Microsoft shares received a boost on June 3 when the company announced via an All Things D report that it was considering a significant restructuring.
CEO Steve Ballmer is planning to broaden Microsoft’s role as a “devices and services company,” follow-up actions to Ballmer’s letter to the shareholders last year, announcing a new direction for the company.
In the letter, Ballmer wrote, “As we develop and update our consumer services, we’ll do so in ways that take full advantage of hardware advances that complement one another and that unify all the devices people use daily.”
Investors were also buoyed by a similar May 2013 report from Bloomberg that Microsoft would be cutting prices for its smaller RT tablets, a move expected to make the tablets more competitive with strong rivals like Apple.
As Microsoft moves further into tablet and service-oriented areas, it is gaining new abilities to influence alternative industries, notably the education sector. Tablets are particularly attractive for education organizations because of their innate portability and their low costs compared to desktop options.
On the server side, Microsoft is teaming with network infrastructure solution company Janet in a Cloud Services for Education Agreement that will bring virtual learning environments and similar types of integration to educational organizations around the world. According to Janet’s site, their focus is primarily on 18 million students and staff in the UK, but the agreement paves the way for future education partnerships. Not only does the agreement bring Office 365 to both faculty and students in the UK, but it also solves several cloud problems that organizations were struggling with, such as previously lengthy upload times for transferring complex lab data to the cloud for peer analysis.
All Things D also mentioned in its report that Microsoft could perform well in the growing cloud computing industry, creating cloud services in imitation of companies like Amazon to help find its identity as a “services” company. This could lead to new cloud offerings for schools and organizations that enable a more integrated educational experience.
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