What Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks Apple and Google do best

At a recent event on its Redmond campus, Microsoft CEO
Satya Nadella detailed his views on what Google and
Apple do best.
His comments, as the chief executive of the company
worth less than Apple, but more than Google,
are notable. For context, in his thus-short tenure at
Microsoft , Nadella has completed its purchase of Nokia,
and also continued the company’s push into cloud
computing.
Here’s Nadella’s quote on his rivals:
When I think about what Apple does, what Google
does and what Microsoft does, therein lies perhaps
the simplest answer to why these three identities are
actually pretty distinct. To me Apple’s very, very
clear, and, in fact, I think Tim Cook did a great job of
even describing that very recently where he said
they sell devices and that’s what Apple is all about.
And Google is about being, it’s about data or it’s
about advertising, it is about serving you ads in a
tasteful way, and they’ve done a great job of that
business.
Apple’s massive success in hardware has driven its
historic revenue and profit growth . Though, naturally,
those successes have been undergirded by prescient
software choices, including adding an application
marketplace to iPhone when that product was in its
infancy. The App Store has been a key strength that
Apple used to help launch the iPad to strong market
adoption, and will, presumably, assist its upcoming
Watch product also see quick initial sales.
Google’s advertising prowess is obvious, but again isn’t
the full story: The company’s search products made
selling ads possible; if Google hadn’t built the dominant
search tool for most of the world, its ad incomes
wouldn’t have soared as they have.
But that doesn’t mean Nadella is wrong, merely that
there is nuance to the point. The executive continued
directly, making a case for Microsoft’s own strengths:
Whereas in our case our identity really is about
empowering others to build products. It’s not really
about us and our products. Of course, we have a
revenue model and a business model, but to me the
place where Microsoft can be distinct and where it
comes naturally to us more so than anything else is
from the creator of a document to a developer
writing an app, to anyone else who is in the
business of actually their own creation we want to
be the tools provider, the platform provider. That’s
the core identity, and productivity to me that’s why
it has deep meaning.
To be most basic, Apple’s core strength is the iPhone,
Google’s search, and Microsoft’s selling Windows and
Office. Apple wants to get into cloud services, as
evinced by its iCloud Drive product, Google wants to
win productivity and cloud computing, and Microsoft is
setting itself along similar lines, working to convert
Office into a cloud subscription service, and growing its
Azure cloud platform.
As I’ve written in the past , the large platform companies
are combating across a host of surface areas. Apple and
Google and Microsoft are each in apps, and hardware,
and so forth. The question is which will be the most
adept at converting past success into new winnings.
Whichever wins a new segment could see its market
capitalization advance, and perhaps challenge the other
two for dominance in the next decade of technology.