Sage's  main message is "We are not implying we are better than Xero.

Asked his competitor's approach, Rod Drury, CEO of New Zealand-based Xero, responded in an email: "Funny. Our support model wins awards and has highest customer sat. So just noise. We love incumbents using their marketing funds to talk about the challenger."

Drury continued, "Have you crunched our numbers against Sage? Amazing how we have already passed them in their home market" and continued that, "Also Xero added more total small businesses than Intuit in the last year globally." I have always hoped that I played a role in pushing Sage to change the original name, Sage Life to Sage Live, because the ads otherwise would have been talking about Life Support.