Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Last year was the first in the recent memory that I skipped out on WPC; two from my team went and had a far different impression of it than I used to. This year, I went again with the team that for the lack of a better word has been the “mop” of Own Web Now: cleaning up the mess left by years of vertical growth and lack of really solid business controls that we needed to get to our SAS 70 and many enhancements I said we were working on Jan 1 to bring more consistency to the business.

Every day counts.

But it isn’t every day that you’re challenged to take your game to the next level, working shoulder to shoulder with some of the best in business. When I think of where I started in this business, and where we are today, it just blows my mind.

WPC is the driving force behind motivating me to that step.

So, let me be honest about WPC and how it changes our future in a way that Microsoft won’t advertised it.

Community

We spent roughly the cost of a nice sedan on our presence at WPC as a sponsor. No, it was not to give out the tshirts and talk about ExchangeDefender.. It was to more efficiently work with our community.

This year, thanks to the SPAM Show, I am far more in tune with the backchannel of the IT space and the major movers and shakers. But do I get to sit down and have 2 hurricanes with Chris Rue? Curry with Richard Tubb? Faux-beef with Dean Calvert? Talk about acquisitions with Jamison West, who isn’t even our client? Noope. Never do.

The length, the intensity, the frustration of WPC is all about endurance and your willingness to be better. If you’re willing to participate, ask questions and offer advice – even when it doesn’t have material impact for you directly in ROI sense – it will offer you more perspective than you could ever buy from a survey. Face to face is important.

I am more confident now, than ever, to say that there is no real community left. Sitting in the tweetie bird lounge (SBSC Central) made it quite clear that it’s just a bunch of very successful, nice, people that are willing to help one another.

Expo

Ok, so the expo was a mixed bag. As you can tell by the video below, it was not well received by everyone (and I know this is going to come as a shock and disappointment to many, but it’s not my video):

The foot traffic was down from previous years but we still did remarkably well. If you are interested in “selling” stuff from your booth then WPC is not for you. It’s just not that kind of a show. People attending WPC paid $3-5,000 to just show up and they aren’t the ‘tards that want to buy the latest shiny toy for their client just so they could play with it. Those days are long gone.

I spent very little time in the booth, maybe less than 10% of the entire time it was open. Even then, it was simply to meet people there so we wouldn’t have to go through the WPC table meeting area that was as far from food as possible.

Expo was just my hub of operations. And it was worth every penny. Even if it didn’t sign up one more dollar of new business.

Microsoft

Meh.

The keynotes made it more apparent that there is very little vision in that company. They just see the word as competitors they are trying to catch up – Apple, Google, Vmware, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Amazon…  I know they tried hard to put on the fight paint but to me it just seemed like a long infomercial to check out the alternatives.

For example, we are a major Visual Studio / Hyper-V operation. But based on what I saw there, next week two monkeys are in charge of producing a competitive matrix and 2 year cost efficiencies of using Vmware on Linux vs. Windows/Hyper-V. If Microsoft tried so desperately to make a case against Vmware (and not for Hyper-V) then I have to think there are things we aren’t aware of about Vmware and owe it to check it out.

Small Business. Man. I am not going to name the partners and Microsoft employees I watched that presentation with but let’s just say that the disbelief was uniform across my row.

Lessons Learned

Undershirt, dress shirt, tie, suit jacket is no way to walk around the streets of NOLA.

British can get really aggravated when they haven’t had their “proper” tea.

This space is changing… always, changing…

Chris Rue, ESI: Enlightened Self-Interest.

Microsoft SMB’s focus on VAR’s may have jumped the shark at this point. “Thanks for building the LANs boys, we’ll take it from here.” Try the Windows Foundation Server / Home server.

Cost cutting. You could feel the ghosts of the 5,000 laid off Microsoft employees roaming the quality of the conference this year. There have been massive cuts in just about everything. However, Microsoft employees more than made up for it all and really put on a great show. As much as I would have liked more elaborate parties, I am even more impressed with their ability to restrain themselves and focus on fiscal responsibility.

