Not Well-Known for Marketing Prowess

In the News:

Business Week on Google Marketing Apps

Google apps (I've tried word processing and spreadsheet) are good and getting better. Now GOOG wants corporate America to buy premium versions at $50/seat/year. Enter a big billboard campaign backing a 400-person sales army.

Analysis:

8 persons per state. Let's blanket New York. We'll have 4 persons for the NYC metro area, one each in Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, and Schenectady. We'll spread the metro folks one each in Westchester, Manhattan, the other boroughs and Long Island.

OK, that's not fair. New York will have twice the average, because it's a populous state. So in Manhattan we'll have one person covering finance, another covering advertising.

Stop! Too much sarcasm, Martin.

Reflection:

I've done marketing in Manhattan for a small time-sharing company. We had eight sales people backed by me and a half-dozen engineers.

Oracle, before the Sun acquisition, had just under 20,000 people in sales and marketing. That's an order of magnitude estimate of what you need to market to the world.

In the quarter ended June 30, 2009, MSFT spent 24% of revenue on sales and marketing. In the same quarter GOOG spent 9%. Clearly these are different business models. Let's ask Wall Street what it thinks of these two companies.

GOOG's revenue, latest quarter, was about one third of MSFT's revenue. GOOG's market cap was about two thirds of MSFT's market cap. Wall Street's opinion is that GOOG will grow its earnings a lot faster than MSFT will.

Summary:

So the question is this: should Google add a serious marketing effort to sell apps? If I were Google I would say no. I'd pick just one small target (e.g., drug companies) and look to convert that segment.

There's no real hurry about this. MS Office still dominates a market when the competition, Open Office, is free and superior in many ways.

Every fact in this post was extracted via Google searches. The spreadsheets (all .XLS) that I downloaded along the way were viewed and crunched with OO.