The Research Of Microsoft's Internet Business Strategy

From a small startup to the leader of software industry, Microsoft's 30 years history is consist of all kinds of difficulties and challenges. Recent years, as the Internet technologies become really mature, lots of emerging technologies and new business models are available in the market. Some rising stars of Internet business are shining: Amazon of E-Commerce area, Google of search engine and Internet advertisement and saleforce.com who deploy software on Internet, etc. The Internet is bringing new challenge and opportunity to Microsoft and the company need to think very hard about how to extend the success to next ten years.This thesis starts with MBA's solid foundation of classic business strategy theories, try to combine current situation and need of Microsoft's Internet business and explore the strategy for next stage.The main body of this thesis is consisting of six chapters: The first and second chapters introduce the background of Microsoft's Internet business and current corporation level strategy. After briefly introduced the overall business status of Microsoft, the thesis will raise a question of:―Why Internet is big challenge as well as big opportunity for Microsoft?‖The third chapter,―Exploring external strategic factors for Microsoft's Internet Business‖, is focusing on external factors analysis. The first point is answering the question of previous chapter of―Why Internet is big challenge as well as big opportunity for Microsoft?‖and discusses the importance of Microsoft's Internet business. The second part focuses on discussing the cooperation of internet business with current Microsoft main business and uses BCG tool to analyze the positioning of Internet business. Finally, this chapter spends many words on the two core sub-business of Internet:―Internet Advertisement‖and―Software plus Service‖, including characters, competitors and market trends.The fourth chapter,―Analysis of Microsoft's advantages and disadvantages on Internet Business‖, is mainly focus on internal factors. The chapter outlines most important factors for Microsoft on Internet business developing area. The fifth chapter,―Decision Making for Internet Business‖, combines results of previous chapters'discussion for decision making. It uses―4-D strategy decision-making table‖, SWOT and―Dynamic index model‖and finally gives the strategy suggestion of―Cost leadership‖as foundation and be very clear for the goal of different sub-business areas.The sixth chapter,―Implementation of Strategy‖, is based on the strategy goal and gives the core strategy implementation plan. The chapter raises core challenges, goals and plans for each function to support the final strategy implementation.