14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s failure to succeed in some sectors like mobile and search has been overly-discussed, with the company itself explaining that as far as phones are concerned, being late to the party eventually proved too much of a setback to deal with.
But in a recent interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, reveals another reason why the company had a hard time, and eventually missed, to win in the search and mobile battles.
The antitrust cases that Microsoft was involved in distracted the company from its focus on key products, with Smith pointing to the search business as one of the areas where it couldn’t do better because of this.
“My own personal view, having been in the middle of it for so long, was the single greatest cost was the distraction. Having a Bill Gates, a Steve Ballmer, great engineering leaders at our company, spending so much time figuring out how to prepare for a deposition, how to defend themselves on the witness stand, how to implement this, that, or the other thing. You look at the early 2000s. We missed search,” he said before adding that this “wasn’t the only thing we missed.”
No company can win it all
Swisher also mentioned mobile as another industry where Microsoft failed to grow, as it’s already a known fact that the Redmond-based giant surrendered to Android and iOS and instead decided to focus on products like cloud and services.
Smith went on to explain that no company can be successful in all market areas, pointing out that should Microsoft wasn’t involved in the antitrust battles, it may have been a more important player in sectors like search.
“I do think one has to have the recognition that nobody’s going to catch everything. There’s no company here or anywhere else that is going to see every trend before it emerges. But would we have seen these things if we had been spending more of our time looking for them than looking at these specific issues? It’s a great imponderable. It’s a hypothetical. We’ll never know for sure, but I will say the odds of seeing these things would have been higher,” he explained.
While mobile is pretty much dead for Microsoft, the search business is actually doing a lot better. Recent statistics have shown that the Bing search platform gained more than 20 percent market share, despite Google obviously remaining the main search in this particular side of the industry.
