IT woes; even Microsoft will have sweeping layoffs

[DanCyn]

I'm not a huge techie, but I am a small business owner. All I know is that MS provides an "easy" avenue for me to be able to integrate all of my applications and be paperless. And because I'm tech savvy and business savvy enough to understand what that brings to the table, it provides me a true competitive advantage and allows me to charge lower fees at a higher margin. I have no desire to try to bridge and have interfaces built between applications - or to do redundant data entry. MS makes it easy for me, and does so at a reasonable cost given my ROI.

MS may not be the answer to huge corporations and open-source folks who truly believe in write-once ran anywhere, but it sure makes things a lot easier to run a small business efficiently.

 

[jumbopackage]

I'm not a huge techie, but I am a small business owner. All I know is that MS provides an "easy" avenue for me to be able to integrate all of my applications and be paperless. And because I'm tech savvy and business savvy enough to understand what that brings to the table, it provides me a true competitive advantage and allows me to charge lower fees at a higher margin. I have no desire to try to bridge and have interfaces built between applications - or to do redundant data entry. MS makes it easy for me, and does so at a reasonable cost given my ROI.

MS may not be the answer to huge corporations and open-source folks who truly believe in write-once ran anywhere, but it sure makes things a lot easier to run a small business efficiently.

What google and cloud computing bring to the table is not having to have the IT infrastructure to support all that. MS's solution requires that you buy hardware and licenses and support it. And then there are IT support costs on top of that as well.

For 50 bucks/year/user, Google offers a set of basic productivity tools, e-mail, messaging, backup, storage and all the other stuff you need to be productive. It's not quite as full-featured as Office (yet), but the goal is to do all those things you're talking about, but do it without having to pay the "MS tax" on everything you buy and do. You probably don't realize how much money you actually pay MS for all the IT infrastructure you have around.

IF it meets your needs (and for a lot of smallish businesses I suspect it would), it's not a bad approach. You could have all the IT infrastructure you need to run a small business for just a few hundred bucks a year.