Microsoft began a US$500 million marketing campaign on Thursday to stir enthusiasm among corporate customers for its new products and grab business from IBM, its biggest rival in the business technology market.
Microsoft's marketing drive and its strategic assault on IBM comes as it prepares to roll out a series of new products in the second half of this year, led by Windows Vista and Office 2007. The company is positioning the new desktop offerings as a kind of dashboard for managing businesses, especially when linked to other new Microsoft programs for worker communications and collaboration, searching company databases, business intelligence and customer relationship management.
The new products, taken together, can help companies reduce costs, increase worker productivity, and hasten the pace of innovation, Steve Ball-mer, Microsoft's chief executive, told a gathering of corporate customers and industry analysts in New York.
The networked style of work is a departure from the way most office workers have used Microsoft desktop software in the past -- as personal productivity programs for reports, spreadsheets and presentations, which are then passed around by e-mail attachments.
The Microsoft approach, Ballmer said, is to offer new software tools for what he called "the next wave of improvement in business operations." That path, he insisted, is very different from that of IBM, which he portrayed as mainly a services business whose consultants help companies and then depart.
"We're talking about giving people in business the tools to be more productive every day," he said. "IBM is talking about a project."
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