Microsoft exec: Challenging times play to our strengths
With a tough economic climate figuring to put a crimp on IT spending, Microsoft is already working on honing a message that it can help businesses save money.
In an interview Friday, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop said that companies are certainly re-evaluating their tech spending projects, but tried to make the case that Microsoft stands to fare better than most.
"Relative to Microsoft's general approach of making all technology, all software very affordable...that plays very well at these times," Elop said. "Who knows what lies ahead, but nonetheless, we've got some pretty good messages."
Stephen Elop
Microsoft has been working on getting those messages ready in a hurry. Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner sent an e-mail to Microsoft's sales force Wednesday night highlighting a dozen or so things the company can do to help customers save money.
The things on the list aren't big surprises--unified communications to reduce travel costs, virtualization to save on server costs, as well as Microsoft's many licensing and financing options.
"It is the case that we are very focused and getting even more focused on having a conversation with our customers around value," Elop said.
But while Microsoft has long grown sales by offering a lower-cost option than software rivals, it now finds others, including Google, using those same arguments against core products like Windows and Office.
Elop reminded me that it's not his first time managing through tough times.
"I've been through a pretty significant economic downturn in the early part of this century--boy that sounds old--when I was at Macromedia," he said. At the time, he said he told his troops that Macromedia could lead through the tough times and come through it stronger at the other end. "I think at Microsoft we can do that even more so."
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina.
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Plus, as Mr. Dee pointed out, MSFT relies too much on Moore's Law to bail them out - most corps will want to keep their existing equipment for awhile longer thanks to lower capital budgeting. Good luck convincing an enterprise client that he/she has to ditch that barely-paid-off Dell PE 2850 and replace it with a Dell PE R900... ;)
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I'm sorry, but OpenOffice isn't replacing MS Office. Linux is not replacing Windows for desktops. Try as you may to obscure the facts, these basic realities simply cannot be ignored.
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Until open-source software gets much better than it is right now....... forget about corporations using it.
On your 1st point though, even you yourself said '... will have a very tough time...' Note you used future tense. So basically, you kinda agreed with Lerianis that OSS was just not there yet. And that's all Lerianis was trying to say, I guess.
MS is compleatly worthless today.
Vista is very good (though it has some things like the steep hardware requirements that I take issue with), Microsoft Office is very good, and so is the rest of their products, both hardware and software.
Without supporting info, I feel from your words that you personally were just unhappy about MS.
When a company achieved a $60+ billion revenue for the last FY, you cannot simply say '...has nothing to give you but words.' Guess what? Had the company given nothing but words, then it could not have got the revenue from its smart customers, right?
Lerianis (who's rersponse is posted to this thread )also sums it up well from a products perspective. Fact again is that MS products while not always first to market are often first to MASS MARKET which has driven pricing down for all of us. Care to think what you'd be paying for Lotus 123 had Excel and Office not come along and driven Office productivity to the mass market? Ditto for SQL Server when stacked up against the former big 3 in the RDBMS market - Oracle, Sybase and Informix. Compare the costs.
And lastly, just look at the relative costs of VMware relative to MS technologies in the virtualization space.
Fact - while emotions always run high in these discussions, in the vast majority of cases, MS technology provides superior value, often also at significantly lower cost than their competition.
I guess if I knew nothing about computers myself, I'd like a little hand holding at times. Problem is fista is an abusive helicopter parent. Some people like that I guess.
When you apply Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization maturity model, Microsoft Operations Framework IT Service Management framework (both of which are technologically agnostic BTW - you could apply them to a pure UNIX environment if you wanted, and still achieve a desired result), and the gamut of Solution Accelerators available through microsoft.com for free, you can make a practice out of raising the bar for efficiency in IT, creating greener datacenters, and lowering TCO of the SMB and/or Enterprise infrastructure without selling a single software license.
I think the point is that Microsoft isn't just about selling software - it's about enabling businesses to create utility for themselves and their employees through the magic of software - Microsoft software or otherwise. Today, creating utility means making sure that everyone is able to realize the full potential of their software and hardware investments, and squeezing every drop of value from those investments.
From that standpoint, there simply is no comparison to Microsoft and the ROI it provides it's customers - noone even comes close.