Microsoft + Enterprise= Hopeless Effort!

Microsoft looking for the “sympathy vote” with businesses despite all prior failed efforts

Just days after the botched Windows 7 beta download programme caused huge waves of commentary, Microsoft have bought out a new ad campaign to attain more “sympathy voters”, the advertising campaign being launched at the “People Ready” subsection of Microsoft according to Gayle Troberman of Microsoft “demonstrates how companies can drive business success by empowering their people with the right technology”, here’s one example of the ads being run:

This advertisement was part of a phone conversation which was held with Quiksilver CEO Robert McKnight, perhaps showing the real personal side of Microsoft who are taking the time to talk in depth on a business to business level, but slightly reminiscent of the popular how to video’s from Common Craft.com.

Many have written of Microsoft’s suffering in the enterprise software market, I certainly feel that more positive steps have been made by other competitors in the enterprise market, as business partners said in 2005 that they were annoyed with Microsoft “stepping on their toes”, despite Microsoft denying that “there was any business conflict with its partners” according to reports from Eweek.com, if Microsoft wants more people to adapt its enterprise solutions it will have to lose its ego that was so well touted by Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft back in March 2008 and focus more on the end user (the businesses using the software).

Even with this push on a “long term vision”, will Microsoft ever find the winning combination to unlock its true potential in the enterprise market or will the emerging enterprise solutions based in a cloud environment provide a more unified set of services for businesses to use across a division or department, it would certainly seem that with Microsoft moving it’s Office software online it will be trying to keep in check with other companies such as Google who have been rumoured to start translating many of their cloud service into “Google Computing Hardware” in an open source fashion.

But out of the two who has the clearer vision for how we should collaborate, share and communicate via the cloud, and who is more suited to help businesses become more “people ready”, I think if Microsoft makes more positive strides in the Office Live Workspace area, Google could have a tough challenge ahead to maintaining dominance in the document sharing space simply because of Microsoft’s dominance in the offline document editing software market. 

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