Three Imperatives Drive Consumer Strategy

To weather the current slump in IT spending and make sure it can maintain growth through business down-cycles in the future, Microsoft needs to generate more revenue from the consumer sector. To meet this end, the company has devised a consumer strategy guided by three imperatives: increase PC sales to consumers, expand into consumer electronics, and earn money from networked services. To succeed, Microsoft will have to coordinate efforts among many product groups, beat powerful entrenched competitors, and enlist new types of partners to support a quest that is even more ambitious and far-reaching than “a PC on every desktop.”

Long-Term Vision: Microsoft (and Its Partners) Everywhere

Chief Software Architect Bill Gates has often discussed his long-term vision for consumers: by the end of this decade, which Gates sometimes calls the “digital decade” or the “PC-plus” era, consumers will have multiple devices in their home and on their person, all of which will be able to connect to one another and to various networked services. The PC will play a central role as a kind of command-and-control center—a place for storing, manipulating, and distributing data to these other devices and services.