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.

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