official Home Page, 2017). Even though the organization has kept on upgrading their products, it has been seen that there is lack in the availability of new feature form the bottom ups. Thus, a large number of consumers are not happy with the operating systems provide by the organization and Apple has gained competitive advantage in this respect. Thus, the organization is lacking in innovation in that respect and they are losing their competitive advantage to rival organizations.

Part 2.1: Strategic Excellence

The organization has been using Entry Strategy Performance Model, which has three major aspects; one is the time of entry, second is the area of entry and third is magnitude of investment. Thus, depending upon the type of the products, Microsoft has made late entry in to various markets (Christiansen, 2014). The best example is the launch of Xbox where Microsoft has been able to gain competitive advantage, as they were able to reduce the length of the product life cycle of that particular product. This means that reducing the PLC of the product enables to increase the amount of sales in that short span of time.

Nolan stage hypothesis is used to identify the evolution of information technology, organizational and managerial strategies. There are four stages in the hypothesis mentioned by Nolan and consist of early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Moreover, the different stages explained by Nolan are initiation, control, contagion and integration. These stages can be amalgamated to form an integrated model for intranet implementation (Scott, 2014). Thus, these four phases will be used for implementing an intranet model in to the organizational setting. The initiation stage will introduce the technology in to the organizational setting, contagion stage will identify the potential for implementing the software in to the organization, intranet is a communication medium and its unwanted growth is controlled in the third stage. The fourth stage includes integration of the software in to the business model so that operational efficiency can be achieved. The initiation stage will provide information about the technology and the benefits associated it. Moreover, it will provide idea of how the implementation will be carried out. The contagion stage will try to gain consumers for the medium and identify the users. Thus, this stage will attempt to attract the potential users of intranet. Thus, the intranet will comprise of effective information so large of users get attracted to it. The control stage will monitor the content on the intranet in order to make changes to the quality of data available. Thus, strategy is developed in this stage so that the intranet server can be managed in a better way. Integration stage will provide the end result of the overall process and will be incorporated in to the organization as it stands out as an separate and important entity. Thus, in this stage advanced technology will be sued for recording and keeping tarck of the overall process.

Part 2.2: Weaknesses in Respect to Competitors

There are mainly three stages to progressive model and they are philosophy, process and innovation. The philosophy will analyze the problem, process will develop the essential model needed and innovation will consist of components that will provide better operational model (Basile & Faraci, 2015). Innovation will include component model, function template, progression via options and model deployment. The main purpose of the progressive model is maximization of the value of the industrial system by identifying the value drivers and the system levers. The first step will systemize, analyze and componentized the overall process, which means that it will analyze the current problems in to small components. The second step includes development of logic, which identify the behaviour of the system so that control system can be developed. Thus, this step will define the variables, objectives and the constraints that are attached to this industrial system. Thus, all the criteria will have to be identified, as the system cannot be judged based on single criteria. The next step is identification of the best possible solution; the systems generally consist of complex problems so the progressive algorithm will be to be identified to mitigate the issue. The next step is delivery and adjustment where the new system will be implemented to identify the gap in the developed model. Thus, after identification of the gaps the model will be rectified and consist of verification and validation.  The final step is reviewing of the model and adapting the model in to the industrial system. The progressive model will change, adapt in accordance to the system and it will not optimize the behaviour of the system.

References:

“The Amazon Effect” and the Future of Retail Competition | Millennial Marketing. (2017). Millennial Marketing. Retrieved 2 December 2017, from https://www.millennialmarketing.com/2016/11/the-amazon-effect-the-future-of-retail-competition/

Basile, A., & Faraci, R. (2015). Aligning management model and business model in the management innovation perspective: The role of managerial dynamic capabilities in the organizational change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(1), 43-58.

Bowen, D. (2012). Ft.com. Retrieved 2 December 2017, from https://www.ft.com/content/4742bcb4-2279-11e0-b6a2-00144feab49a

Christiansen, C. H. (2014). Occupational therapy: Performance, participation, and well-being. C. M. Baum, & J. Bass-Haugen (Eds.). Slack Incorporated.

George Wynn, M., Turner, P., & Lau, E. (2013). E-business and process change: two case studies (towards an assessment framework). Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 20(4), 913-933.

Microsoft – Official Home Page. (2017). Microsoft.com. Retrieved 2 December 2017, from https://www.microsoft.com/en-in

Scott, J. E. (2014). The Knowledge Garden and Content Management at JD Edwards. In Enterprise Content Management in Information Systems Research (pp. 183-197). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.