Just a decade ago Microsoft was considered an evil empire, scheming for domination. Today it is the most liked among the big tech.
At the heart of this change is the change in its culture - from dominance mode it went to collaborative and cooperative mode.
Microsoft missed social networks and smartphones because of its obsession with Windows, the operating system that was its main moneyspinner. In the past quarter revenues at Azure, Microsoft’s cloud division, grew by 68% year on year, and it now has nearly half the market share of Amazon Web Services, the industry leader.
But today that rival operating system is more widely used on Azure than Windows. And many companies see Microsoft as a much less threatening technology partner than Amazon, which is always looking for new industries to enter and disrupt.
From the start Microsoft designed Azure in such a way that it could accommodate local data-protection laws.
Facebook and Google have started to recognise that with great power comes great responsibility, but each has yet to find its equivalent of Azure, a new business model beyond its original golden goose.