Comfortable shoes. I’m a Bruno Magli / Timberland fan myself. But last week I decided to give a shot to something that a sales rep at Macy’s couldn’t say enough about: Johnston & Murphy. Cheap, look OK and feel like butter. I think these shoes are just about the best pre-WPC decision I made. I know, reading Vladville for shoe advice is a bit of a reach but I recommend what I like 😉

Since Chris Rue is now done speaking and I can attribute quotes to him without fear that he’ll be gunned down for his low “Microsoft opinion / revenue” ratio, last week he really called the Microsoft/Partner relationship:

It’s kinda the equivalent of an abusive relationship

Like…MS keeps beating the fuck out of us

And yet….we all still think “We can change him”

I should wear a t-shirt with that poster from the X-Files

I Want to Believe

That really sums up the business relationship with Microsoft, one that the company becomes less and less sensitive to the more competitive it gets with the impersonal foes in organizations that hide behind fake taglines and misleading ads.

To steal a line from Microsoft: It’s a people business. (Or “People Ready”); You’d hope that as an organization they’d understand that there are people that also support and distribute that software and that it doesn’t “Just work” like Apple does(n’t).

In the past, Microsoft was able to bridge the gap by having some phenomenal field people that were interested in their community if for no other reason than to further their career and professional agenda: we all had to find the common ground.

Today, this is no longer the case. And I can tell you from touching base with many people at Microsoft that I consider friends, who have long moved up, that the spirit that helped Microsoft excel with it’s partners is just no longer there.

And the sad thing is, when business is just about business (which I’ve cautioned many of you reading this blog, that perpetually bitch about how your community resources are going away but you refuse to participate or show support in any freebie events we all do) the decision making is done only on what’s black and white and there is always a cheaper, more effective, more reliable or more suitable widget you can find from somewhere else.

The mass migration of long time Microsoft supporters that you can still see at this conference to Apple, Blackberry, Linux, Google and more ought to be an indicator to Microsoft what they ought to find important.

So I’m with Chris: I want to believe, but I just don’t. Sorry.

Kevin Turner

I always watch these live, from start to finish. Why? You can never underestimate the power of the sales guy to sell you the crap that won’t be available for sale for 2 years. Kevin, for all intends and purposes, runs the business of Microsoft. That business, in case you haven’t noticed, is no different from anything else: selling s***. CEO’s of the world evangelize, promote and motivate their companies forward. People signing the checks, making tough decisions and figuring out where to put money and where to cut it from, typically aren’t the ones that are always being begged for an interview, stuck apologizing for the company dropping the ball, so on and so forth. In case you doubt that, there is a reason I write this blog and none of you know my COO.

But back to Kevin. Kevin was the first guy to tell us that S+S was Microsoft’s new thing and that the era of selling software and solutions through partners was over. In 2006. He is the #1 reason I changed my business model in 2006. And to an extent, I probably owe him some carbon fiber from my Ferrari.

Today, Kevin talked about retail. Kevin talked about the consumer. Kevin talked about data centers.

Notice a pattern there? This is a company that is no longer going to be famous for having a beautifully landscaped campus in Redmond with geeks packed into big rooms where they can be comfortable to work all hours of the day and night. This is no longer a company that is going to have a logo and a web site and thousands of partners in order to reach every business and be a part of the solution.

This is a company that is going to go after it alone.

My take from the presentation: Get on the bus or get ran over by it.

SMB Vision

I’m a huge fan of the SMB Vision presentation.

Seriously.

Whoever came up with it deserves a friggin award. Let me know where to send it.

Brilliant.

Pay no attention to the lack of applause, your partners mumbling in the audience while you announced it, the lack of any excitement in the room. The people were just floored and awed by the opportunity. Really? Really!

