Microsoft South Africa is confident that a changing approach by its parent will mean the faster introduction of the company’s online services in South Africa. That’s the word from the MD of the South African operation, Zoaib Hoosen.

Hoosen has also expressed confidence that hardware products, such as the Surface Pro tablet/laptop hybrid, will in future come to more international markets more quickly thanks to a new approach by Satya Nadella, who was named a year ago as the replacement to Steve Ballmer as CEO.

“Under Satya’s leadership, and with the idea of having cloud services on our platforms, he has challenged the engineering teams to drive a much more aggressive agenda across the globe,” Hoosen says. “Parity of services [everywhere] is discussed as a global initiative.”

Compared to Google and other online computing rivals, Microsoft has been tardy in bringing its online services to international markets such as South Africa. For example, although Apple’s Siri personal assistant and Google’s voice search tools are both available in South Africa, Microsoft does not officially support its equivalent, Cortana, in this market.

Cortana, originally developed as a voice assistant for Windows Phone, will form a key part of Windows 10, which will be launched later this year.

It has also not delivered services locally it promised it would. Though former Microsoft South Africa MD Mteto Nyati said years ago that the Xbox Music streaming service was coming to the country, it failed to materialise. A number of rival services have since launched. A range of other Xbox services are also still not available to South Africans through official channels.

But Hoosen is confident things are changing. “What is going to shift the needle is the attitude of the corporation, saying we want to push [these services] out.”

He says he was party to an “interesting conversation at a senior leadership level” internationally in Microsoft recently. “There was a concern voiced around a service being available in South Africa. The instruction that went from the senior leadership to the product group concerned was: ‘The traction for these services is in emerging markets — you need to fix that first.’

“For me, what gives me a great deal of comfort that this is real and is happening is that senior leadership is talking like that.”

As far as Microsoft’s hardware products are concerned, Hoosen says the company is “actively looking at the business cases for the next wave of roll-outs”.

“Those are under review at the moment,” he says, hinting that there is a chance that Microsoft’s well-received Surface Pro 3 device could be introduced in South Africa at some point.

But, he cautions, introducing new hardware “requires channels and many things to be set up”.