Microsoft WPC is a fun event, lot’s of information comes out and in typical Microsoft fashion, it’s always about the hope and potential of mostly unfinished or half baked ideas. That’s not necessarily a negative thing, as it provides for an elaborate ecosystem of solution providers that can develop and position the technology in a way that makes a difference for the end customer.

I guess most of the fear on the partner side is that Microsoft is getting a lot less half baked stuff and is relying less on partners to solve the “simple” stuff. That’s just the impression that I get.

Today looked different. You can sense a feeling of humility in the Borg collective. They have taken punches from all angles and some hard decisions (ie, cuts, firing, product drops) had to be made. It seems to have refocused them.

Even Kevin Turner, the embodiment of competitive Microsoft that doesn’t need anyone and is winning, seems clearly bothered that despite the advances Microsoft is making, they are hardly getting the credit for it. Lot’s of stats and numbers in that conversation, some damning for the competition – Microsoft laptop share is into 90% percent while Apple is around 7% – yet Apple gets all the press and all the fame.

In my humble opinion, Microsoft executives need to figure out how it is that all the buzz is around Apple and Google and how Microsoft is not even in the discussion. For Microsoft – who has the most elaborate partner program, the ecosystem, the marketing budget and the loyal following among partners and developers – what is Microsoft doing for it’s partners?

We all pay to come to the Microsoft WPC to find out what Microsoft is doing next, because we’ve been herded in a way that we should follow Microsoft. I think Microsoft is at a point where (given all it’s competition) it needs to start talking to it’s base and get it excited about it’s products again.

Which brings me to the highlight of the event: Bill Buxton from Microsoft Research is the person Microsoft needs to put front and center as it tries to “reboot” it’s offerings. Bill is an extremely passionate and excited guy that seemed to truly love the technology Microsoft is making – Microsoft needs more of that. Microsoft’s new chief, while I can understand is nervous and awkward on the third day of his new job, is nowhere near where Allison Watson was and has a long way to go. Things look good for Microsoft but there are a lot of if’s and big decisions they have to make. Don’t envy the position one bit.

Today was a mixed bag for Microsoft – in the areas in which Microsoft leads (Xbox, Messenger) it looks amazing. In the areas in which it’s following (virtually everything else in the consumer space) the future for Microsoft looks like the past of it’s competitors. To say that Windows Mobile doesn’t have a chance would be giving it a huge compliment.

Not really a business conversation at all, but as a Microsoft fan and junkie, here is a short summary:

Xbox – a-f’n-mazing. At first I thought this was going to be a poor man’s copy of Nintendo Wii but the demo of Halo and the little girl playing with the baby tiger made one thing clear – sell your coffee table and get a big cushy rug because you’ll be jumping all over the place and falling down a lot

Personal Cloud – Take on old Microsoft Mesh demo a few years ago, but a little less techy and a lot more appropriate for the mobile and devices. While the demo was quite cool and Microsoft has a chance here if it leverages ActiveSync, it has the iPhone problem – if it requires all of your friends to use all of the same stuff (like SkyDrive, Onenote) then write it off. Otherwise, it could be a game changer. It certainly will make your Microsoft devices far more friendlier and easier to use.

Windows Mobile Phone – Sad. The biggest applause was for the ability to edit PowerPoint. And that’s from 10,000 Microsoft salesmen and partner executives. It has all the stuff that made Zune a dud combined with what killed Windows Mobile. Oh, and HP was curiously absent from the mobile discussion as well.

To sum it up: When even your employees and your sales force can’t get excited abotu what you’re doing, you’re probably not doing it right.

I’m going to look on the positive side here: Microsoft Windows has a chance to stay around for a long. long time if it can link up the Personal Cloud and extend it beyond all-Microsoft sphere because it has no mobile chance.

Here is the summary:

We’re following Google to the cloud. Forget about Software + Services, just cloud.

Apple pretty much owns us as we missed the whole iPhone, iPad but we’re following.

We have a lot of money, so if you follow us you’ll make a lot of money too.

We know you’re scared about changing your business.

Oh, and I’m sure I’ll hear about the channel conflicts, competition, margins, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That last part is pretty much a verbatim quote from Steve Ballmer’s closing.

Wow. Anyone remember a few years ago (WPC 2008, Houston) when I posted that picture of the new Microsoft Partner Program – it was an action shot and the partner seemed to be in a bit of a pain from the “interaction”;

Be honest… how far off was I?

Sick of it yet?

It’s about to get a whole lot worse.

