Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it is setting its marketing strategy on small businesses as it sets a goal of growing that niche by 9% by developing offerings to entice them to spend more than they are currently planning.
Chief operating officer Kevin Turner affirmed that there are over 7 million small businesses in the U.S. alone and an increasing amount in India and China.
Turner who is a transfer from Wal-Mart Stores, said that small businesses are increasing their spending by 9 percent a year.
He said "So we better do more than that, because I think we have a big opportunity," which he cautioned was a goal and not a projection based upon data.
This is a must strategy for the tech companies including Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP because of the decrease in IT spending by the larger corporations.
One move that Microsoft is making is to lower minimums on their financing that involve tech products in the $3,000 to $10,000 range.
They have also began intensively marketing their accounting software package for small busiess and are offering rebates as an incentive to switch from the Quickbooks sofeware which is so popular and ubiquitous among small business operations.
They are also trying to create a hybrid set of office live applications and services that will work online and with their offline desktop cousins of Microsoft Office including Excel and Word. This is of course in response to the growing proliferation of online document creating software that is challening the Microsoft Desktop applications market.
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