Folks have been trying to sucker me into this debate that started yesterday with CRN about “the cloud” and how to find a profitable way to it (I believe the title was “Running behind the train you’ve missed and why your sales # isn’t ringing anymore.”)  Everyone from CRN to Joe @ VAR Guy and the endless stream of shameless opportunistic weasels elsewhere are now entering the debate on a conversation that for the most part ENDED nearly three years ago at WPC 2006 with Kevin Turner.

I feel there is some value in encouraging the channel to change when it becomes threatened by technological evolution. My body of work, however ugly, is a reflection of that.

I, however, see no value in shamelessly cheerleading it to the grave. But hey, we all need hope in despair, so by all means you’re free to continue to be delusional if it makes you feel better.

So what’s changed to start this debate over the cloud again? Nothing, really. VARs  started losing money and clients to the cloud, like they were told they would, and now they are ready to pay attention and form a strategy for the cloud. Too late.

A friend of mine writes a blog in which she spends 10% of her time bashing the cloud solutions (many of which she actually uses/plays with) and the other 90% of her time demonstrating why DIY “on-premise” IT Management is about as much fun as doing your own root canal. And all while all her key vendors including Microsoft and Intuit are sending her a clear message – IT’S OVER – she persists to question it. Good news for her is that she has a real job – but the VAR? Not for long I’m afraid.

One of the more vocal folks about the change has been my buddy Karl (smbbooks.com) who last night wrote: “I want to sell that client a new PC every three years until one of us dies.” I (heart) Karl. But what Karl gets, and many others don’t, is that business survival requires change, which was the topic of that post to begin with. What made money yesterday isn’t making money today. The customer has changed the preference.

Does this mean the death of the VAR world? Of course not. In my humble opinion, it’s been dead for at least 2 years and the economic collapse just accelerated the inevitable.

The only bright news for the VAR industry is that there is plenty of work out there painting and putting up drywall in all the forclosure properties.

What about the IT Solution Providers aka “VAR with a business plan not stuck in 2002”? They are doing quite well as far as I can tell. As I’ve written here over, and over, and over, and yes even again today – business is about fulfilling the market demand. So people don’t want to pay for Vista. Or antispyware. Or email. So what if they don’t want a new computer – there is so much money to be made optimizing processes, improving security, mobility, remote access, business continuity, business intelligence. You can focus on that – or sit in a webcast with other defunct businesses trying to get on top of the trend they already missed.

Focus on what the clients want. It doesn’t matter what you want, you’re in the business for the sole purpose of making money. Either get comfortable with that or grab a paintbrush.

This has been on my mind somewhat over the past few days and I am not sure if I’m right or not but here it is: I talk to a lot of you and the most frequent question happens to be: “So, if you were me, what would you do right now?”

Answer is always the same – sell everything you own and mail me a check care of Vlad’s Ferrari Collection Fund.

The reason I’ve never really thought about the real answer is the circumstance under which it is asked: I’ve generally described out business model, shared something that’s keeping the lights on at over ten thousand other places, and instead of the person being excited about it they seem to recognize it requires actual effort and if they wanted to work for money they wouldn’t be running their own business.

Therein lies the ugly differentiator between those thriving and others dying. Work. Some say that only suckers work hard. They fall into two groups: successful people and idiots. Successful people already busted their ass to build something, made a ton of money and now get others to put in insane hours. Idiots, on the other hand, expect success without hard work and probably own more than one infomercial get rich scheme.

If it doesn’t work As Seen On TV, why in the world would you figure it would work in SMB? Don’t hold out hope, nobody is going to bail you out: It’s all up to you.

Regular season is over. Let the hatin’ begin. Buck Fama!

Got the tickets to the next Saturday’s SEC championship game between Florida and Alabama so I can hate live in person So even if we get our ass kicked at least I’ll be in the good company of drunken losers. But that still gives me over 6 days of hatin’

Southeastern Conference, the tradition of hate….

Start of the football season. Let the trash talking begin.

