I don’t believe they don’t think they can go direct, I just think that by nature they are incapable.

As for the math, what was I thinking. Oh yeah, I was thinking of what is best for my customer. If my customer can put the money they were spending into something else (maybe even something revenue generating) then maybe, just maybe that IS the best thing for them. Hopefully it they will purchase other technologies that help thier business succeed with those displaces dollars. I’m sorry, but holding them hostage to legacy services to protect my on @$$ will only last so long. I’ve got to change with the times too I guess.

Aren’t you a nice guy. You sell a server without an MSP plan of any sort. No? Wait, you mean you charge a few hundred a month for server managed services plan? I see.. What’s your profit margin on that?

As for “we could never do that”, “we don’t have the ability to work direct”, “we would never” – cut the bullshit, if Microsoft couldn’t make money on this they wouldn’t be doing it.

And that to me justifies some of the concerns I have heard. That Microsoft is going direct because it believes it can get more customers to go direct instead of the partner intermediary, and it will market to those customers directly forever taking them out of the partner channel.

Now you can call it whatever you want – direct, without partner, unmanaged, business relationship – if Microsoft can draw a higher profit of working with the customer directly and not have another layer of competition holding back it’s update or licensing refresh cycle then guess where the marketing $ is going to flow?

I know you’re just trying to better articulate their position on this S+S thing Mark, and I appreciate that, but people know better and see right through the numbers.

-Vlad

Or try to make a business model out of 6% commission on a $10/month transaction.

The entry level infrastructure game is over, the sad part is that most of the midmarket is consolidating faster than lower tiers SMB because they are more cost conscious and know what they are paying for licensing/maintenance as opposed to the cost-avoidance part of the SMB market.

I think Microsoft just opened a huge opportunity for us all in the marketplace, sadly it will be to their detriment because most will now have to show different solution and how they make more sense than the “For 6% Microsoft Owns My Customer” play.

Time will tell.

-Vlad

The rest of the post makes sense (I hope).

From that point of view, I can certainly understand how an IT consultant/contractor/vendor that had staked its reputation on being the best in town at delivering Microsoft solutions would be miffed that Microsoft would now be trying to go around the channel, cutting out the middleman. I wouldn’t necessarily have much sympathy for that consultant/contractor/vendor, but at least I’d better understand the feeling of betrayal.

So is that what’s happening? Do the pissed-off MS partners out there think of themselves primarily as Microsoft solution providers as opposed to small business solution providers?

Apparently you spend your time posting comments on blogs I like my gross oversimplification better

You are not going to convince me that what you do is respectable any more than I am going to convince you that you should build a business. I’m not a self help guru.

All I am trying to make you, and others, understand is that as you go along as a business you make investments. Some good, some bad. Some people tend to invest a lot in a particular vendor. They kit their tshirts, cars, train their entire staff. Person that shall remain nameless looks more like a Microsoft employee than a Microsoft employee themselves and has a stated goal that when they walk into the clients office they want the staff to feel like Microsoft just walked through the door. They pay their staff more to get trained on Microsoft solutions, they get vendor specific training and push vendor solutions.

When that vendor changes their business model to no longer back their partners 100% but goes into direct competition with them, they tend to get upset as you’ve seen on this blog. Yes, Dave made an incredibly good argument for S+S and had Turner or Ballmer pitched it that way, this would be a non-issue. But they didn’t. They pitched a model that now and going forward will have Microsoft behaving like Yahoo, marketing and doing business with end users with Partners not being solution providers but a 6-12% recommenders. I realize there is no difference between what Dave and Turner said, but you don’t position an opportunity for partners by telling them the world has changed and Microsoft will embrace it by making sure “they aren’t writing TCP/IP stacks anymore”

Microsoft doesn’t owe anything to the businesses that have been build on top of their marketing message, but I think this move will open up the SMB market for far more third party non-Microsoft solutions and Microsoft’s upper stack (System Center, etc) gets virtually ignored because IT solution providers will not want to design solutions that Microsoft can just suck up into the cloud.

I will also take another point up with you – that of the impartial IT consultant – your place is at Best Buy. I know, big bad Vlad is blowing the piggy house again. As this technology becomes far less complex and involved, there is really nothing to “consult” anymore when it comes to SMB infrastructure. Tell the 17 year old what you want to do, he’ll ask you what you currently have, they’ll give you a few options and if a week or two it doesn’t work for you, you can come back and return it for a small restocking fee. Want a Mac? It’s 20 yards that way. Need software? Let me show you your options.

The IT consulting space is dead, the IT solution businesses still have a little bit of time to adjust and work on the more complex systems.

But I agree, the lack of complexity makes a lot of this business that has been built around it… unnecessary. And as you’ve read here, there are many people who react to that emotionally because they work on an emotional level, they do not run a business.

-Vlad

I don’t know how you think I spend my time these days, but “fixing the Internet” is not it.

I agree that it will be tough in the future to build a company that employs a lot of techs who know how to do infrastructure support and not much else. But haven’t we known that for a long, long time?