Survey Looks at IT Importance and Small Businesses

Microsoft released some interesting findings today regarding small businesses and information technology. Many of these businesses seem to be envious of larger corporations when it comes to IT resources.

The majority (79%) think that larger businesses gain significant advantage from having access to better IT resources. 37% still use Web mail, such as Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo! services, rather than business e-mail services such as Microsoft Hosted Exchange.

Some other interesting stats include:

- 39% of surveyed businesses have grown over the last year, while 36% had remained steady.

– Russian small businesses are the most likely to have IT (97%) while 91% of U.S. businesses use IT

– 67% of Chinese small businesses use social networking applications to talk to existing customers and 57% use them to promote their business compared to 26% and 24%,respectively, of small businesses in the U.K.

"Despite their varying businesses and greatly differing needs, many small businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on information technology and the Internet for networking, communications and sales. As they become more Web-savvy, we’re seeing that small businesses are starting to seriously consider hosted services to meet some of their IT needs," said John Zanni, general manager, Software + Services Industry team, for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. "At this time of economic uncertainty, the benefits of buying IT services on a subscription basis become ever more apparent."

It’s good that more importance is being placed upon information technology these days, but there is probably still not nearly enough. When you see all of the businesses out there with sites that don’t work, you have to wonder how much they even pay attention to their web presence at all. And that leads one to wonder how much importance they actually do place on IT.