The first few slides were awesome too. I love seeing a new person running the SMB business at every WPC and it was very exciting to see the slide with 4 people that preceded the current boss.

Ok, that’s as far as I can push my insincerity. There is no chain of profanities I can use to effectively portray my disbelief in what Microsoft showcased today. So please, feel free to use your own:

Are you _____ ____ insane? Who the ____ thought that was a good idea?

When you’ve got your own people shaking their head walking out of your presentation it tells me you didn’t even run this by your sales force. My god. I guess we’ll be meeting the SMB boss #6 at next WPC because if that was your vision for this market there may not even be a vision next year. It will be called the “SMB Tombstone: Lessons learned by not understanding our market.”

Final Day

Packing right now, looking forward to the final day at WPC. You can smell the cost cutting in the air in New Orleans and for the second year in a row Microsoft managed to deflate it’s audience (hint: It’s channel sales force).

Microsoft’s missed steps make a terrific opportunity for it’s partner base to further establish itself as a solid business void of Microsoft’s control and market dominance, all of which favors that business and the client, not Microsoft or any other vendor for that matter.

As I blogged recently, the Economics and Business 101 blog posts of last year are gone, as are the previous eras in this blog. It’s time to get serious, spot the opportunity and go after it. The time to just roll with the punches and see what happens is over, and this is a golden opportunity to think, act and succeed like Microsoft. No, not the Microsoft you are seeing today (hubmled, vulnerable, emotionally and competitively insecure) but the one that in the past had fantastic people doing their best to push fantastic technology and solutions and find a way for them to work for business.

Google, Apple and Microsoft have made an invisible pact, one that is unavoidable, that all technology will become an unavoidable necessity of life and be sold and provided as a common consumer good and service from a brick and mortar. But so long as there is business out there… there will be a solution opportunity. It’s just that pricing, scalability and solution will not involve the “trusted advisor” but a much more competent hybrid of a few things out there. I don’t think we’ll see the SPF resurgence…

Bring it on WPC….

Interesting day today, lots of announcements again focusing on the cloud. The presentation started with some very cool virtualization technology and the now WPC-customary dig at Vmware followed by a catchup demo of what Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager can do. Very impressive demo of a machine move to Hyper-V while it’s running full motion video.  Crowd loved that one.

Next up – bing, bing, bing song that everyone seemed to enjoy. I’m sure it will be on youtube.com soon.

Then it went downhill a bit. They announced Microsoft’s response to Amazon cloud services (in Azure) and nobody clapped. Ouch. The pricing was announced, but the full pricing details are still sketchy and murky and might not make full sense until PDC. Until then it’s free though. The bandwidth pricing and storage pricing is in-line with what we’re paying Amazon so Microsoft has some work to do because there is really nothing that much special with Azure, Amazon also offers Windows servers and SQL.

Shenanigans

Followed was a presentation on how much Microsoft is investing in R&D. Microsoft is investing $0.9 billion in Windows Mobile platform in 2009. Let me try to break down those numbers for you. That means that Microsoft will invest 900 million dollars in Windows Mobile development. That means if Microsoft had 900 engineers working on Windows Mobile, and each of them was making a $1,000,000 (million dollars) in salary the number would make sense. I don’t know many Microsoft people making a million a year, much less at Microsoft.

What’s that make out of the rest of the numbers?

Always, always, always listen to Ballmer.

If you’ve ever listened to Steve try to answer partners concern about Microsoft’s direction (of plowing over the partners bodies) then you’ve certainly heard this example:

“14 years ago there were a bunch of people were writing TCP/IP stacks. None of them are doing it today. And Microsoft is the biggest company it’s ever been!”

I wonder if he can fully appreciate just how insulting that response is to the people that are selling Microsoft software. Effectively, it feels like someone is firing you while telling you not to worry about the company, it will be better off without you!

