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Microsoft in China & India

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Microsoft in China and India, 1993–2007 It was early summer 2007. Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft
Corporation, had just completed a transcontinental phone call with Orlando Ayala, Will Poole, Tim
Chen, Ravi Venkatesan (HBS MBA 1992), and Ya-Qin Zhang, all members of the senior management team overseeing Microsoft’s growth in China and India. A decade ago, Mundie had begun to broaden
Microsoft’s forays into both countries. Now, he continued to mentor the China and India teams.
Mundie saw his role as one that mitigated ventures that others within Microsoft might find too risky to undertake and thus to try to fill “white spaces” in Microsoft’s offerings. Chen and Venkatesan headed Microsoft operations in …show more content…

Major Issues in China Until 1998, China represented only a minor sales subsidiary for Microsoft. The on-the-ground issues were quite lost to Redmond. Ayala, who along with Mundie was one of the first executives to visit China, would later say, “If you squinted and looked at it, China would look like the U.S. or
Europe or Japan. . . . Hey, there were judges, laws, etc., but in practice there was a lack of transparency, a lack of preparedness in dealing with business problems, and we had no way of recognizing it.” Product localization in China was one of the first complicated issues. The ideographic script used in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), referred to as the “simplified” Chinese character set, had over 7,000 commonly used characters originally created with brush and ink, while Taiwan and Hong
Kong used the “traditional” character set with 13,000 characters. Thus, products had to be localized separately for the PRC. China then had a piracy rate of 98%, the highest in the world. Almost the entire PC-installed base in the PRC had the mostly pirated English version of Microsoft DOS together with one of the many
Chinese shells. There were several regulatory, legal, and market-based initiatives to control piracy.
These included major raids and Microsoft’s signing of a licensing agreement with a company called
China Great Wall Company. There was also a memorandum of understanding

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