So let’s see, who are we playing this year. Of course, there is FSU. Now their coach seems to have the right spirit:

The rest of the team gets it too I think.

Now last year we lost to Georgia…. so props to them. But I think one in what, 30, is a fluke. And considering they are #1.. See ya in Jacksonville.

Now hopefully this year we won’t see OSU back in the contention…for anything….. or backing into games just to be destroyed by the SEC. Maybe destroyed is too kind? Humiliated? I dunno, for some reason Inbred Hick League (Big 10) always seems to be in the contention despite the fact that they play high school teams it seems. But this year with USC in week three hopefully they will slide where they belong, somewhere behind Vanderbilt or Fresno State.

Let’s see… who else do we play. Tennessee? Citadel? WTF? That’s a school? LSU one is going to be ugly, I won’t lie. I guess we aren’t playing Alabama this year, I guess there wasn’t enough room on the whopping schedule between Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, Miami to fit in the overpaid coach and the diapointment crew. Rumor is, Chris Rue is walking onto that team to play a linebacker. My god, is this what being an OSU fan feels like, checking if the opponents are actually a college or a prep school?

Coments are open and welcome, bring it on

Go Gators!

A little while back I decided not to play a role in the neverending SBS world drama and perpetual line of jackasses posturing for attention and influence (but seemingly uninterested in doing any real work). I’ve done so primarily to optimize my time spent at work but mostly to give myself some focus and stick to the plan – what I’ve found out is that the most successful people in this business do not play in the drama either, they are taking money to the bank and Friday’s off.

But a part of this gig and keeping the conversation open is talking to my partners, my employees, random person that guessed my work extension or got the bat phone from one of my IT friends. And so even indirectly I get to feel some of the drama. I am going to share just the three top jackasseries of the week so you can see just what you get when you become rich and famous in the SBS land and everyone brings you their dirt. Here are the three mini-blog stories:

PPT-o-Matic

Congratulations to the SBS team for releasing SBS 2008 to manufacturing! Although we’ve made a business decision not to make SBS a part of our business going forward, you can’t say no to free training and we should be familiar with the product regardless of whether it’s going to be raised in a support request twice or make $20 mil a quarter. So I sent the link to a few folks:

• Windows SBS 2008, Part 1 of 8: Introduction
  Thursday August 21, 2008, 12 PM – 1 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 2 of 8: Planning & Installation
  Thursday August 21, 2008, 2 PM – 3 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 3 of 8: Migration
  Friday August 22, 2008, 12 PM – 1 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 4 of 8: Management, Health, & Security
  Friday August 22, 2008, 2 PM – 3 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 5 of 8: Messaging & Collaboration Management
  Monday August 25, 2008, 12 PM – 1 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 6 of 8: Remote Access & Computer Mgmt
  Monday August 25, 2008, 2 PM – 3 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 7 of 8: LOB Support & Troubleshooting
  Tuesday August 26, 2008, 12 PM – 1 PM Eastern
• Windows SBS 2008, Part 8 of 8: Virtualization
  Tuesday August 26, 2008, 2 PM – 2 PM Eastern

What is shameful here is that all the seminars are free and that the negative commentary came from my own team. The complaint was that it was a very basic and at best a sales presentation for SBS. Now this is shameful for two reasons: 1) Of course it’s a sales presentation, Microsoft’s webcasts are always dripping with sales junk and worthless notion of “market size” and “opportunity” selling the dream of fortunes to those only clinging to the hope of success and 2) most SBSers are not highly skilled IT engineers that will ever concern themselves with anything out of the scope covered by a wizard. So Microsoft designed the first training to target it’s core SBSer base – stop whining, it was free and you got paid to learn. Worth checking out.

Successful Sale of Jealousy

Got plenty of jealous (some even angry) commentary about Arlin selling out to Microsoft. Oh dear god no, more people will try to use Grove now!