But we can learn a lot from Microsoft’s dismissal of the partner channel – because in fact it is a leadership lesson. What Microsoft is in fact saying is, we are going to keep on coming, and keep on coming, and keep on coming, and keep on coming – until this WPC keynote is empty because we’ve matured enough not to need you anymore.

If you’ve got low self-esteem, that’s your problem. This is a leadership lesson in real life – you are on your own. Partnerships are only partnerships while they are profitable, and if there is a more profitable venue that doesn’t involve the partner… Microsoft answers to it’s shareholders, not it’s employees (5,000 wacked) or it’s partners.

So let’s learn from Microsoft: We need market share. If you want to be as successful as Microsoft, you need to fight for market share and lead with your service. Microsoft has one, and it wants the other. It’s your call whether you want to give them the service expertise or not.

. . .

My key take from this conference is that it’s time to bet on the winners. Microsoft is not a winner in many categories and they are operating them in the red. So hey, Google and Amazon are the leaders in the cloud – guess what that does with my R&D budget, even if Azure is a little bit better I am going to go with the winners.

One lesson it seems Microsoft has learned through this process and this economy is the sense of being humble. There is a reason they are adopting standards, there is a reason they are being more open and “free” in many areas – competitive pressure. The more ground gained by Microsoft’s competitors, the more pressure there is on Microsoft on making a better product for it’s customers.

It’s a great time to be in this business.

Day 3 – Watching Kevin Turner, by far the best Microsoft keynote to watch. Why? You’re getting it from the guy that actually runs the company and knows what they are about to do to earn their money. C O O, it’s who actually runs the company, they are the ones who know where the money is going and where the money is coming from. So if you want to partner with Microsoft, on anything, this is where you get your opportunities. It’s not from the BS keynotes outlining shiny toys, it’s from the guy that writes the checks.

Day 1 at WPC is officially in the books and I’ll save you some time if you don’t feel like reading a lot: meh.

The downside: Windows 7, Office 10

The announcement was pretty much as expected. Unfortunately, it is the same old story: unfinished, unreleased, peak at the future. One that the small and medium markets are going to look at seriously.

Virtual XP Mode is cool to me as a geek. But as a business owner and a developer it just gives me the safety net not to look at newer Microsoft technologies, consider or recommend upgrades. So if the line of business stuff can run on the same Windows and .NET environment from 6 years ago (assuming they actually release it this year) then there is no incentive to develop for (and for many of you) incentive to upgrade to the latest.

Obviously Microsoft sales pitch is different to the partners, focusing on how moving to Windows 7 will not impact your workplace or disable current LOBs, but it’s sort of a tombstone to the purchase/install/upgrade/migrate era. Frankly, glad to see that one come to an end.

The Upside (for us): Office Web Apps

Nothing new here, though they spun it rather well. It’s great news for the technology support and business technology companies. Microsoft is stepping up it’s fight with Google and the more they focus on trying to take Google out of the picture, the less time they will have to screw their partner base.

Check out this blog post from Mini-Microsoft from a few days ago:

This is happening, too, while the shine on Google is dulling. Rather than pulling an Apple on us anymore, Google has picked up the nasty habit of pre-announcing technology. Guys, you stole the wrong playbook. And, uh, we don’t want it back.

Microsoft and Google are convinced that the future of the Internet is on the cloud, in the ability to quickly locate information and have the minimalist OS that quickly responds to those searches.

Google makes money on search. Everything else they give away.

Microsoft makes money on Windows and Office and loses money on everything else it does.

As I wrote last week, Microsoft and Google are fighting tooth and nail to become more cloud/consumer-centric companies and get the next generation to base their solutions on their frameworks / virtualization / APIs and services.

Meanwhile in the real world, people still want an SLA and affordability. With Microsoft and Google, it’s either or none 😉 And I can’t be happier about that.

I also think the more serious Microsoft gets about their fight with Google, the more time they give all of us to become more formidable companies focused on the clients and cutting their IT costs.

