Microsoft Financial to Grow: Watch Out

Leasing News is going to attempt to cover more about Microsoft Financial, a growing entity in the captive leasing marketplace. Dell, HP/Compaq, are growing. In the past manufacturers such as Dana, Studebaker-Worthington, Ford Motor Credit, were very active in financing not only their equipment, but others too.

With Microsoft now going down to a minimum of $3,000 for its vendors (partners) to help them sell Microsoft software, as well as their equipment, training, installation included, the company certainly will become a tour de force in the equipment leasing industry.

This year Microsoft will be introducing its latest operating system, the successor to XP, this year and their financial arm is gearing up for the sales. Yesterday, the company announced that Vista would be ready for large business customers, who typically buy the company's software in multiyear licenses, in November. But the consumer rollout will be pushed back to January 2007.

The new operating system promises higher security, less spam and pop-ups, and improvements on XP for video and music performance.

Supposedly the trouble has been designing and debugging the new operating system, brimming with features, complexity and an estimated 50 million lines of code. In the original days there never was a finished product, just a Beta version and thus the need for “service packs.”

The bad news is for retailers because the new operating system will miss Christmas consumer sales. This puts more pressure on business sales to push leasing.

This chart gives an indication of the potential leasing sales, and why Bill Gates, head of Microsoft, is the world's richest man at $50 billion.

This comes from netapplications.com, who notes that:

“Microsoft Windows XP breaking 80% market share for the first time, just as Vista approaches. With much of XP's gains coming from upgrades of other Microsoft operating systems, Apple's Mac OS has finally passed Windows 98 in usage. Mac OS market share in February was 4.28%, while Win98 dipped to 3.89%.

Apple market share first broke 4% for the month of December 2005, and has hovered around 4.25% since. Note that this data is based on computers browsing the internet, and does not attempt to reflect server operating system usage.

Microsoft is also growing its finance arm, leasing and finance, for its “partners” (dealers and re-sellers,) which includes equipment, installation and training costs. They want to control their dominance, and even have entered the manufacturing field with small, hand held computers.