Success Quote by John W. Thompson

Power, in this line, isn’t about market share so much as custody: who gets to own the customer’s everyday habits, data, and expectations. John W. Thompson frames “consumer experience” as territory to be defended, not a service to be improved. The phrasing borrows from sports and war - “franchise,” “securing,” “concede” - turning what could be a product conversation into a sovereignty claim. It’s corporate strategy spoken in the language of dominance.

The interesting pivot is “around securing.” That verb choice treats the customer experience like an asset at risk, vulnerable to takeover. Thompson isn’t promising delight; he’s promising control. In the early-2010s ecosystem wars - where platforms (cloud, mobile, identity, productivity) started to fuse into total environments - “experience” became a euphemism for lock-in that doesn’t sound like lock-in. If you can define the workflow, the defaults, the sign-in, the store, you can define the customer’s future purchases without having to win them anew each time.

Then comes the name-check: “including Microsoft.” It signals the real audience isn’t consumers at all; it’s competitors, partners, investors, and internal teams who need to hear backbone. Microsoft functions as shorthand for a rival with the scale to make your “experience” irrelevant by bundling, integrating, or underpricing. Thompson’s insistence that they “will not concede” is less a forecast than a posture: a declaration that the company intends to be a platform, not a feature. The bravado is the message, because in platform fights, confidence is a kind of currency.