Microsoft changing their moat

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box said

Incumbents get disrupted because the very moats a company builds up to be successful in one era become a liability in the next.

On Microsoft and this theory:

A literal moat of course, is a defensive strategy and that's exactly why I think Aaron chose that analogy in his statement. Satya Nadella is now starting to very vocal about the new Microsoft, and that the company be positioned as a productivity & platforms company, as opposed to a devices and services company.

Or rather, they are changing from a defensive strategy, into an offensive one.

It's difficult to see this strategy - as Mary Jo Foley points out this can often come to market in the form of some hardware, such as the Microsoft Band - which seems like the hardware is the product, but its the really the services and platforms on which the hardware operates that we can see real value extracted from the buyer for MS. It seems as though MS is happy to continue to sell hardware at a loss, as long as they showcase their software in the best possible way.

From this point of view, I can see why a strategy that involve continuing the surface lines and creating new handsets in the Lumia line are necessary.

Nadella redefines what "mobile " is, as in their view the user is mobile, not the device. The new Microsoft have a build once, run anywhere strategy themselves, so what is fascinating to see is is MS applications released onto iOS and Android way before they ever reach Windows Phone.

You can see a very logical reason for this, but its very 'new Microsoft' to do so in the first place. Then this is announced at build, and you can see that Microsoft are themselves saying to the developer community not to bother with their platform. 

In the PC epoch, Microsoft made office productivity tools available on the Mac, and were ultimately sticky enough for the user to demand the application, not the platform to be available to them. Enter, a large chunk of the Microsoft moat in the early cloud and mobile era. Strictly defensive, and strictly exclusive, it didn't even matter if enterprise users were using something totally different at home, or mobile, because the Enterprise was wrapped up, and contained, by the platform - in which they were exclusive.

The Next Generation of the Workforce.

 As an ageing workforce comes around, and millennial's enter the workforce, they demand nothing but the best, user experiences. This new generation of the workforce is bringing their iPhone's to work and being handed a handset with no applications, or worse, bad applications because of the non existent developer community. 

This report show The “bring your own device” (BYOD) movement continues to mature with more personal tablets joining employee-owned smartphones as the devices of choice for business productivity on the go. iOS continued to show the strength of iPhone 6 devices in the enterprise with 72 percent of all device activation's in the quarter. Android market share grew to 26 percent, while Windows Phone? held steady with one percent of the market share in total device activation's.

You need only look at some of the collaboration tools surrounding office 2016/O365, the "groups" concept and their mission to move everyone to the hybrid and eventual cloud (even if they don't state this) to realize a Microsoft "Answer" to the google apps / chromebooks value proposition. What's interesting is that while google have had the infrastructure and power to deliver this a long time ago, their adoption is something to be desired. How much of this could we contribute to the end user demanding their long loved productivity applications, Excel & Word? What about forgetting adoption issues internally - what about the need for cross, and backward compatibility with the organisations macro environment. 

Microsoft are indeed disrupting themselves, by breaking all their own rules and becoming their own version of the incumbent. Where they closed, they are now open. Where they were exclusive, they now welcome everyone and anyone. It's a different moat, and its an offensive one. What will future would be 'disrupters' strategy be in the next Epoch to turn this moat into a liability once again?