Mood:
cheekyTopic: Small Business
Microsoft is redesigning its business applications for midsize companies with an employee's role in mind
By Aaron Ricadela
InformationWeek
When Microsoft looks out on the $215 billion market for software and consulting at midsize companies, it sees a great opportunity, fragmented market share, and the potential for business to become a lot more efficient with a little infusion of technology. The world's No. 1 software company thinks it has figured out what those midsize companies need to run their operations better. The answer: Not what Microsoft has been trying to sell them.
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To understand the jobs people do at midsize companies, Microsoft's engineers and managers spent two years studying their workdays in excruciating detail, recording their conversations, snapping photos of people at their desks, and generating 15,000 pages of transcripts. The conclusion: Most workers don't like their software, because it forces them to work with business automation and personal-productivity apps that are often incompatible. In other words, today's business software doesn't look like today's business. "Nobody in these companies has software tailored for how they really work. Everybody uses the same screen," says James Utzschneider, a general manager in Microsoft's small- and midsize-business division. "Our vision is that we're designing software for the way that people really work." That means a sales manager would see leads front-and-center, while an accounting clerk would see a list of invoices or a flow chart to pay bills against a monthly budget.
There's some data to support the notion that smaller businesses could use an IT boost. Microsoft commissioned a survey, reviewed by a Harvard University business professor, that concludes midsize companies with high IT capabilities grow 30% faster than their peers.
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There are two ways to bridge this gap:
1) Let Microsoft tell the company how to do its business.
2) Train employees to use the tools that have already cost the company tens of thousands to do the company business.
That's where AEmeritus comes in.
Posted by amoranthus
at 6:38 PM NZT
Updated: Monday, 12 September 2005 6:43 PM NZT
