Profile: Microsoft's Yu Sasamoto builds experience into products

Microsoft's Yu Sasamoto has had a challenging upbringing at times. "After I was born in Thailand, I returned to Japan unable to speak Japanese. Then I started school in Australia without any English.

The only sentence my mother taught me was to raise my hand and ask to go to the toilet," he laughs.

This occasional lack of language hasn't held him back in business. Before joining Microsoft as marketing officer, consumer and online for greater Asia-Pacific, Sasamoto worked at MTV in Japan as COO and then took over the CEO role. Microsoft approached him in 2006 when the brand was "very vigorous about building the search business," he says.

He joined as GM of its online service group which included search, MSN and Windows Live. This evolved into his marketing role in consumer and online based in Singapore.

"It's about the device and the services," he says of the evolving business. "Microsoft has to build an experience between each of our products. We need to integrate the products that we have and build an experience for consumers. So this is how my role evolved from online service to consumer and online business."

Sasamoto says he took the new role because he saw the limits of his homeland, which he says was becoming a saturated economy. "Business wise, and for my career, I needed exposure outside Japan. Today I look after a region that stretches from India to Japan, and from China to Australia. It's pretty exciting - not just because of the geographical, cultural and economic differences, but you can actually identify cluster markets in Asia."

Sasamoto says he sees India and Indonesia as "mobile first businesses", whereas Japan and Korea are digitally advanced. "China is a growing country with challenges presented by piracy, and Australia - it's Asia, but it's English - trickles back to the US," he says.

The subject of how Microsoft, an American company, translates itself as a brand in different countries in Asia, especially China, is something Sasamoto is keen to talk about. Microsoft's investments in China are growing. It works with local players and it extends its growth through joint ventures there. "The challenge is that a US company cannot morph itself into the China market as local players can," he says.

Sasamoto says the task for Microsoft is to localise its products in China so they become more Chinese-friendly. "When we launched our search engine, branded as Bing, we localised the brand with local characters - this was the first time we did this and I think this type of localisation will continue," he says.

Given the recent publicity, it would be unnatural not to broach the subject of Microsoft's competition with Apple. Apple recently surpassed Microsoft in market value and chief executive Steve Jobs1 predicted the death of the PC last month, saying that the tablet could take its place. Microsoft's dominance in the PC market, where its Windows software runs on more than 90 per cent of computers, is under threat from this new breed of computers.

Sasamoto admits there have been internal and external difficulties at Microsoft. "Ironically, the challenge is that Mircrosoft has been so successful in the past," he says. "As a new company, Apple has been able to do a lot of new things and hasn't had much to lose. It will have similar dilemmas to those we have faced when it reaches a certain point in its success. Apple has found its success in the value of its products, and integration, but it's still not a perfect ecosystem."

Sasamoto says Microsoft has been working, especially over the last two years, on developing a consumer and online group that will build on the brand's digital experience.

"Microsoft can work with many partners - whether that's Siemens or Toshiba. We can reach a very wide audience. This is where we will keep our strength, but on top of that, products such as Azure will enable developers and content providers to distribute services."

And this, he says, is why he joined Microsoft. "The key essence of building media is emotional engagement and technology," he says.

This articloe was originally published in the 1 July 2010 issue of Media.