My personal vision and what we’re working on at OWN and ExchangeDefender is a technology services business void of technology people. The technology people are going to be inside IT providers house, not out on the road, under the desk, in the ceiling or the roof. Microsoft is further cementing this.

Give huge credit to Google, Yahoo, Amazon and all of Microsoft’s competitors here. If Microsoft existed without big competition, they would never be as open or as free in terms of adapting (not adopting) their software to open standards that are making customization possible and going further from the “Microsoft on every desk” world.

Expo

Awesome reception at the expo, got a chance to talk to a bunch of people during just the first few hours and compare notes with my existing partner base. It’s interesting to watch – people that saw the presentations in person seem to be far more realistic about what this is and what the direction is. The guys watching WPC online seem to be more excited about it – might just be a different kind of a partner that attends WPC vs. one that stays at home, might be that Microsoft Silverlight is laced with crack 😉 But it’s clear that Microsoft is putting the infrastructure partners 6 feet under unless they are about to build a data center. Again, good news for me 😉

After Hours

New Orleans is fantastic. Don’t listen to the wusses about it being too hot and humid, it’s not. It’s awesome.

Today

Day 2. Microsoft bashing Vmware, Amazon ECS… they just announced Azure’s pricing and nobody clapped. After the “infomercial” reinforcement “It’s available today!!!” about quarter of the room clapped. Ouch. “Microsoft is your partner in moving to the cloud.” Tough audience. But more on this tomorrow.

It’s something you hear in the voices of many IT people these days, particularly those in the Microsoft Partner world whose business was established on one primary vendor.

So I have a question for you: What would you do for a living if you lost your job?

Presumably, if you are reading this blog, you work as an information worker in some faucet of maintaining and managing IT.

I have been hearing these “woe is me” stories for a couple of months now. Yeah, there is growth out there but it just doesn’t seem to be enough for many that have seriously stepped up their marketing and services. Gain one client, lose two. Get some labor but lose a reoccurring service account. We can somewhat anecdotally match this up at OWN where the calls to buy ExchangeDefender direct and without going through a partner have skyrocketed. With record layoffs in the technology sector it’s not a good time to be a techie.

So why say depression? Because almost everyone I have talked to is pinning their hopes on the recovery in IT spending on Windows 7. It’s awesome! It’s faster and more stable than Vista. It finally let’s you use your computer and not have to constantly frustrate yourself with it. It also makes you obsolete.

We are on our way to New Orleans for Microsoft WPC where I believe Microsoft will announce a whole slew of “visionary” products (to them; they have already had all that Microsoft plans to announce in production at Apple, Zoho, Amazon and Yahoo for years) that come one step closer to Microsoft being a consumer company, not a technology burden company it is today.

Now, I know many will say that there are good odds Microsoft will mess this up, that there will still be a need for someone to manage complex technology, deal with migrations, that there will always be business.

And that’s given – despite urban planning there are still millions of septic tanks out there – and there will probably always be a need for that guy that attaches the hose and hits the suction switch. I just highly doubt that the guy sucking crap makes much above minimum wage. So perhaps we’ll always have the guy running around the office blowing dust out of the back of a power supply, or trying to figure out why the newest antivirus update got corrupted.

But much like his septic tank pumping pal, he won’t be making more than $30K.

Quick, how much do you think the Apple Geniuses and Apple store personnel make?

And that’s the cause for the depression in the SMB / MSP space, and why so many are working so hard to become more efficient consumer companies. Microsoft has the benefit of the size, but not the benefit of knowing how to run a service organization.

It will be interesting to see the post-carnage attendance at WPC and just what their business is focusing on. I can tell you from talking to my very successful partners that they aren’t doing what they were doing a year ago. (and they aren’t the bummed ones either) The big question is: What will they do next year?

Tune in for reports from WPC all this week. Should be a blast.