New Small Business Support

A new set of educational and support tools will help Microsoft build a deeper relationship with small businesses, providing them with resources such as free or low-cost technical support and online business and software training.

Reaching Small Business

Small businesses, which Microsoft defines as organizations with fewer than 50 employees, are a particularly difficult market for IT vendors to reach. Most do not have professional IT staff who keep up with technology, and their modest IT budgets rule out significant expenditures on marketing and sales efforts to reach them.

Nevertheless, they have one critical attribute for Microsoft: their numbers. Approximately 40 million small businesses worldwide, including about 7 million in the United States, have at least one PC. Access Markets International, which defines small businesses as having fewer than 99 employees, estimates that 76 million small businesses worldwide spent more than US$300 billion on IT in 2002.

Operating on the assumption that many of these small businesses might be attracted by educational and technical support resources that can be delivered inexpensively over the Web, Microsoft designed Small Business+ to reach them. The program, for which registration is free, offers the following benefits: