News
Microsoft Launches Advertising Campaign
- By Scott Bekker
- 01/22/2001
Slowly, but surely,
Microsoft
Corp. is beginning to provide some insights into its future plans.
Nearly four months after introducing its .NET platform,
Microsoft has launched a $200 million U.S. advertising campaign around the
“Software for the Agile Business” tagline.
The main focus of the ad campaign will showcase Microsoft’s
ability to meet the ever-changing requirements of enterprises.
In launching this new marketing effort, the Redmond-based
giant is aligning itself to directly compete against the likes of Sun
Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp., and IBM Corp. in the increasingly competitive
and lucrative enterprise software market.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the announcement also comes on the
heels of Microsoft’s acquisition of Great Plains Software.
“Once they acquired
Great Plains, I though this was something they were going to do,” says Dan
Kuznetsky, program vice president for systems software at IDC. “Before they didn’t have any high-end
business applications. Now that they do, they’re going to go after the likes of
Oracle and Sun to gain a piece of the business application market.”
Looking ahead, Kuznetsky believes this is just the beginning
of things to come from Microsoft.
“They’re beginning to show how they’re going to roll out
their .NET strategy,” says Kuznetsky.
“There are a lot of markets that Microsoft does not play in that they
have their eye on and I wouldn’t be surprised if they made more acquisitions.
The .NET umbrella is very large. They’re trying to spread the grand vision of
Microsoft as a leading supplier across the enterprise, from middleware and
operating systems to business applications.” – Jim Martin
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.