14 DAY TRIAL // Qi Lu, executive vice president at Microsoft, commented on his company’s approach on innovation during the financial analyst meeting 2013, thus responding on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s statement that the tech giant is actually copying their own strategy.
Lu said during the Q&A session following the keynotes that what Microsoft does right now is to “drive innovation,” pointing to Windows 8.1 as to the living proof.
“One is we're gaining share. Number two, we're driving innovation. So we have a set of product ideas we think truly differentiate our search experience. In Windows 8.1 we'll deliver; they haven't tried it. We have a complete new way of seamlessly integrating search with information on the devices,” Lu explained.
“Terry's team, Julie's team, their former teams, we're able to build that. We have a very good set of ideas to truly disrupt today's search model.”
However, Lu admitted that Microsoft was still looking for profitability, but he explained that the tech giant was actually trying to innovate as much as possible on the way to reaching this goal.
“Your question is about the profitability. For my organization we're hard-core. Essentially we're absolutely committed, always monotonically making progress towards profitability, driving always to. Volumes we're gaining share, we obviously have more volume. Great,” he said.
But Microsoft isn’t all alone in this struggle for innovation. Terry Myerson, Microsoft's executive vice president of Operating Systems, explained that partners that were also supporting this goal and Nokia, the company whose mobile division was recently purchased by Redmond, was playing a key role.
“I'm pretty excited about having the Nokia folks as part of our team. It's really just from the point of view of accelerating innovation, and really trying to produce these really epic devices,” he noted.
“We want to change the search paradigm, drive innovation so that we enable our users to get things done. And there are infrastructures, there's data, there's machine learning,” Lu added.