Thanks to all of you who wrote to me to say something nice about the previous post. Even though I’m not depressed/sad about what is going on, I appreciate the kind words and all that.
However, a common theme to the emails has been:
You need a vacation.
Just go somewhere, ignore it for a while, start fresh when you come back.
Here is the deal. This year we’re doing a lot of traveling, we’ve beefed up support, customer service and sales and with the new thing that we’ll have online towards the mid-to-late 2009…. I don’t want to be in the position of a Dell executive trying to address the channel – In order to say that we’re the best damn solution out there I need to actually believe it. Right now, there are issues, even if they are minor ones, they need to be fixed before I get to go out and make an ass out of myself.
The thing about support and why try to work on it all… Here is the thing: 95% of the active partners never even open a support request with us. And for 99% of the people the stuff just works or they pay attention to the advisories and deployment guides and they manage. Those are the people that I work for and why I push the monkeys so hard: none of this stuff should require support, it should just work. And so long as we stick to our process and our partners stick to our guides, it does. It does need some finesse though.
P.S. Comments closed, every time I put Office and Solutions in the subject I get spammed by furniture companies.