Best blog post comment ever: “Nice Eulogy”

It took over a week to catch up with the comments regarding the “Death of a Services Salesman” blog series. I’m glad so many of you enjoyed it, I got more comments on this and more ad money than ever before. Now I can retire and live in a tent! 🙂

The commentary seemed split between oneliners that I read and long, extended rants that I deleted. Told you I would do that. If you have an opinion or insight that can fill more than a paragraph, honestly, you’re doing yourself and everyone else a disservice by not having a blog of your own.

“Nice Eulogy”

If you saw DoaSS as an eulogy, it probably was. Please turn the lights off on your way out.

On the other hand, we’ve seen this before. Technology (and solution providers) are naturally phased out by technological improvements. But that doesn’t mean that there is a mass extinction event on which everything as you knew it a second ago ceases to exist. Remember that Gmail has been out for 6 years and Microsoft signaled the current state of affairs at least 4 years ago (which leads me to believe that people that thought it was an eulogy didn’t actually read the blog posts but instead just reacted to their own fear of not being able to continue running business as usual)

Quite the contrary, the phase out period is extended – but only the first movers tend to survive. They get to the new market before the rest of the sheep flood it and completely render it impossible to differentiate and compete in.

The faster you accept that things are changing, the faster your company will grow. No, this blog is not meant as an abuse broadcast system (another comment) – it’s meant as a sounding board. I speak to hundreds sometimes thousands of people each week – and I use this blog to voice the insight I get from my interactions to see if I’m only getting a message from a small/vocal biased group or if this is an overall state of industry.

That’s how I know that if you’re sitting around formulating strategies over virtualizing servers in the cloud you’re stuck in 2006. Remember when good ol’ Vlad talked about a $99 SBS box and had thousands of them running? Yeah, good luck selling that today – you’ll find a handful of people with a lot of money and the number of people that consume IT like that is decreasing, not increasing. So by all means, try to run your consulting practice like you did in 2006 – few clients with thousands of dollars to burn on IT. High risk, slow deployments, expensive staff – and the few SMB bloggers that are still around will hopefully speak fondly of you and what a great job you did building the company’s first LAN.

The point of DoaSS is to make you move – quickly. If after reading it you don’t have a sense of urgency, go read it again.