Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft kicked off NRF 2020 Vision, the annual retail industry mega event in New York yesterday.
He had some great sound bites "There’s death, there’s taxes and there’s ever-increasing online advertising spend. There’s not much we can do about the first two, but — depending on the decisions we make now — there is something we can do about the third." I took that to mean - hey, don't just blow all your advertising dollars and those of the brands you represent with Google, Facebook and increasingly Amazon and with your agencies. We can help you do better.
And “The meme of the twenties will be retailers moving to their own tech intensity. It’s not about taking away the art of retail. It’s about building your tech intensity. You can’t be cool by association with a tech friend — you have to be cool on your own.” I took that as we can do better than the AWS or Google or Alibaba cloud infrastructure.
Earlier, I had listened to two Microsoft analyst briefings in prep for NRF. There it was more about products like Dynamics 365 Teams (with an Ikea use case) and Commerce, Azure Synapse Analytics (with a Walgreens Boots Alliance use case) PromoteIQ Commerce Marketing (with a Home Depot use case). That was more about traditional ERP and CRM competitors like Salesforce, Workday, Infor, SAP and Oracle. Sound bites were terms like "Headless Commerce."
If I could have taken a tour of their booth at NRF or at their showcase store nearby on 5th Avenue, I am pretty sure I could have learned more about their mobile and mixed reality innovations they showcase in this physical store flow graph.
What I had hoped to also hear about was innovations around cashierless stores (Microsoft does have a connected store concept but it is still in Private Preview). Or same-day delivery (they talked about Attabotics which provides a robotic warehousing and fulfillment service for perfume orders at Nordstrom. It runs on the Azure cloud. They did not mention if they have any role in Walmart's Alphabot deployment - which is grocery, fresh item focused). Similarly not much about alternatives to Fulfillment by Amazon and its highly automated distribution centers (that competitors like Shopify, 3PLs and robotic competitors are starting to provide alternatives to). Or role of multi-story warehouses in last mile delivery (that Prologis and others are pioneering) or about reverse logistics which are always a hot topic this time of the year as customers return holiday purchases.
You get my drift. Lots and lots of capabilities but a bit of what logistics folks call "chaotic storage", designed for machines not humans to navigate.
Knowing Microsoft and its reseller network, I know they can pull piece parts together and create solutions for any challenge you throw at them. It's a bit like going to a retail store you are unfamiliar with. You have to ask which aisle an item is at. If it's not there an associate can look it up on her mobile device. Or they can special order it for you from their online catalog or somewhere in their supply chain.
I will take that over vendors who spray paint their horizontal products with a couple of vertical features. Every industry has grown massively complex over the last decade or so. Even those around death and taxes:)
