Vendor Bias and Influence

Microsoft's Robert Scoble who writes a well read blog suggests that "blogger ethics" are why many bloggers wrote about Google's corporate email offering, but did not write about MSN's similar offering a few months ago.

Let's do the math. Microsoft spent $ 8.7 billion in sales and marketing last year. That is more than Google's revenues.

How much does Microsoft spend on advertising with WSJ and InformationWeek? With Gartner and Forrester? With Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs?  Should we not ask if their reporters, industry and financial analysts are magnitude more biased towards Microsoft than some blogger who earns pennies from Google ads?

This week has been full of "conflict of interest" discussions. The WSJ on bloggers. InformationWeek on industry analysts. But as I wrote earlier - The buyer is in charge, has been in charge, will be in charge.  That is why most well structured procurements take input from a number of sources and have various steps in the process, and minimize any bias any single influencer may have.

And larger vendors still have more bucks to spend on the traditional influencers. So the question to ask is - Microsoft, why did you not publicize the MSN announcement yourself - spend a bit of the $ 8+b budget? Could it be because you really do not want to cannibalize your enterprise Outlook revenues?

Comments

[Mohit Mahendra]

Cannibalization is most likely the reason. Same reason why SAP tried to downplay the launch of their on-demand CRM service last week, while salesforce.com touts the end of software. You could say Google is to Microsoft what salesforce.com is to SAP.

[vinnie mirchandani]

You are right in the analogy though Google would need to introduce calendaring and many other features Outlook currently offers..but if current price differences hold around SaaS v/s traditional license it is pretty significant so MS, if it retained the customer, would suffer cannibalization. More importantly from a CIO's perspective the cost of outsourced or internal email support could be much lower...