Microsoft 2013 Annual Report Download - page 18

competition with Apple, Google, and other well-established and emerging competitors. We believe our history of powering
devices such as Windows PCs and Xbox, as well as our experience delivering high-value experiences through Office and
other applications, will position us for future success.
Services for the enterprise
Today, businesses face important opportunities and challenges. Enterprises are asked to deploy technology that drives
business strategy forward. They decide what solutions will make employees more productive, collaborative, and satisfied,
or connect with customers in new and compelling ways. They work to unlock business insights from a world of data. At the
same time, they must manage and secure corporate information that employees access across a growing number of
personal and corporate devices.
To address these opportunities, businesses look to our world-class business applications like Microsoft Dynamics, Office,
Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Yammer, and our business intelligence solutions. They rely on our technology to manage
employee corporate identity and to protect their corporate data. And, increasingly, businesses of all sizes are looking to
Microsoft to realize the benefits of the cloud.
Helping businesses move to the cloud is one of our largest opportunities. Cloud-based solutions provide customers with
software, services, and content over the Internet by way of shared computing resources located in centralized data
centers. The shift to the cloud is driven by three important economies of scale: larger data centers can deploy
computational resources at significantly lower cost per unit than smaller ones; larger data centers can coordinate and
aggregate diverse customer, geographic, and application demand patterns improving the utilization of computing, storage,
and network resources; and multi-tenancy lowers application maintenance labor costs for large public clouds. Because of
the improved economics, the cloud offers unique levels of elasticity and agility that enable new solutions and applications.
For businesses of all sizes, the cloud creates the opportunity to focus on innovation while leaving non-differentiating
activities to reliable and cost-effective providers.
Unique to Microsoft, we continue to design and deliver cloud solutions that allow our customers to use both the cloud and
their on-premise assets however best suits their own needs. For example, a company can choose to deploy Office or
Microsoft Dynamics on premise, as a cloud service, or a combination of both. With Windows Server 2012, Windows
Azure, and System Center infrastructure, businesses can deploy applications in their own datacenter, a partner’s
datacenter, or in Microsoft’s datacenter with common security, management, and administration across all environments,
with the flexibility and scale they desire. These hybrid capabilities allow customers to fully harness the power of the cloud
so they can achieve greater levels of efficiency and tap new areas of growth.
Our future opportunity
There are several distinct areas of technology that we are focused on driving forward. Our goal is to lead the industry in
these areas over the long-term, which we expect will translate to sustained growth well into the future. We are investing
significant resources in:
• Developing new form factors that have increasingly natural ways to use them, including touch, gesture, and
speech.
• Applying machine learning to make technology more intuitive and able to act on our behalf, instead of at our
command.
• Building and running cloud-based services in ways that unleash new experiences and opportunities for
businesses and individuals.
• Establishing our Windows platform across the PC, tablet, phone, server, and cloud to drive a thriving ecosystem
of developers, unify the cross-device user experience, and increase agility when bringing new advances to
market.
• Delivering new high-value experiences with improvements in how people learn, work, play, and interact with one
another.