It may well seem ironic for the provider that has cornered much more than ninety % market share in each desktop operating systems and office suites to be centered on expanding its share.But that;s how Microsoft officials are identifying their mission for fiscal 2010, which started for Microsoft on July 1. At the corporation;s global revenue meeting, recognized as MGX, the week of July 20, Microsoft;s leading brass is hoping to whip the product sales troops right into a share-growth frenzy.Microsoft;s reseller partners obtained a taste of some of the revenue priorities for the business during Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner;s keynote in the Worldwide Companion Conference on July fifteen. Microsoft is taking the gloves off,
Office 2007 Pro, Turner needed to make clear.“We;ve got lots of competitors. We;ve obtained great competitors. They;re out there every single day trying to take our market share,” Turner told the resellers on Wednesday. “But you know what? We;ve received incredible products and solutions. And in just about every case,
Purchase Windows 7, they;re built on that high-value, low-cost proposition with partners.”Turner listed the companies Microsoft is most concentrated on taking share from in the coming year. They are: Oracle (with SQL Server 2008 R2)Google (with Workplace 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on the Google Apps front and Bing on search)VMWare (with Hyper-V/Windows Server 2008 R2)Lotus (with Exchange 2010)OpenOffice (with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010)Apple (with
Windows 7) (I found it interesting who Turner failed to mention when talking up Microsoft;s competition. Amazon sure has a hefty head start inside the rent-a-cloud space. Mozilla is sure coming on strong against Internet Explorer. Apple has Microsoft on the run in the mobile OS market. Red Hat and other Linux distributors still have lots of mind share in key parts of the server space — in spite of Turner;s claim that Microsoft has competed really effectively agains “the fraudulent perception of free.”)Turner;s message to partners in many of these cases was the competitive offerings can carry higher margins,
Windows 7 Discount, but they are a whole lot far more expensive than what Microsoft has. It sounds like the Softies, buoyed by the reception its Laptop Hunter ads received, is going to try a similar sales/marketing tact with SQL Server, Hyper-V and other products by touting their higher cost vis-a-vis Microsoft;s offerings.(Speaking of the Laptop Hunters ad campaign, am I the only one who thinks Microsoft;s obsession with Apple has gone around the bend? Apple has less five-plus percent with the desktop working system market,
Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Plus, and, according to IDC,
Office 2010 Activation, is now down to No. 5 among U.S. PC vendors. The majority of consumers I know who are looking to buy a new PC are either inside the Windows or Mac camp when they go out to create a purchase. But Microsoft is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Apple-focused ads and retail stores which will be located next door to Apple;s temples for that faithful. Why?)Anyway, back to “Grow our share.” I guess “Save our share” wouldn;t have the same ring to it. But I wonder whether Microsoft;s arrows are missing some key targets and are concentrated too very much on competitors from the past. What;s your take: Are the Softies back in fighting form or just tilting at windmills?