Brand Power: Apple Blowout Quarter Microsoft Earning Plunges

Following yesterday's blowout quarter by Apple, Microsoft announced 5,000 job cuts and decreased earnings today (by 11%). It came in no surprise that EVERYONE should be doing bad; as a matter of fact, high-end brands were expected to be obliterated in this recession but Apple was able to beat expectations delivering blowout numbers.

Last year analysts were skeptical about Apple not having a low-end notebook or even a reduced MacBook while competitors were rushing out with netbooks to target the low end of the market.

Building a brand like Apple is not about volume but intimacy with the customers, a highly targeted relationship with the customer to create brand appeal. Knowing your market and meeting customer demand is where it all starts, the same solution can be sold very differently if you position it properly. Much like how automobile industry positions their brand: Toyota can sell the same Camry for 40-50% more with Lexus badges on it simply because they knew and targeted two different types of buyers.

Microsoft on the other spectrum went for volume (surprise?) and low intimacy thus its revenue and profit rely on mass market adoption. In this model profit margins erode rapidly over time thus new/updated product must be introduced. This is where Microsoft is having issues with their low margin Windows XP being the ideal OS on all the little netbooks (accounted for a majority of the increase in overall mobile PC shipments to U.S. retailers in December, according to the NPD Group. The number of laptops shipped rose 23% to 1.9 million units, with 14% of that growth attributable to mini-notebooks ). Windows Vista is not suitable for netbooks since it needs much more powerful hardware to support it.


The take away? Become the premium brand to your customer regardless of where your market focus is and build strong relationships that create stickiness with your offerings. At the end of the day you're not the only solution provider in town, be creative and maximize the tools and resources (private label) around you.

The Empire Strikes Back: Reselling Google Apps

Another vendor has entered the channel with promises and optimism, this time its the search king Google. Yesterday Google introduced their new Reseller Program focus solely on gApps Premier Edition (email, chat, word, spreadsheets, presentations, and security). Until now Google only cooked up the menu to resell Google enterprise search appliances, Apps and Maps to enterprise customers. Key word 'Enterprise' partner program.

And now Google is ready to grow their channel during this economy knowing Microsoft is consolidating with web-based Office Web Applications not ready until 2010.

Google and Microsoft solutions can actually coexist depending on each customer on a case-by-base basis since Google has a slightly different approach to their channel. Solution providers or VARs may even combine the two but ultimately Google App is more appropriate as a cloud-based solution at lower cost than say an on-premises solution from Microsoft. Microsoft is restructuring its channel while Google has just begun, the perfect storm's thunder and lighting.

I am not surprise that Google doesn't having a deal registration because they spend years building their brand and offer free tools directly to customers. So the customers are already trained and used to their brand while Microsoft spend trillions creating products to build a service around their brand.

VARs and solution providers should focus on the business drivers: Continue to foster your relationship with your customers, look for ways to add value to their business, strengthen your brand, and deliver flexible solution (SaaS) that you can build your business on for the long haul. That translates to high customer retention, brand recognition and recurring revenue with real margins!

Pointivity Launches New Partner Program to Resell Online Services

Pointitivy released a new partner program for partners to resell a wide range of online services included hosted Exchange, SharePoint, CMR, BlackBerry services, anti-virus & spam filters by Postini, and email archiving by Global Relay.  Through this new program, partners will receive complete end to end private label solution with valuable brand support package and a provisioning engine to get started immediately.

You get to choose from different private label storefront templates to launch the ecommerce store that includes all the html, graphics and content. Next you will receive your own control panel to manage your customers and your customers get access to your branded control panel for a wide range of self administer features.

We provide all the go-to-market strategies for partners to strengthen their brand(s) and create stickiness with their customers.

For more information please visit our partner site.