How Microsoft ’s Bizspark manages to increase my frustration as an entrepreneur?
Let me just share with you a recent experience with Bizspark, a great Microsoft program for entrepreneurs.
For those of you who don’t know about Bizspark, it is a program dedicated to help entrepreneurs with free access to MS software, mostly for developpers, with great networking capabilities and with potential exposure for your startup. It’s team is dedicated, easily accessible and quite helpful.
I interviewed a few months ago her representative in France, Lubomira Rochet. My company, Idaos, which develops projects around the social web, is part of Bizspark.
Let me also say that I have never feared, or bitched against Microsoft. I have run Corbis France and EMEA for 4 years, a Gates company, have had the opportunity to meet once with Bill at his home, am grateful to MS for all they have done since i first used MS DOS 30 years ago and have quite a few friends who love working at MS.
But i have switched to MAC OS the day Windows 7 was released. And i went to Bizspark to download a simple Office Suite for Mac OS. And guess what, I couldn’t. You have to use Windows OS to get your free copy of the Office Suite. If you use Windos OS, you get your free lunch. If you don’t, you starve.
Well, i guess some guys in Redmond still operate under 1980’s marketing wisdom and vision. Too bad really.
Hello franck
Good news: i manage that program, every aspect of it.
Maybe it was not clear for you, but bizspark is a program for software developers/entrepreneurs. People building product on windows, SQL, Silverlight.. with a tool called Visual Studio, that is ony available on Windows.
We provide free software, for deve, test and production, for people about to develop software on windows.
office, for example, is only available for people developing Office applications. it s not availbale for internal use, same thing with windows seven.
So unless you plan to develop an app for Office Mac, you don t need Office Mac, that s why it s not in the package. There are many other ways to get Office for mac, it s really not expensive.
that said, if you planned to develop and application for Office Mac, let us know and we will help you.
Once again, bizspark is not a program to offer software to small companies, it s a program for software companies, willing to develop applications on the Microsoft stack. Office and windows -for internal use- are not part of the agreement. And by the way, you will need to run windows to use Visual Studio anyway…
Hello Julien,
Thank you for your comment and i appreciate the quality of the program which i am not yet fully using. Congratulations on the good work.
As you know, « Le diable est dans les details » and, in my experience as a CEO for the past 10 years, each and every detail matters.
If the cost of the program is not really expensive, I guess MS does not expect lots of revenus from it. So why not include it free as the other ones?
We don’t expect revenues from it, there is no upfront cost to the program, but we don t feel that Office Mac is a very popular platform for developers and startups. is it ?
I actually don t know a single application for Office Mac but if your developers want to develop one, let me know.