When I joined Microsoft last September, it was evident I joined a company with bold ambitions and one eager to rethink business norms and foster a new culture of creation. This was motivating given my charter to drive business deals and strategic partnerships across various industries.
In the past year, Microsoft has made a series of moves to win over the hearts and minds of customers. We’ve re-engineered many of our flagship products to be more modern, we’ve acquired
companies that are
rethinking traditional categories of productivity, and we’ve made some of our most popular services more readily available than ever. Our aspirations are simple: continue to grow and build a vibrant community of billions of people who love and rely on Microsoft experiences across all aspects of their daily lives.
We’ve proven that we’re not afraid to look outside ourselves to reinvent ourselves. We’ve received fantastic customer feedback for making Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype available across all platforms. But, we’re far from done. Now we see an opportunity to turn our focus to our device partners — easing mobile access to great apps and services for customers by pre-installing them directly on the device.
Earlier today, we announced an expanded
global partnership with Samsung to deliver Microsoft mobile productivity services to both consumer and business customers. Building on that news, I’m pleased to share that we’ve also expanded strategic agreements with leading global OEM
Dell, and regional OEMs including
TrekStor of Germany,
JP Sa Couto of Portugal,
Datamatic of Italy,
DEXP of Russia,
Hipstreet of Canada,
QMobile of Pakistan,
Tecno of Africa, and
Casper of Turkey, as well as top original device manufacturer
Pegatron. These 11 hardware partners will pre-install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype on Android devices coming to market later this year.
For OEMs, these deals will increase the value of and enrich people’s experiences on Android devices. Original device manufacturers are important because they extend Microsoft services to the ecosystem. More specifically, they help to reach a greater number of other device manufacturers, resulting in even more choice for customers around the world. And for Microsoft, this is part of the company’s mobile-first, cloud-first vision. It is addressing consumer demand for top services by making them already available on a device, instead of requiring consumers to download them separately.
These deals demonstrate how we are working with hardware partners in new ways to deliver rich experiences through their scale. This is a big step forward for our cross-platform and cross-device services strategy, which will bring an array of Microsoft services to every person on every device.
Peggy Johnson
Executive Vice President, Business Development
