Most days I am on my daily commute from my home in Cheshire to deepest London- enough said ….
I just fired up the Internet to see what’s going – a really interesting article on the windows7 launch- how Microsoft have made great profits by receiving the full shipping price and the PC vendors are taking the hit with discounts to get us consumers to buy.
I thought the title was the interesting piece that caught my eye.
What are Microsoft up to? It’s like the big software giant is using a defensive strategy to drive it’s innovation into the market. They spent years building a strong and very loyal community of partners and resellers only to now turn the tables – they are attacking the core of their channel.
Yep- google and cisco are causing them problems (big) but surely there was a better strategy than to compete head on/undercut your distribution network.
Cisco says it’s all- they play to their strengths, the power of the network, the power of their distribution channels to market. They look after their partners, they know it’s the way to deliver innovation to market- the butterfly effect if you will.
The hosted exchange market is imploding – BPOS. Why devalue your offerings and importantly put a price in the market that fundamentally kills your channel? I was talking to someone yesterday and it was mentioned that there are 100+ partners in the UK for SPLA and exchange specifically- after this fallout there maybe 10 left.
Ok, so being blunt some deserve it because they have created the ‘devalue’ effect by knocking prices down, to get you as the consumer in so they can sell you a phone line, minutes, mobiles etc etc but hey its economics and business. Irrespective, that’s a great strategy for killing a key income stream around cloud services. There is clearly a strategy- clearly a google one and possibly to scoop the ruined businesses up who were their partners.
The more I look at this- pitcher plant.
So the title is quite fitting- it’s happening across the board- the hardware vendors and the hosting community.
I think it’s a fear factor strategy- come on Microsoft, play to your strengths- your relationships, innovation and distribution network.
Someone once told me- if you play someone else s game you cannot win. Play your own game …..
Read the article
http://www.cnet.com/apple-mac.html?tag=txt;luke_topic
Steve Balmer is famous for his energetic speech on developers, developers, developers. 
