Here’s a Great Profit Improvement Tool – Part 2

As an update that underscores the ease of use and versatility of this tool, I want to report that I have made 22 new blog posts in under an hour. Pretty cool. So let's consider how this tool saves you the added expenses of upgrading your office computer system or systems.

Forget the fact that software now costs more than the computers that we're buying, the biggest expense of a new computer system in the office is learning to use the new productivity tools, especially if you are the only "employee" of your Small Office/Homes Office based business. If you aren't familiar with "opportunity cost," it is simply defined as the possible profits that you could have earned by using a resource differently; in this case it's the resource of time that we are considering. As the only employee of your company, you need to be busy doing whatever it is that customers pay you for. If you don't have enough customers yet, then the most valuable activity that you can be engaged in is Selling. Even if you are a tech support company, your time is best spent fixing other people's computers, or improving other businesses computers, rather than working on your own computers. There is a legend that great businessman Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic (known as the god of manufacturing," I'll post his story later) once walked into one of his manufacturing plant offices and saw a "computer" sitting on an employee's desk (it was actually the monitor). Legend has it that he picked up the "computer" and in front of his astonished staff walked to a window and threw it out. He proclaimed that "computers do not work, people do." I am certain he was aware of the power of the computer, but he wanted to make the point to his employees that they could get bogged down. Certainly, the learning curve of a new system is just like that. Some of you may remember WordPerfect, after they took over WordStar's market (yes anyone who remembers WordStar and Lotus, and even Word Perfect is as old as Steve Jobs and me. Of course I remember when word processing was an electronic typewriter with a small 1x4 lcd)? If you do, you'll remember how we had a new learning curve. We used keyboard templates, and competing software companies had "WordPerfect commands" capabilities wherein we could switch back to WordPerfect commands because it was too difficult to relearn the new Microsoft commands. It seems almost laughable to today's generation of computer literate workers. But that reality helped us to understand that when new technology was purchased, we had to pay attention to the training element of learning how to use the new equipment.

Today, that challenge is made so much greater as we have to learn how to integrate all of the equipment in our office, while at the same time learning how to get it all to work with the Internet, Networks - both physical and virtual, email and email Clients. It has simply gotten to be too complex. Have you ever felt like you have become the Computer Help Desk or Tech department in your small business? Have you ever felt like tech requirements and technical support (calling up the mobile technicians and paying them to fix a problem that wasn't' there yesterday)is draining your working capital as well as your precious time? The entire Office 2010 suite seems to have the potential of eliminating most of that. Buy Word 2010 (of course, you're already seeing that I would recommend buying the entire suite), and you won't have to go through reading a "Cloud based" service's "help pages" trying to figure out how to get it and your word processor to talk to each other. With the growing cloud computing model, it was time that a software company figured how to simplify all of that for us. Once again; bravo to you Microsoft, for getting it right for us and making it so we can focus on our businesses not our office equipment.

Last, but not least, it seems that Microsoft's marketing department has been working in unison with the Developers, and made "getting Office 2010" as east as using it. The new pricing model is in line with our needs as small to medium sized business owners. In addition to being a more affordable pricing model, Microsoft has made it possible to "try it, before you buy it" buy allowing free downloads of the Office 2010 beta. The new suite of tools is scheduled to arrive on store shelves in June, 2010. I strongly suggest that you download it now, and see if you aren't as excited about its features as much as I am.