You are advised to make your work clear and well presented, marks may be reduced for poor presentation.You must mention question number clearly in your answer.Avoid plagiarism, the work should be in your own words. No exceptions.All answers must be typed using Times New Roman (size 12, double-spaced) font. No pictures containing text which will be not accepted and will be considered plagiarism).

Microsoft Case Study Case studies are an essential learning strategy in business classes as they provide an opportunity for you to critically analyze events that have taken place in real-life businesses. This develops your critical thinking and research skills as you research the competition and industry in which your business resides in order to formulate a recommendation for the challenges faced by the company. For this unit, review the “Marketing Excellence: Microsoft” case study on pp. 94–95 of your textbook. This assignment will be comprised of two parts; one part will ask you to respond to questions, and the other will require you to complete a case analysis. Part 1 Evaluate this case and respond to each of the following questions using both theory and practical managerial thinking. Evaluate Microsoft’s product and marketing evolution over the years. What has the company done well, and where did it falter? Evaluate Microsoft’s recent expansion into areas such as search engines and smartphones. Do you think these are good areas of growth for Microsoft? Why, or why not? Review the potential ethical implications of Microsoft’s situation. How might they revise their strategies to align with good ethical practices? Your Part 1 response must be at least two pages in length. Follow APA Style when creating citations and references for this assignment. Note that you will submit Part 1 and Part 2 in one document. Part 2 Complete a case analysis of Microsoft. This requires that you conduct research on Microsoft beyond the case study material in the textbook. In the case analysis, you will look at the situational analysis, problem, and alternatives, and you will provide a recommendation. Refer to the instructions below as you construct your analysis. Situational Analysis  Discuss the external environment through the compilation of a PEST (political, economic, sociocultural, and technology) analysis. Discuss the internal and external environment through the compilation of a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. Problem Identify at least one organizational problem that Microsoft is currently having or one that you project it will have in the future. Base this on your research and critical thinking. Alternatives  Compile three or four potential marketing-related solutions to the problem above. Remember that these are potential alternatives; you will not select all of the alternatives to solve the problem. Recommendation (Marketing Strategy)  Select one or two of the alternatives above to solve the problem that you identified in this case analysis. Discuss your rationale for choosing these and not the others. Include supporting research that will increase the depth of your analysis.

Resource: Pastas R Us, Inc. Database Review the Wk 2 - Apply: Statistical Report assignment. In preparation for writing your report to senior management next week, conduct the following descriptive statistics analyses with Excel®. Answer the questions below in your Excel sheet or in a separate Word document:Insert a new column in the database that corresponds to “Annual Sales.” Annual Sales is the result of multiplying a restaurant’s “SqFt.” by “Sales/SqFt.”Calculate the mean, standard deviation, skew, 5-number summary, and interquartile range (IQR) for each of the variables.Create a box-plot for the “Annual Sales” variable. Does it look symmetric? Would you prefer the IQR instead of the standard deviation to describe this variable’s dispersion? Why?Create a histogram for the “Sales/SqFt” variable. Is the distribution symmetric? If not, what is the skew? Are there any outliers? If so, which one(s)? What is the “SqFt” area of the outlier(s)? Is the outlier(s) smaller or larger than the average restaurant in the database? What can you conclude from this observation?What measure of central tendency is more appropriate to describe “Sales/SqFt”? Why?