Interesting point about the MS revenue heart; look at what Gates say's recently in Interview with Diamond Technology Partners/CONTEXT
and where MS see's the future of their business...
contextmag.com
>>>>
GATES: But nobody owns the customer. Nobody owns them.
CONTEXT: For companies that leverage a skill like you do, that's one thing. But for companies that have played the game across a wide variety of fronts and have no particular skill that's a clear leverage point, the one thing they do have is relationships with customers. Can't companies do something to hold customers through mass customization?
GATES: I totally agree, and that ties back to the Internet in a big way. To map this into Microsoft terms, we have a business called Microsoft Office, one of the most profitable businesses around. It makes Coke look bad. Today it's being characterized by the one-time sale of the physical package that you buy. In the future, we'll get your permission to send you mail once a month and collect bits that describe how you use Office. We think we'll get 90% to 95% of the people to agree to that. We'll make sure what we send is very informative to them and tells them what new pieces of Office they might want to download. And, if they're paying our annual fee, of course, they get everything in there. Our relationship with that customer will be drastically different. We'll know the nature of their current machine.
CONTEXT: You will mass customize, is that what you're saying?
GATES: Absolutely. We have to. That is the future of the Office business. Our relationship with our customer will be our big asset. We'll use that asset and the technology asset to, hopefully, create something that's very hard for people to duplicate.
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Marry this strategy with evolving progress on micropayment technology and it's pretty compelling.
dd |
