November 19, 2007 | Monday
Microsoft’s lofty goals and snowball challenge
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |PPC |Search Engines |Microsoft
Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, gave attendees of a UBS investor conference a glimpse at the stars his company is shooting for. Looking closely at the tidy package of goals - which even has its own nearly-catchy name ("10, 20, 30, 40") - it’s clear that merely hitting the treetops is not an option.
First, Microsoft wants to be one of the top two companies in online advertising within the next three to five years. No prizes for guessing that they assume Google to be the other company at the top. (I’m guessing that, just for the pleasure of seeing the search giant knocked down a peg or two, they’d happily swap Yahoo into the top two.)
The other goals include increasing total page views, the percentage of time people spend on Microsoft sites, and - of course - market share in search. Back in September, comScore estimated Microsoft’s search share at around the 10 per cent mark. The company wants to boost that by another 20 per cent over the next few years.
This is all well and good; it is healthy for Microsoft to be setting goals like this. However, what was not revealed - contrary to how Reuters reported Johnson’s remarks - was any “strategy” for reaching them.
As Johnson quite correctly asserted in his remarks, Microsoft has the resources - chiefly, money in the bank - to make all kinds of things happen. But having the resources and knowing how to apply them in order to topple your competitors and vastly exceed industry expectations are two different things.
This all makes Microsoft a lot of fun to watch. In the past couple of years, they have somehow managed to shift (in the eyes of many, if not all) from steely monolith to somewhat injured underdog, partly thanks to Google’s emergence and the missteps the new kid has made in its PR approach. It is also attributable to Microsoft’s employee bloggers. My friend JP Rangaswami, CIO of BT Global Services and all around swell guy, explains the effect thusly:
When a company achieves critical mass in terms of “external” bloggers, there is no longer an inside or an outside. Blogs do not support hierarchies or vertical silos, they tend to be lateral and networked and and all-over-the-place. Blogs are not respecters of walls, whether inside the firm or at the firm’s boundaries.
Not having an inside or an outside. That’s how tomorrow’s customers will figure which of today’s companies to bless.
(Emphasis JP’s.)
My first instinct is to hope that this is part of the unspecified strategy Microsoft will use to hit all their goals. Upon further reflection, I remembered that such movements only work if they are bottom-up, not imposed from the top down. How well Microsoft will be at supporting this while staying out of the way is anyone’s guess. Like the cartoon says:
If you try to polish the snowball, the snowball melts.
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