The Death of SBS by Support?

My buddy Karl has been through a lot with SBS support over the years. He writes that the death of SBS will come from the lack of support.

The last year of Microsoft patch QA has been painful, for a lot of us that are in charge of supporting it. It’s hard to talk to an IT partner and have them say that their “SBS has been rock solid since we turned off Windows Update stuff.” You hear the same from the customers still using Windows NT4, Windows 2000 and so on – It just works. And it works great if you turn your blind eye to the fact that you’re exposing yourself and your customers to the Internet at large but those are just details I suppose.

SBS support for us has been fairly good but I’d be lying to you if I said that we think we can support it in the future. If I ever get a callback/email from Greg Boyd, Rene Alamo or Jessica Emmons my organization will be going to the Premier Support with Microsoft for the SBS product because the complexity is clearly way over our head.

What Karl is coming to realize, as I’ve written in my “I’m no longer an SBSer” blog post, is that sometimes the cost of complexity with SBS cannot be justified for a small business that has complex requirements. I’m not suggesting that SBS is not the best platform for small business at all, I’m just saying that if you don’t have the expertise, standardization and “all Microsoft apps” in your deck you’re going to have a lot more pain managing it than a standalone server. And please don’t troll about virtualization, you’re not getting E12 to work in a VM reliably no matter how much RAM you throw at it.