The News Review:
- Is It Time for Microsoft’s Ballmer to Make Way for zzie?
- Google Launches Google Apps Reseller Program
- Microsoft testing Google Docs rival
Is It Time for Microsoft’s Ballmer to Make Way for zzie?
Seeking Alpha NY
Just who is Ray zzie and what is the deal?. As slogans go it’s not particularly catchy. But the sentiment is clear: Just packaging software collecting the money and then producing a new version a few years later (whether people want one or not) is no longer a sustainable business plan. The relationship with customers must be constant and continuous. Instead of discrete one time transactions the money—whether from subscription fees or advertising—will flow constantly.
Google Launches Google Apps Reseller Program
CRN NY
The program which pits Google Apps against Microsoft’s budding portfolio of SaaS applications offers VARs a 20 percent discount and the ability to receive recurring revenue on a product that Google has primarily sold directly to customers in the past. Google partners will receive $10 per year on a $50 per-user per-year subscription fee and they’ll also maintain the billing relationship with the customer and pre-pay Google in advance for each one-year subscription. Partners will also be able to add their own services and bill customers on a monthly quarterly or annual basis. Solution providers in the program can now begin marketing sales and technical training and Google expects transactions to start in March said Stephen Cho director of Google Apps channels. Google is betting that its productivity suite will win over VARs that have grown tired of waiting for Microsoft to release a Web-based counterpart to its ffice packaged software suite.
Related from Vistra-corp: A Sign of the Times: Google Closes Engineering Plant in Austin
Microsoft testing Google Docs rival
Computerworld New Zealand New Zealand
5 million people have signed up for the beta since it was released. Its capabilities are quite limited however. Users must create new documents in the desktop versions of Word PowerPoint and Excel and then save them to the web where they are stored on Microsoft servers. thers can view the documents online but editing them requires downloading the documents to a PC and opening them in ffice. That contrasts with online suites such as Google Docs and Zoho where the entire process of creating saving and editing documents is done from inside a browser. But Microsoft has been testing a ‘technical preview’ of the ffice web applications which will allow users to create new documents online without needing to have ffice on their PC. The web applications — Word PowerPoint Excel and neNote — include a task ribbon similar to that in ffice allowing people to perform light editing from inside their browser including formatting text and tables.