Vista is a fiasco. Microsoft went from building software to building vapor clouds. Rampant speculation that Microsoft is doomed without leadership. The biggest spotlight is on a hyper-closed smartphone and online hangouts. And the front page of the Wall Street Journal says that consumer confidence has again hit an all time low. Who would have thunk it?

More and more people are starting to wake up from their self-deluded coma and raise their head out of sand to realize that just because you choose to ignore the economic realities of running a business, your ignorance alone doesn’t have the power to change what is actually going on: lack of innovation combined with a tough economic cycle, shrinking credit availability and consumer confidence.

What in the best of times made for the business partners of convenience is now setting up for a showdown of end user control. Dell and Microsoft and Apple and Comcast and (insert every company name here) are all blowing past their partners and looking to work directly with the customer. The service providers who once served as the agents for the above simply due to the enormous demand and complexity are now seen as competition and are becoming displaced.

It is giving rise to the whole new deathpool of MSPs that Chris Rue and I discussed last night: The Disaffected Service Provider. DSP if you will.

DSP is inheriting the same lack of ethics and planning that SPFs were popular for before the giant lawnmower of Microsoft Licensing enforcement knocked it out of the IT world and into the world of real estate and mortgage refinancing. DSP is also taking on the riffraff business building code of design: “I’m not in this to build a business or gain expertise of any kind, I just rationalize that I can make an OK paycheck by being a necessary evil for those too busy to read a manual or a trade journal.”

The opportunity in this market has never been greater: Microsoft monopoly on life support with obviously demotivated and directionless leadership, endless doubt and speculation over who will control the future of business applications and data storage (Amazon? Google? Microsoft? Salesforce? Dell?) and how we will use technology in life and in business is creating a wide open door of opportunity… now.

Yet, the pile of disaffected service providers seems to grow, some disinterested and some angered, that the world of technology keeps on evolving and that with it we evolve as well or just cease to be relevant (and thus unemployable).

The Fourth Year

As I head into the fourth year of this blog I look back at my Vladville mission over the last year and try to figure out what service I have done to my business, my business associates and partners, my fans and readers. Last year I posted a survey asking why you come here, what you are looking for, who you are, etc. I saw my duty with Vladville in 2007-2008 to cover the underlying change that we are seeing in the marketplace, the diminishing Microsoft influence, the difficult economic scenario and the departure from the one-dimensional process-driven business implementations of what used to work to what is likely to work in the future.

I think I did an OK job. The audience has more than doubled, the fanmail has gone through the roof and hate mail has nearly disappeared. I think I’ll just chalk that up to thinking that if you disagree with me you’re wrong and basically doomed

Going forward, as I return to my baby, I’m going to spend more time writing about what we’re doing in this brave new world of IT services and how we are doing on implementation of our new business plan. Should be fun, I hope you stick around.

As always, thank you for reading Vladville and thank you for all your money!

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