Personally, kudos to Arlin. He has done what no other SBSer organization has been able to – to sell Microsoft on committing some serious support to the SBS community and actual business training. In a single step he’s set a bar to entry into the training and an application to make sure people really focused on growing a business aren’t stuck in a conversation with guys like Geek Squad Dave pounding their chest at how great of an ethical consultant they have become.

Seems like a good deal to me. Personally, I feel this one is more about jealousy that someone finally managed to bring Microsoft to the table and put their pen to the checkbook. To be honest, I’d throw some of my people into this if we hadn’t already packed our schedules. Worth checking out.

Triumphant Ignorance

This one belongs in a class of its own so I’ve saved it for last:

BOB ONE-WPC ZERO.
No matter how you want to score this, my request for comments from those who found the last Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference to be worth the effort has yielded no responses. What it did get was yet another Inner Circle member, who reported that the 2008 event was a waste of time. There haven’t been many reports from smaller VARs. But if I were Microsoft, I’d worry considerably about the number of award winners and Inner Circle members who said they only sent skeleton crews, or even just one person

If you are going to the Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference for presentations you’ve failed. Miserably. At concept and at understanding the opportunity:

“Let me see. The richest, most successful IT company in the world. The most successful IT companies that have partnered or won with Microsoft all in one place for a week. The $2K entrance fee keeping out the riffraff. Ability to communicate and try to find opportunities in this pool. My god, a person could transform their company through the relationships made there. So much business, so many relationships to st..

But nah, screw it, I’m here for the great breakfast and PowerPoint slides I can watch later!!!! I am here for Microsoft!!!” FAIL.

Folks, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again and I will keep on repeating it no matter how many of you don’t have the balls to admit the following to yourself: If you want to be the best, you have to strive to be like the best and the only way to do that is to learn from the best. So another fall comes, another collection of riff-raff festivals where people will fall over one another bitching about the exact same problems they had the previous year, at the exact same point in business maturity as they had last year, with the exact same process they had the last year and next year they will come back to the same place, albeit marginally richer, to bitch and moan about the same troubles they have had for years without an ounce of motivation or ability to make something better of themselves.

You gotta aim higher. There is no shame in being successful. But for that to happen you need to let go of your insecurities and the need to be the king of the wadding pool and maybe strive to be the last person in the Olympic race. Not everyone is destined to be IBM. But don’t sell yourself short either.

Anyhow…

This is the life and times of SBSers. Is it any surprise that the more successful people don’t pay attention to it? As you can see, not really.

One thing that gets me, been on really all sides of the IT business, is how easy it is to spot people that should never be dealing with human beings. The world of IT business has really evolved from the hippie-hair guru that dismissed everyone around him and acted like a god… that personality is dead and it seems to be lost the most on the older generation which likely got their pinkslip because they could not act in a professional manner.

How they went from being a fired antisocial guru to an IT consultant confuses me even more. I mean, if I hated people the last occupation I would want is the one of a patient mediator and teacher trying to bridge the gap between the end user training and complex computer user interfaces. But that’s just me. Here is the thing:

If you can’t be polite and courteous people will refuse to work with you.

I can understand the frustration, I can understand the personal problems.. but that does not mean I have to tolerate it or accept it. What kind of a leader would I be if I did that? What kind of a message does it send to your people to force them to put up with abusive and rude people, but never do anything but smile and try to help?

No. We are not DMV. We are not a punching bag.

Most techies like to assume that everyone they talk to is a complete retard and it is their duty to solve all the problems the other party has because the way they were treated did not meet their expectations. There is a lot of professional stuff in professional services, if you can’t act like one you need to seek a job where they will stick you in your cave and throw away the key. Only downside is that those types of jobs are few and far in between..

So let’s learn a little respect, k? Or you will be sitting in one sad, lonely unemployed corner all by yourself and your ego.

One of the best parts of the MVP summit is getting together with project managers who bring you all the Microsoft software and seeing exactly how they collect the feedback and how we all end up with the software that we use.

The picture below is of the entrance to the SBS MVP meeting room, where some of the most knowledgeable SBS experts got together with Microsoft SBS team to share feedback, direction, opinions and why wizards are so neccessary because people can’t read the damn documentation.

