Microsoft Corporation Company Review

INTRODUCTION

Computers have come to be vital technologies in every single line of work at present. Bulk of the present obligations and tasks being completed at assorted firms and associations are by now computer-based, and this is a sure signal that they are keen to invest deeply in these technologies to make their procedures far extra competent and productive. Even if the computer multimedia marketplace is loaded alongside tough competitors, there is no mistrust that Microsoft is method in front of the pack in words of being the most reliable and progressive computer multimedia producing firm all above the world. Its large resources and competent people have allowed the association to produce a expansive array of produce that are able to address the disparate computing needs and hobbies of its globe customers. Microsoft’s attendance all above the globe has additionally come to be stronger above the past couple of years as the firm aims to distinct itself from the rest of the contest and have a stable grasp at the top spot of the computer multimedia and hardware industry. With CEO Steve Ballmer grasping the date-to-date procedures of the firm, Microsoft has honestly not ever looked back and has stayed forceful and lucrative even as the present commercial disaster has negatively altered the procedures of its competitors. Specialists forecast that Microsoft will tolerate to solidify its by now dominant locale in the computer multimedia and hardware industry above the subsequent couple of years as they retain on maximising their profitability and comprehensive globe reach.

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Microsoft Corporation is the leading software company with at least one of its product on virtually every computer on this planet. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the company on April 4, 1975. Bill Gates is among the top 3 richest person in this world as declared by Forbes Magazine. Microsoft Corporation deals in developing, licensing & designing a range of software products. It also manufactures and sells hardware products. The company has products in entertainment consoles like Xbox360 and Kinect for Xbox.

Role of organisational behaviour at the company

Microsoft Corporation has a wide range of products under its belt. It is critical for a company of this size to manage its organisational strategies and behaviour to sustain in the market and its position. The company functions in five segments: Windows and Windows Live Division, Server and Tools, Online Services Division & Microsoft Business Division. In recent times, Microsoft has given importance to the concept of sustainability. It has initiated an unusual strategy of taxing internal fee on carbon. It will charge its clients for every ton of carbon it produces that means they will charge to recycle every ton of carbon produced. However, it has pointed out a few major reasons this strategy:

• Behaviour Change – Microsoft aims to reduce the overall carbon emissions and energy utilisation. They have analysed previous reports and emphasised on the use of renewable energy to increase the efficiency. As per the statement by Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist, if someone decides to use carbon based power resources, they’ll be charge an additional fee as a tax to discourage such pathways.
• Organisation Accountability – Microsoft has learnt from the past to imply new changes to the organisation, it needs to divide it into smaller divisions. The executives that run that facility will be empowered to address any sustainability concerns to drive better efficiency figures and adopt greener power resources. It initiated to tax on carbon power use internally before charging its external clients.
• Risk Reduction – Microsoft has encouraged all its employees to understand the energy related risks. Microsoft has begun to address its employees and customers to operate through cloud-based services. They utilize significantly their own power and reduce predictable variable cost that brings down the costs and adds to the renewable energy figures.
• Sales at Vendor Choice – Through its customer feedbacks and previous reports analysis, they have found that the customers are in search of reliable service providers at lower costs and lower carbon emissions. Thus, they have emphasised on alternative energy resources to land new customers and expand their operations with existing clients.

(http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/05/microsoft-taxes-itself/)

Human Resource Management

Human Resource at Microsoft is a priority as the company drives on the path of success based on their employee’s performance. In the beginning, Microsoft used to recruit employee based on their experience over intelligence. But during the slow down of the company’s success, it realised that their employee performance was going down. Bill Gates re-invented the recruitment strategy model by recruiting intelligent staff over experienced staff. According to his experience, he found that intelligence drives aggression in performance. CEO Steve Ballmer says, “whenever you meet a kick-ass guy, get him” (Bartlett 2). They re-modeled the human resource hiring strategy & policies: Attract & retain employees, Increase organizational insight, Store and access employee information, Personalize Role Centers to speed productivity & Provide online access with employee Portal. Soon, realizing that employee’s are the greatest assets of a company. Microsoft’s strategies started to reflect this philosophy. The human resource management had the following steps: Recruitment & selection, Employee motivation, Employee loyalty & satisfaction and Employee rewards. They broke down projects and decided to coherent a strategy of center of excellence to enhance project timing and coordination. Thus, you can measure Microsoft’s success in the recent years based on their employee performance and efficiency.

(http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/en/za/products/ax-hr-management.aspx)

(http://mgmt.talkingvillage.com/article.x/1866)

International Business

Technology Management

Microsoft partners with CA Technologies to address its top IT needs. IT companies face fierce competition and challenges like sustainability, IT innovation, management and greener computing. It delivers solutions combine current technology with advanced technology. Technology helps to maximise investments along with security and redundancy to match with the current and future business goals.

(http://www.ca.com/us/partners/spotlights/microsoft-corporation.aspx)

Analysis of entrepreneurship and innovation at the company

Future Strategies Management

• Adaptive Systems and Interaction:

The Adaptive Systems & Interaction group (ASI) pursues research on automated reasoning, adaptation, and human-computer interaction. Interests of the group include principles and applications of decision-making and learning, computation in the face of complexity, techniques for information management and search, and the development and evaluation of innovative designs for visualization and interaction.

Research goals include both the pursuit of basic science and the development of computing and communications applications that demonstrate new functionalities and flexibility. ASI is at the center of user modelling at Microsoft Research, focused on inferring the goals and needs of users from multiple sources of information about activity and interests. The group is also home to research on information retrieval and management, including work in automated text classification and clustering. The ASI team continually attempts to identify new means for enriching the user experience through advances in automated reasoning and user interface design.

(http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/adapt/)

• Speech technology:

Our main aim is to craft requests that make computers obtainable everywhere, and work alongside our product-side partners to make this vision a reality. We are interested not merely in crafting state-of-the-art articulated speech constituents and additionally in how these disparate constituents can come jointly alongside supplementary modes of human-computer contact to form a fused, consistent computing environment. We are pursuing countless undertakings to aid us grasp our vision of a fully speech-enabled computer.

(http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/srg/)

• Natural Language Processing:

The aim of the Natural Speech Processing (NLP) group is to design and craft multimedia that will examine, comprehend, and produce tongues that humans use naturally, so that in the end you will be able to address your computer as nevertheless you were addressing one more person. This aim is not facile to reach “Understanding” speech way, amid supplementary things, knowing what thoughts a word or phrase stands for and knowing how to link those thoughts jointly in a meaningful way. It’s ironic that usual speech, the signal arrangement that is easiest for humans to discover and use, is hardest for a computer to master. Long afterward mechanisms have proven capable of inverting colossal matrices alongside speed and grace, they yet flounder to chief the basics of our articulated and composed languages.

We address these setbacks employing a blend of knowledge-engineered and statistical/machine-learning methods to disambiguate and answer to usual speech input. Our work has implications for requests like text assessing, data retrieval, question responding, summarization, gaming, and translation. The syntax checkers in Workplace for English, French, German, and Spanish are outgrowths of our research; Encarta uses our knowledge to reclaim answers to user questions; Intellishrink uses usual speech knowledge to compress cellphone messages; Microsoft Product Prop uses our contraption translation multimedia to elucidate the Microsoft Vision Center into supplementary languages. As our work evolves, we anticipate it to enable each span whereas human users can benefit by conversing alongside their computers in a usual way.

(http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/nlp/)