Head to head: Apple and Microsoft

This article appeared in the April issue of CRN as part of the main feature "A winning formula for reselling mega-vendors"

LeetGeek started life as an Apple education reseller and over time has added Microsoft and other vendors to its mix. And although it now views itself as an honest broker of solutions for the company with heterogeneous IT, it still has a deep Apple affinity.

“We have a few serious Apple advocates,” says LeetGeek director Ben Corbett. “And we’re certainly heavily involved with the relationship and filing bug reports with new releases and making sure we’re up to date. If there are any keynotes coming out, [our engineers] stay
up late to watch them.”

A close association with Apple is necessary, especially for design and education clients, who are traditional Apple strongholds, he says. “Apple spends a lot of time and investment in education space – getting to the schools and speaking to leadership and making them understand the story.”

And while Queensland reseller Downs Microsystems still supports Apple after a recent merger, partner in the business Ian Hurley has reservations. “We’re Apple lovers and haters,” Hurley says. “We support them, we’re an Apple service agent, but we also understand the downsides and downfalls.”

And increasingly that leads him to direct customers to consider Microsoft, he says. “Where I think Microsoft has won the game is where they have a consistent OS across all their devices. Microsoft has done a very good job of rewriting the OS.”

Microsoft and Downs Microsystems have also got much closer in recent times. “We have a really strong relationship with Microsoft and have an account manager who’s always helping drive that channel experience. They have a lot of campaigns about moving your customers to Windows.”

At one point, Microsoft provided a Nokia Lumia smartphone running Windows 8, which Hurley used to demonstrate the platform’s advantages to businesses and customers.

“I enjoyed that experience so much and was able to do so much more on my phone and corporate network that I convinced our business to change. And I was then able to show all my customers the experience I was getting and even the diehard Apple fans agree it’s worth a look now.

“So that was a pretty good piece of marketing [from Microsoft]”.