Here is the picture of the conference room door:

If you are having trouble reading, the door on the right has a sign on it right at the eye level that says, in English, “Please use other door” and an arrow pointing to, well, the other door:

The number of SBS MVPs grabbing or the locked door was just amazing. What was incredible though was that Chris and I were standing outside of the conference room looking and laughing at the whole thing.

Two MVPs went up to the door, could not open it, turned around and asked us if we knew if the conference door was locked. Chris said: “Use the other door” and the guys started to walk the other way in the hallway to try and find the other door.. “No, that door, the one on the left” like the sign says.

I decided to start taping the entrance but for some reason nobody wanted to walk in front of the camera

Tomorrow is April 1st and I will not be blogging out of protest.

You see, April 1st is the excuse for people without the slightest sense of humor to take one day a year and act like awkward imbeciles. I’m not even going to work tomorrow, I can imagine the helpdesk, voicemail, phone calls and other mediums will be flooded by people that get one obligatory day to pull out the giant stick they carry up their butt the other 364 (or this year, 365) days of the year.

Humbug. I wish most people could stop trying to destroy a productive workday and instead ration out that good spirit and humor over the course of the whole year.

See ya on the 2nd.

The American economic prosperity, let it rest in peace.

1776 – March 17, 2008.

JP Morgan buys Bear Sterns for $2/share. Federal Reserve drops interest rate on bank loans to 3.25%. Asians flushed down the toilet too.

Poof.

Integrity matters. Humble pie is tasty.

For close to a decade, Internet used to be an awesome place for deceitful sociopaths. That kind of environment, full of anonymity and unaccountability, is a great breeding ground for some spectacular outright shameful lies marketing strategies. But as Ashley Dupree found out this week, there is no hiding on the Internet from who you are. Especially if you are being judged on the daily basis by your customers, business partners, employers or politicians.

Over the past two years I saw two of my friends outright destroy their online identities because they did not want their personal, private, life to interfere with their work. They also get the double handicap for being girls (likely inbox full of “I’d tap that”) and dealing with the juvenile male Internet. The first girl worked in the public sector in charge of bringing businesses into the local economy to build up the job market. Unfortunately for her, she is an Irish catholic republican and makes Peter from the Family Guy look like a saint. She had to blow up her entire blog because her personality virtually guaranteed she would never be able to make it in the public eye. The other friend is an extroverted party girl that works in the software industry. She blew up her Facebook profile because even though the minxy chick at a social event gets you all sorts of contacts, it does not translate well into corporate promotions based on black and white out of context notes backed by the spite of office politics.

The sad thing is, what guarantees corporate climb makes you a total bitch that nobody wants to hang out with. What makes you a macho man party animal translates into a stack of sexual harassment lawsuits.

This is nothing new. People in the spotlight were always judged, always quoted out of context, always had their private lives violated and everything ever done used against them at the most inopportune times.

What is new is that the social Internet is putting everyone and everything into the spotlight. Everyone you ever encountered becomes a viable, relevant, reference. I had the privilege of growing up in South Florida and going to the high school in the hood (I know, hard to believe) so by the time I got to the University of Florida I got calls from Miami Herald about my former classmates doing everything from homicide to serial jewelry robberies (Go Dragons, Class of ’07, release date of ’22). Everyone, everywhere, and at any time in the past becomes a quotable reflection of your character and how you life your life.

So if you want to live and work in this century you have to come to terms with who you are and how you represent yourself. You can’t hang on to your secret personality and change clothes in the telephone booth. You have to let go of your inner sociopath, put away that second personality you’ve got going on, stop changing your clothes in the telephone booth and just be who you are. If you are going to be judged, be judged for who you really are.

It doesn’t matter if you’re fucking the governor or if the global network of computers is fucking you, the age of deceit and dishonesty is coming to an end. Embrace fame, and yourself. Remember, you’re selling yourself all the time to everyone.