Microsoft Corporation - Essay Example

Microsoft Corporation Introduction: Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded one of the world’s largest multinational computer technology corporations. The company has grown in a slow and steady manner over the years and is now recognized to have a major part of the computer technology market. Microsoft’s operating systems cover a total of 88.7 percent of the market and the remainder of the market is covered by numerous other companies (Palmer, 2009). The company is run by a group of ten members of the board of directors who are elected every year in the annual shareholder’s meeting.

The paper aims at discussing the four major managerial functions of the company, i.e. Planning, Organizing, Leading, and Controlling. Managerial Functions: Microsoft has been known for its planning, organizing, leading, and controlling functions. Considering the most essential element of management – Planning, it has been seen Microsoft has a very strong planning process. The company’s planning is done only by the top management and all plans require to be consented by the board of directors and most essentially by Bill Gates.

The plans are generally developed by the top level and then are passed down to the various departments of the company, where each of the plans is implemented. The second essential management function is organizing. This function is another very essential element of the business and here the company requires establishing the functions and assigning them to the respective teams. This is an essential element as it brings teams together to work towards the same goal. Microsoft pays a lot of attention to this and this is clear from the fact that the company is spread worldwide and the only focus across the world is to ensure complete organizational success.

Leading forms the third main aspect of the managerial functions of any business. The ability to motivate and lead the company to reach heights of success is where Microsoft and Bill Gates have been recognised to be the root cause for the immense success that the company faces. Bill Gates is the current chairman of Microsoft Company and has been ranked to be the wealthiest person in the world. He has been known to be one of the biggest revolutions in the computer industry. Bill Gates has built a strong image for himself and has grown to be recognized as the best entrepreneur in the world.

He has set down examples, is admired by many as well as has been criticized for his style of business (Lesinki, 2006). There have been mixed views on his style of working and he has been criticized for being anti-competitive. Controlling is the final stage of managerial functions. Here it is how the company measures and monitors the systems and evaluates the goals of the organization. Microsoft has been known for this as the company has been able to keep up the quality and the goals across the world.

The main credit for this mainly goes to Bill Gates for his excellent leading qualities. Recommendations and Conclusions: Microsoft however does have a number of aspects that requires to be considered to ensure better performance. It has been noted that the company is off lately been faced with high levels of competition from Apple. Hence the planning aspect of the company requires to be strengthened to a greater extent to ensure higher profitability and success of the company. The company hence requires increasing the focus on this stage to be able to meet up with the competition and to also build better overall strategies as well.