THIS IS YEAR OF CONSUMER FOR US: MS

Microsoft has planned a slew of launches in the consumer segment this year, including the search engine Bing. Its Greater Asia Pacific head of consumer and online international business Sanjay Chheda says the software firm is focusing on growing the market in India and tapping the mobile phone segment.

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What are the focus areas for Microsoft in consumer and online services business?

This is truly the year of the consumer for us, with the launch of Windows 7, Windows Mobile 6.5 and search engine Bing. Microsoft created a new business unit in the beginning of this fiscal year to focus on the consumer business that includes consumer software and online services. We see a lot of demand in the consumer space.

There are synergies between the personal computer (PC), the mobile phone and the Web that we are aiming to tap. For instance, we don?t want people to think of Windows as an operating system product but a set of experience that can be accessed on a PC, regardless of where the software resides ? on your drive or on the cloud.

The Web is nascent in India, with about 50 million Internet users in the country. The task is to grow the number of PCs and broadband connections. There are a bunch of things to be done. The price points are one factor and Moore?s law applies there. Then, there is the issue of broadband availability. There are only about 6-6.5 million broadband connections in India. But the advantage of being a nascent market is that you can leapfrog technology.

What about mobile phones? More people use it to access the Internet in India.

That is a big opportunity. There are 1.3 billion phones in Asia Pacific and about 350 million in India alone. I think all phones will flip in the future from devices to make voice calls to small, handheld PCs. And with cloud computing, this opportunity could become even bigger, allowing users to access a whole lot of applications residing on the cloud.

But competition from Apple, Palm and RIM has intensified.

Yes, there is a lot of competition. A few years ago, people focused on form factors. Now, the focus is on services. We work with OEMs that make handsets. At Microsoft, we are trying to create a broader ecosystem. We have an applications marketplace for developers to monetize their apps. We are also offering services such as My Phone that backs up your phone?s data onto the cloud. We already offer Microsoft Live services on the phone. And you don?t need a smartphone to access such services. We have a strategic relationship with Affle that allows owners of low-end handsets to use some of these services.