What Microsoft Has Meant to Marketers

This past week, Bill Gates pretty much stepped away from Microsoft, which got me thinking about what Microsoft has done for marketers and the marketing profession over the years.

First off, there are the tools of the trade that almost all of us use - those trusty stand-bys, Word and PowerPoint.

I’m old enough to remember the type-writer - including the first IBM’s with some sort of memory. They had a dial on the side, and you could store pages in the typewriter, and dial them back up for re-use. (I have no recall of how you actually edited these documents - there must have been some sort of little screen.)

When I began my professional career, we used an online, mainframe word processor that was extremely limited in terms of what it could do. I think there were two fonts - Times Roman and Helvetica - and you had to insert macros in the document if you wanted to do any formatted. (The macro for bold was “bd.”, which was inserted before the word you wanted to appear in bold.) Then there was the Wang word processor (a pre-cursor to Multi-Mate?). Word Perfect. AmiPro. And then there was Word.

And pretty soon, we were all using Word.

How did we live without it?

How did we live without hundreds of fonts? Without tables? Without embedded graphics? Without columns? Without instant TOCs? Without styles?

You could argue we got along just fine, but if one of the first and highest purposes of marketing is to communicate clearly, then Microsoft has provided us with a tool that enables us to do so more effectively. (Sure, we probably waste more time futzing around than we have to; and maybe all that ability to cut and paste, spellcheck, and find-replace has made us sloppy and lazy, but I’m someone who has a lot of appreciation for Word.)

PowerPoint? Mixed feelings. Yes, it’s great to be able to easily change a presentation to tune it to the specifics of a situation - years ago, you had a 35 mm slide set that you could change every 6 months or so, and at great expense. Or you relied on fairly clumsy and primitive “overhead foils”. But with PowerPoint, it’s also easy to get into endless tweaking, “playing designer,” the hours-upon-hours that you can spend searching through ClipArt galleries! There are definitely times when PowerPoint is an anti-productivity tool.

But on balance, I think that the Microsoft Office application set has been a boon to marketers. (No, I haven’t forgotten about budgeting with Excel, and using Access as a d.b. - I just don’t rely on them the way I do Word and PPT. And, while I’m at it, I’m writing this post in Windows Live Writer, which is a pretty darned useful app.)

And then there’s what Microsoft has shown us about the power of good marketing.

Say what you will about Microsoft business tactics - and I did spend some time in a company that certainly felt victimized by them at one point - Microsoft has also shown us the power of marketing and branding, elevating, in the process, the position and value of marketing. No dismissing their marketing department as “fluff”. No keeping them from a seat at The Table.

And time and again, they’ve taught us the lesson that your products don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be able to do the job and provide value. I logged a lot of career time in companies pursuing the Holy Grail of the absolutely best and greatest technology ever, only to fall to competitors that out-marketed us with products that were easier to understand and easier to use - and generally a lot cheaper. As marketers, we look down on such competitors at our peril.

I’d also like to say that, of all the co-marketing programs I’ve ever been involved in, the only ones that were ever really worth a damn were Microsoft’s. Yes, they were coin operated: if you weren’t producing for them, no goodies for you. But they sure knew how to pour on the program love if you helped them make sales.

Despite all this gush, I’m in no way a sublime Microsoft zealot.

On the occasion of Bill Gate’s exiting the scene, I just wanted to send a few props his way for what he and Microsoft have done for marketing over the years.

So long, Bill. And thanks.

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