Someone the other day mentioned to me that I’m being unfairly tough about Microsoft lately. So I am going to say something nice and leave the comments wide open and encourage you to provide the end to my blog post. If you do, the ten most creative endings get a Shockey Monkey shirt:

Microsoft today released Virtual PC 2007 SP1, the groundbreaking customer virtualization product that still doesn’t include 64bit guest support because….

Post your response in the comments. Let’s see if I’m just a basher or if we as a community are just horrible people.

One of the Microsofties and I often argue about Microsofts lack of (inability, unwillingness) advertising in the mainstream media. This is really a double edged sword and any change could potentially piss off a large number of customers or partners so here is my take on why Microsoft’s marketing, for the lack of a better word, sucks:

Microsoft has never successfully marketed to end users.

Microsoft has always perfectly targeted technology decision makers.

Microsoft excels at marketing things like servers and workstations to those that are in the market to buy and manage them for a business. They even do a fair bit of promotions and incentives around the office.

However, look at the mainstream media advertising for Vista for example. When was the last time you saw a TV ad for Microsoft *anything* – how about the ads for Blackberry and Mac? I saw at least a dozen of them last night during the NBA playoffs.

Why doesn’t Microsoft market to the mainstream? Well, for one, Microsoft software is generally too difficult to use. Chalk it up to “choice” and the complexity that comes from it. The more choices the people have, the more uneasy they get on an impulse buy. Don’t think buying a shiny laptop with the purple back cover is an impulse decision? Do I want one with a big screen, small screen, big drive, small drive, laptop, tablet, blah. Try the same at an Apple store.

The second reason, que flamethrowers SPFs, is that any attempt to market something that goes around the gatekeepers gets met with huge resistance. Look at Microsoft’s online offerings – most people believe they will be put out of business if Microsoft markets them to end users in a significant way. Who needs a server if they can get Exchange and SharePoint for $10?

So what is Microsoft to do? From a purely impartial point, I say take the money and don’t ask any questions. Microsoft makes bulk of its money from sales of office software to businesses – windows client, server and office suites. So, do you just take all the money pouring in or do you go out of your way to change what has worked up until now and risk pissing off a large part of your partner base?

The decision seems fairly easy when you put it this way.

However, Microsoft should be afraid that mainstream advertising actually works and in the same way that it is not willing to back its partners and its brand in a very public way from an all out assault by Apple and Blackberry, it’s partners too will take the easy way out. You want a Mac and a Blackberry? Deal. Who are we not to take your money? After all, we make money on services and as my pal Dave says: “I will manage anything that can be measured.”

Microsoft did a lot of right things over the years, it earned the loyalty of a lot of people and adoration of a lot of IT professionals. But if you have been reading this blog over the past few months, you’re starting to see that brand leadership and loyalty is starting to crumble. Not due to anything that the partners are doing, but by a combination of things that Microsoft is doing and a stack of things that they are not doing enough.

Microsoft, through people in roles like Kevin Beares and Eric Ligman, needs to find a way to open up a conversation with a larger audience. The main problem is that the message that is reaching us, is not reaching the customer.

And for what its worth, the message that you read here is directly influenced by the pushback from the partners and customers. I’ve got no horse in the Blackberry vs. Windows Mobile race, I’m just showing you the odds.

Looking for a job in IT? I need to fill six roles, quick, in the beautiful downtown Los Angeles, at 600 W 7th Street 90017. Two Sr. system admin gigs, four Jr. system admin gigs, all include absolutely zero (0) contact with the customers or end users. Role responsibilities include hardware and facilities management (networks, routers, switches, load balancers, SAN, bladecenters).

Requirements: college degree in IT field or military experience with IT certification. Relevant work experience in the enterprise / complex hardware field, these are not entry level or SMB jobs.

Email: vlad@ownwebnow.com

… because at least the bad food is free …

Today, McDonald’s is offering a Free Southern-Style Chicken Biscuit w/ purchase of a medium or large drink, or a free Southern-Style Chicken sandwich in the evening or afternoon. For my foreign friends not familiar with “southern style” it basically means if your momma and pappy aren’t at least second cousins or closer, eating one of these comes with a mandatory four hour bowel movement that will either chip the porcelain on the toilet or create special effects only seen at the Yellowstone National Park. Not to be outdone, Dunkin’ Donuts is offering a free 16-oz iced coffee, from 10am to 10pm. Cause you know… you need iced.. coffee at 9:50 pm.

Is this a great country or what?

Fantastic news from Redmond, just when you thought Windows Home Server could not suck any worse, they find a way to do it. Yes, ladies and gentleman, the product designed to be the central point of backup and storage, previously found to corrupt many file types opened from it, has found a way: they removed the database backup feature from the upcoming update designed to fix the bug of file corruption in the first place. Yes, really.

