Microsoft 365, Google Workspace & Selling through the Channel

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Could you give me a brief primer on the channel, who they are, how you worked together, then my second question is when did Office 365 launch?

It launched in June 2011. The first channel where Microsoft has the most success is called VARs or value-added resellers. These resellers cannot buy product and sell it directly from Microsoft, they buy through distributors like Ingram Micro, Cynics or Tech Data, which were created in the late eighties to resell software because Microsoft didn't want a relationship with 30,000 US VARs. That channel has existed forever and is extremely important to what we will speak about.

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Could you give me a brief primer on the channel, who they are, how you worked together, then my second question is when did Office 365 launch?

The second channel is slightly newer and is called a channel partner, a quintessential example being CDW. These sellers used to have retail stores but are all online today. There are many of them and they sell software and hardware. The third channel is system integrators such as Accenture and Deloitte, whose bread and butter is helping you integrate your software from Microsoft and others. They will become the real winner in the cloud war. Microsoft cares deeply about those three channels, who are all absolutely critical.

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Tell me about the difference between Office 365 and Google Workspace.

The question sent to me was what I thought of Workspace as a competitor, and my answer to that was we didn't. Google made a fundamental flaw which they are still battling with today. They first launched Workspace to the SMB market in particular. The SMB channel has 25,000 VARs in the US and many more in other countries. Most of those SMBs are owned by founders who loved what they did and didn't start their business to deal with technology. When I did this research four years ago, we found that 50 PCs was the stage when most founders opted to hire an IT professional to manage it for them. Prior to that, they used a local Microsoft VAR to manage their PCs, and those VARs held incredible sway over 25 million US small businesses. They don't make technology decisions without consulting a VAR, so the idea of selling technology directly to SMBs was very tough.

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