Nokia will make us stronger: Microsoft India chairman

Microsoft India chairman expects the company to accelerate growth on the back of mobile devices and greater touchscreen penetration.

Bhaskar Pramanik , chairman of Microsoft India, wants to change the perception that Microsoft is all about Office and Windows. In an interview with J Srikant, Pramanik said he expects the company to accelerate growth on the back of mobile devices, greater penetration of touchscreens and services around the company's software. Here are the edited excerpts:

How are you changing the perception that Microsoft is basically about Office and Windows software?
I worry about this all the time. If you think about Office today, it's a productivity and collaboration tool and content management system. Excel does better analytics for a user than anything that Oracle or SAP throw at it. So that is the challenge.

When people think of Office, they think about Word or simple spreadsheet or PowerPoint. But the fact is today Office is about content creation. And when you have a share option, it becomes a collaborative tool.

Unfortunately, we are typecast as someone who does spell check, creates a PowerPoint presentation. It is much more beyond that. Excel for example has also evolved over time and I think most users only use 20-30 % of its capabilities. 

Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 work best on a touchscreen environment. But the penetration of such devices is still low in India?
If you look at Diwali sales this year, 26% of the devices in the retail stores were touchscreens, that is up from 5% to 10%. If you look at January to March, it is going to be that much higher, including tablets. What we saw in Diwali, it was more convertibles. Going forward, it is going to be a plethora of tablets of 8-inch and 10-inch screens. You will also see convertibles, ultrabooks, desktop PCs also moving to touch. And once you have done touch, you don't want a non-touch device anymore . So it is just a question of adoption and trying it out. 

Apart from application development and operating systems, are there any other platforms, Microsoft will focus on in India like cloud?
If you think about the software market, devices and cloud, we address everything, that is, hardware, software and services.

The software is now moving more towards services. Now, we have the opportunity to address the larger chunk of the $42-billion (Rs 2.6-lakh crore) market that exists for software in India. Our strategy is accelerating growth and we will do it through devices and services. We are the best at selling software to individuals. In small and medium business space, it is all about new customer acquisition. Especially with cloud and devices, it is a huge opportunity.

As for the consumer, we have only touched a tip of the iceberg. We are trying to grow muscle here and with Nokia's acquisition, we will be even stronger. We are very good in PCs but in tablets we have a very small and insignificant market share. We need to grow that.

How many employees does Microsoft have in India? How do you look at the hiring in the current environment?
We have more than 6,000 employees working for Microsoft in India. We hire quite a few people. I don't have the exact number, but over the past two years, we have been hiring not just for India but global offices as well. We are one of the companies which are in the top institutes on the first day
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