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Spreadsheet Workshop

This company is profitable in all of the regions that it is currently selling to. However, Nunavut has a small number of sales and for those sales the profit per order is the lowest. This company should reconsider if they want to continue using resources on this region or focus more on others. For example, the Northwest Territory has the largest profit per order so marketing in this region could bring more profits to the company. As a business plan in regards to ways money can be conserved, cutting out these areas of minimal business may prove to be beneficial. The company may then be able to attempt extending their services in another direction if they choose to investigate doing so. The money saved may also be better spent on upgrades for the company itself, in regards to how it functions and how it sell its products. However, this is all just speculation, and the removal of these areas may turn out more detrimental than beneficial to the company. Overall, looking into these areas as a whole to gain more information still probably rests in being a good idea, based off the spreadsheets.

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Marketing Internal Culture at Microsoft

Job Overview from Microsoft Careers:

“The Surface marketing team is looking for an expert to lead the end-to-end launch process for Surface devices. If you have a proven track record in product marketing, business planning, product management, operations and/or finance this is a unique opportunity to lead and develop the end-to-end launch process for Surface at a critical and exciting time.”

Qualifications:

• Proven ability collaborate effectively with partner organizations and teams
• Strong analytical and structured thinking skills with the ability understand and find solutions for multi-dimensional problems
• Demonstrated ability to disambiguate challenging and complex problems with cross-group dependencies and identify growth opportunities
• The ideal candidate will have 5+ years of experience post BA/S in finance and/or strategy, business planning, product management, consulting and/or operations; MBA preferred

A key concept of Microsoft brand’s culture is their aspiration for innovation, customer satisfaction, and exercising risk. It is essential that they exhibit these qualities in order to stay up to par with their competitors, considering this day and age of technology. A main goal of theirs is the idea of diversity in their products, their aim to set themselves apart when it comes to creating products similar to that of other brands. In comparison, while Apple wants to be “much better”, Microsoft latches onto innovation in order to draw in customers. As a whole, their culture is exceptionally committed, because their customer retention means a great deal to them.

Their culture appears to be consistent with their brand to a degree, for they obtain strong success in some realms but are weaker in others. For example, in looking at their tablet products, their ratings are comparable with that of competitors but are still not quite as successful, for their ratings just a notch below that of Apple. Plus the content of the written ratings are still lesser for these same tablets. The tablets themselves function just fine, but the visual display and accessibility layouts of them are not as strongly favored when it comes to tablets. In regards to this specific job, which involves marketing Surface products for Microsoft, the employee ratings are considerably high; however, the product that is being marketed isn’t the most sturdy when competing with products in the same market.

Road Map to Microsoft employment:

-obtain BA in finance
-potentially obtain MBA, but not necessary
-obtain internship at Russell Investments
-obtain finance job at Russell Investments and remain there for the next 4 years
-apply for Microsoft job considering that all technical qualifications are met

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