Heading to the MVP Summit (for all the wrong reasons)

I do not talk about it often, but I have been given a prestigious Microsoft MVP awards twice now and everyone on that team has been just spectacular to me over the years. I got a lot of opportunities with the program that the money just can’t buy (no matter how much licensing you sell) and the MVP Summit is sort of the grand benefit of the whole program – the ability to network and deal with some of the best and brightest in this industry.

I originally danced away from going, really felt like it was better to just stay home and work on Shockey Monkey (Travis and Hank will be doing that now, you will be working with them next week if you are on the beta) how I really did not want to chance being out of town because of Katie being almost a month till giving birth.

And then today, barring anything unforseen, I will definitely be there. All thanks to AT&T. I got AT&T Tilt and Samsung BJ II. Tilt is so pathetic that aside from the device esthetics, its the usual Microsoft crapshoot unchanged since 03. Blackjack is slightly better, but still needing 20-30 tweaks to get to the working mode. And with all that, the behavior is still clunky, unreliable, error prone and so far behind Apple it’s not even funny. Forget about using this in business. Yes, it was fantastic in 04, 05, 06.. but now, not so much.

You see, my company makes a ton of money off Microsoft. We are currently mostly an infrastructure company, that is, we make money deploying, managing and scaling solutions powered by Microsoft creations.

But Microsoft 2008 is not what it was back in 1998 when we started this enterprise, it is not what it was in 2001-2003 when OWN put together ExchangeDefender, it is far from what it is now that solutions like Shockey Monkey and all our Web 2.0 projects are online.

Today, Microsoft is behind. Far, far, far behind. It seems to be losing on all fronts except the server. Even worse, it seems to be lacking any direction and is chasing the industry leaders and innovators with crippled and incomplete substitutes that are just not cutting it.

You will never lose giving your customers what they want. You will always lose trying to fight what the users are asking for, buying on their own and demanding. Users are no longer demanding Windows. Users are no longer demanding Windows Mobile. Users are no longer demanding Microsoft.

Next week, I will be at Microsoft trying to decide if Microsoft has any creative juices left, any direction to motivate me to drive my company closer to Microsoft after I come back from my paternity leave… because… and it kills me to say this because I love what Microsoft has done for us over the years.. at this point Microsoft has its eyes on Google and Yahoo, not on its base.