Chennai: The year 2013 has been a pretty busy year for Microsoft and a lot has happened since its release of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 in 2012; which was a huge year for them. Microsoft went from being a software company to a “devices and services” company, as said by the then-CEO Steve Ballmer. Now that, another exciting year is coming to an end, Microsoft’s fortunes in 2013 gave us some insight into what the creator of Windows, Office and Xbox will do to stay in this increasingly competitive game.
The 10 most interesting and major events that took place in Microsoft during the year 2013 are given below as compiled by Mashable.
Office 365 and the Subscription Model
Office 365 (a.k.a Office 2013), the first version of Microsoft Office for Windows 8 brought about a bunch of changes such a being completely tailor-made for touch interface, cloud and social networks – the same things behind the philosophy of Windows 8. But the most interesting change was the business model itself, Office was no longer a standalone app but rather a subscription based online office. With this new model, users no longer needed to pay the price for the complete software package which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint; instead they can be subscribed on a monthly or yearly basis as per one’s requirements and convenience.
The Surface’s $900 Million Stumble
Surface, which is Microsoft’s series of tablets with Windows RT as its operating system never really took off. Windows 8 was an OS that was preferred only by very few in the globe, and to make things worse, at the time of Surface’s launch there were very few apps of any relevance at all. Even though software updates later fixed the bugs and brought some improvement, the damage was already done. Windows RT failed and along with it fell the Surface tablets. Microsoft later admitted to producing too many Surface tablets that were never sold even after a number of price reductions and other sales incentives.
Office on Android and iPhone
One of Microsoft’s major strongholds has been its Office suite, something that was limited to only Windows desktop and mobile environments. With Windows being a minority in the mobile segment, Microsoft was forced to come up with something to compete against Google and Apple in the mobile segment. The answer was to release Office to both Android and iOS platforms. A change that would never have happened in Microsoft’s glory days.
Facebook, Foursquare and Flipboard for Windows 8
One of the major drawbacks of Windows 8 was the lack of apps. At Microsoft’s Build developer conference, Steve Ballmer announced that Windows 8 would be acquiring the services of the big Fs; Facebook, Foursquare and Flipboard. And rightly so, it happened. Facebook’s Windows 8 app made use of the wide screen that many of the Windows tablets had, the new Foursquare app re-invented the location service as a powerful discovery engine and Flip board brought with it a unique live tile interface.
Steve Ballmer Steps Down
In the summer of this year, Ballmer announced he will be retiring in the next 12 months depending on when a suitable successor is found. This announcement came barely one month after Ballmer led a major reorganization of the company in an attempt to bring all the divisions under one unified vision. The rumor mills say, Ballmer’s exit was already planned and Surface RT’s failure only made it worse and accelerated this process. The hunt is now on to find his replacement, with former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Ford's Alan Mulally supposedly leading the pack. It is said that a new CEO will be named before the end of the year.
#6 Microsoft Buys Nokia
All the major mobile segment companies except Microsoft had their own phone. Google bought Motorola and Apple had the iPhone and Microsoft desperately needed one to increase their dominance or lack thereof in the mobile market. This time, fortunately they did not do the same mistake they did with the Surface tablets by creating their own Windows Phone compatible hardware, instead they opted to buy Nokia, which was already a leading Windows Phone maker and its closest partner. This was a smart move as Microsoft really couldn’t afford another major product failure.
Windows Phone Goes Big
Earlier this year, there seemed to be a standoff between Microsoft and BlackBerry for a third place in the mobile ecosystems war. It is now clear that Microsoft emerged a winner from that battle and took the third spot after Android and iOS, thanks to its fast growing market share in most regions. Windows has upped its game and is now going head-to-head with Android in the Phablets market segment with its latest update. Phablets are big screen devices and fall in-between tablets and phones in regard to its size; these seem to be hugely popular in China and India. Windows Phone now has Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1320 to please these growing markets.
Windows 8.1 Arrives
Microsoft released Windows 8 towards to end of last year and it had its own fair share of flaws and criticisms. Most of the desktop users moaned the lack of a popular Start button that everyone was familiar with from all the previous Windows versions and criticized Microsoft for aiming Windows 8 only at touch based devices and ignoring the larger traditional desktop segment. The new Windows 8.1 update not only brought back the Start button and fixed all of the problems that were present in the previous version but also introduced several new features.
The Xbox one
The Xbox 360 is one of the best-selling game consoles ever and Microsoft’s consoles have always had a loyal following. The new Xbox One looks to take it to a whole new level by serving as a complete gaming cum entertainment system. It seemed as though Microsoft shot itself in the foot with its seemingly harsh downloading policies but since the PlayStation 4 is directed more towards gamer, one can expect Xbox’s loyal following to carry it into another generation.
Second Generation Surface tablets
Surface Pro, the high-end version of the Surface RT proved to be a success. Released in the Jan of 2013 it benefited from this later release which meant more polished and bug-fixed software and better hardware in the heart of it. This encouraged Microsoft to further work on these tablets and release two more second generation models this October. The Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 serve as flagship devices for Windows 8.1, and with the new Haswell chip from Intel it overcame one of the major drawbacks of the first-gen models which was bad battery life. But only time will tell if Windows has enough apps and community support to make it a success that Microsoft so badly needs.
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