Are you f’n kidding me?

Someone go right ahead and put the tombstone on the Windows Home Server cause that product is officially and completely done.

I am all about holding the product back until it’s perfect, but if you ship a product and then yank its primary feature set what are you left with? How can you ever deploy anything built by a team that after so much time couldn’t come up with a solution, so their solution becomes total and complete lobotomy?

Seriously guys, you have lost your fucking minds and the time to get your shit together has all but run out. But good for you, I sure hope the telescope software you’re writing helps you find a new group of customers in space because nobody with their right mind would trust your software on earth.

Someone from Microsoft needs to explain some of this shit to the public, quick, because your reputation as a company is going to sink not only Vista and WHS, but everything around it – Welcome to 2008, “experimental until 3.0″ no longer flies.

Chris went to NOLA this weekend. Made a presentation. People liked it a lot, one of my guys even texted me about it being the best presentation of the weekend. Turns out you can make quite a business if you use mobility to fit the SMB business, not check off boxes on the Microsoft sales brochure.

Chris then went to O’Briens and had a Hurricane. And a Hand Granade. Another. And Another. Sooner or later it was bound to produce some brain damage, manifested in willingness to help complete strangers be more successful in a role they are grossly unqualified to be in: SMB technology sales.

If you would like to support Chris, who is still living large off his SBS Show royalties, in another fruitful community effort to postpine the inevitable, here is a survey:

Chris sells Windows Mobile

Please don’t let my apathy towards the iPhone Roadkill and Microsoft get in a way of you filling out this survey and helping Chris try to turn the leaking oil tanker that is Microsoft’s business software. He is trying to make things better for us (and Microsoft) but Microsoft  is a company of numbers and statistics so if you’ve got the time and will, please, help a brother out.

Eric is taking down payments on SBS/EBS orders, get in the line:

Examples of licensing improvements over the current Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 product include these:

• Customers will be able to purchase single client access licenses (CALs), so they will pay only for the exact number of employees using the product.
• Customers can cost-effectively purchase a mix of Standard or Premium CALs, as appropriate to the technologies that individual employees are using.
• CALs now apply to other copies of Windows Server, SQL Server or Exchange Server on the network, eliminating the need to purchase additional CALs.

Windows Small Business Server & Essential Server Solutions pricing* is as follows:

• Windows Small Business Server 2008 Standard Edition software, including five CALs, $1,089 (U.S.); additional CALs $77 each (U.S.)
• Windows Small Business Server 2008 Premium Edition software, including five CALs, $1,899 (U.S.); additional CALs $189 each (U.S.)
• Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Standard Edition software, including five CALs, $5,472 (U.S.); additional CALs $81 each (U.S.)
• Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Premium Edition software, including five CALs, $7,163 (U.S.); additional CALs $195 each (U.S.)

Can you be held liable for damaging personal property of asshole lawyers who are asking for it?

In case the pic is too blurry, that is a proud (proud as in “fabuloooussss”) Florida plate: “I SOO 4U”

If you’ve volunteered to help with the SMB Buddy site, please whitelist my email addresses (vlad@ ownwebnow.com and vladville.com) as I will be sending you an invitation tomorrow. I would like to build an advisory council of sorts of actual content creators and leaders as one of the major goals of SMB Buddy is the unification of the SMB resources and giving people a starting page for all the diverse communities, people and places that can help – even if its just one another.

So please whitelist me and I’ll drop you an invitation. If you are interested drop me a note with what (specifically) you might be able to do and I’d love your input. I will spare you the cheesy NBC “the more you know” infomercial…

I just approved a few PO’s to get Own Web Now off the desktop. We will now be a cloud-in-the-cloud organization, with all business critical applications deployed on Windows 2008 Terminal Server infrastructure split between two geographically redundant data centers, disaster recovery storage network in Europe and a new level of security and data access audit control.

The infrastructure, inventory, management and licensing all got too expensive to manage and stay on top of. That combined with the massive growth we expect in second year of 2008 made the investment a lot more palatable because it gives us the ability to have rock solid backups, control of all licensing and have a hot backup site in case of s…

Now we can have disposable systems, use Linux / Windows Home / Macs and still have enterprise communication and application access for those that need it. Windows Desktop, it was nice while it lasted, but sorry we’ve got better places to put our money. Ironically, this decision was not rooted in the finances alone, we felt like Microsoft’s distractions with the Web 2.0, online services, search, and really anything but the desktop OS put a huge question mark over whether this is the platform for us going forward – and considering that we spend 3x as much on software licensing than on the hardware purchase (Vostro 1500 is our standard company issued computer).