Wk 2 Discussion – Factors Influencing Strategic Planning

Discussion Topic- Respond to the two peers post below in 125 word count

Post a total of 2 substantive responses over 2 separate days for full participation. This includes your initial post and 2 replies to other students.

By Tosha

A business concept that looks perfect on paper may prove imperfect in the real world. Sometimes failure is due to the internal environment – the company’s finances, personnel or equipment. Sometimes it’s the environment surrounding the company. Knowing how internal and external environmental factors affect your company can help your business thrive.

In a bad economy, even a well-run business may not be able to survive. If customers lose their jobs or take jobs that can barely support them, they’ll spend less on sports, recreation, gifts, luxury goods and new cars. High interest rates on credit cards can discourage customers from spending. You can’t control the economy, but understanding it can help you spot threats and opportunities.

Unless you’re a one-person show, your employees are a major part of your company’s internal environment. Your employees have to be good at their jobs, whether it’s writing code or selling products to strangers. Managers have to be good at handling lower-level employees and overseeing other parts of the internal environment. Even if everyone’s capable and talented, internal politics and conflicts can wreck a good company.

By Tasha

Microsoft is the company I will focus on for this assignment. External environmental influences include understanding the competition and considering how to gain market share. For example, Microsoft’s Windows phone struggled to gain market share, had challenges with getting application developers to create apps for the phone and therefore made it ultimately impossible to compete in the mobile phone space. As a result, Microsoft made a decision to sell off it’s Windows mobile phone business to remain focused on its cloud services and gaining more market share in a space where it could be successful, and has proven this strategy a good direction. General environmental factors include governmental regulations on data accessibility, accessibility for those with disabilities and overall security, which challenge companies like Microsoft to ensure these factors are taken into consideration in their strategic plan. Microsoft has an entire organization devoted to accessibility to ensure products are being developed with those with disabilities in mind. Teams, Microsoft’s collaboration software, includes accessibility features such as a screen reader and a mailtip which checks text for accessibility content. This identifies text that might make the content difficult for people with disabilities to consume. Industry environmental factors such as competitors delivering cloud services priced less or with features and functionality that Microsoft hasn’t introduced yet force Microsoft to evaluate the software and solutions it produces to understand how to differentiate them from competitors. Threats of new entrants is another critical area for Microsoft to consider. Microsoft recognizes that it came late to the cloud business, but because of the investment the leadership has put in its cloud business, it has been able to catch up to competitors like Amazon and IBM to take market share from them.