In the day one keynote of its Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft was working hard to persuade its hardware and software partners of the opportunity that its platforms offered them. Key to that is convincing the assembled partners that its platform represented a growth opportunity. That means talking about the growth when products are doing well—and talking about the size of the potential market when they aren't.
Doing well, of course, are Windows and Office—a billion users of the pair—and perhaps more importantly, as it represents the future, Office 365. Microsoft calls it its fastest growing commercial product, claiming in January a 150 percent increase in the number of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using it in the last year. This growth seems only likely to continue, with new pricing plans announced last week that should give SMBs a little more for their money.
Azure, too, is looking like a success story, with Microsoft claiming 250,000 customers, adding 1,000 more every day. Just as Microsoft is having to sell the cloud to IT departments, it's also having to sell it to its partners. Here, the pitch is one that the company has been making since the start of the year: being "cloud-oriented" boosts profit and growth, with the company claiming that companies doing at least 50 percent of their business "in the cloud" have 1.6 times the gross profit margin, and 2.4 times faster growth.
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