Microsoft WPC, at least from the vendor standpoint, is all about the cloud. By my brief account while trying to locate the ExchangeDefender booth (#743) the cloud is bigger than Windows for Microsoft. That’s a bit ambitious. If you’re ignoring the cloud hoping it goes away, Microsoft is about to unleash a storm of very good reasons why your clients do not need you anymore. And for those of you that think Microsoft is too big and too slow to reimage itself and take on the market leaders – ask Sony about Xbox and Google about Bing. We’re still dealing with the dominant market player here, one that makes billions of dollars in the marketplace.

They are making a move in a different direction, my suggestion is you follow it for a profitable route.

Now, I mentioned I’m writing a book about this – now well over 1/3 done. Running a business on cloud solutions is not the same as running a technology solution provider – but it’s a lot cheaper and hence more profitable when done right. I’m taking my time from a very (again, thanks to many of you) very profitable business at Own Web Now to share what we’ve learned in over a decade of doing where Microsoft want’s to go.

And I want to help you get there first.

So if you’re in DC, track me down and talk to me. I promise not to try to sell you anything. If you have a concern, so do hundreds of other consultants and I want to make sure it’s addressed. Ignoring problems has never made them go away, taking advantage of opportunities always has a chance for a win. So let’s brain up.

Bottom line: If you’re in WPC, look for a guy wearing purple.

About a week from now I’ll be heading to Washington DC to the Microsoft WPC event.

I really, really, really don’t want to say anything negative about MSFT, but..

I also really don’t want to beat a dead horse – let’s just say that I hope Microsoft has something to show for itself this year and doesn’t retreat to what it’s already become: a depressed cash cow munching on the proceeds from Windows and Office while playing Xbox on the couch.

Bah.. Microsoft WPC used to be the event of the year. Now, having killed it’s partner program, my largest partners will not be heading to WPC at all. Partners – few and far in between, pretty much the same guys I see at all other events. What is sad is that Microsoft did this to itself, and I can pinpoint the exact moment at which Microsoft stabbed itself. Sadly, it was on the top of the game when it decided it no longer needed it’s partners.

Mistake #1: Microsoft decided to fight Google with an enterprise product. Gmail, even today, is a crappy AJAX webmail. It’s better compared to Hotmail than Exchange. Yet, Microsoft decided to position Exchange against Google Apps – thereby destroying any chance it’s partners had with Exchange in the SMB market to begin with. It’s clear (through many, many, many memos and messages) that Microsoft is OK just getting a $1 or $2 per subscriber with BPOS is better than getting $0 in the eventual fear that everyone will be on Google Apps.

Mistake #2: Microsoft decided it didn’t need the partners anymore. For all the time they spend trying to create all sorts of partner perks and engagements, it’s product & business divisions certainly stiffed it’s partner base: by setting their profit margins from them, by taking their clients on direct, by eliminating core products that the partners were excited about and finally, becoming extremely inconsistent with the business direction.

Who would have thought that the Microsoft mantra of “we will compete with everyone, everywhere, with blood on every table” would be the eventual samurai suicide presented as a spectacle through WPC keynotes from Ballmer to Turner?

Don’t get me wrong – Microsoft is our biggest partner. We want them to succeed.

However, we are not developing anything for the Microsoft platform. It’s all about iOS, Android and the web. We are spending more time working on development efforts with Google than we are with Microsoft. Our business is diverging from our largest partner, not by our own choice but by the market demand.

It’s sad to see such a rich and successful company so thoroughly mismanaged and misguided. You always need friends and partners. Every year, there are fewer Microsoft partners at WPC, and in a week I hope to see a reason to remain one. I really do.

Provocative title, except I do not intend it  to be.

This weekend was an upgrade weekend at Casa de Vlad. I upgraded my Macbook Air to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. I upgraded my desktop to Windows 7. These are the best the two companies can produce.

Snow Leopard: I connected my USB DVD to my Macbook Air, slipped in the DVD and powered it on. I clicked on about 3 OK / Welcome / Next buttons and went to sleep. This morning, I woke up to 10.6 seemingly a bit faster, same experience and behaviors with some more polished effects (Expose)

Windows 7: Later this afternoon I upgraded my Vista development system to Windows 7. Well, I tried, it failed. So I put in a new set of hard drives. First time Windows 7 failed because it couldn’t setup a system partition – it told me to look at Windows Setup Logs but provided no information on how to find those. It just failed and took me back to the start of the setup. So I created and formatted a partition, rebooted and this time setup worked. After a reboot it couldn’t find bootloader. Ok, try again. This time it worked.

One of these is an OS built in 2009, the other one feels like it’s still 1999.

I think we are at a time where Microsoft’s big TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) argument will come back to bite them in the most unfortunate way: are Windows systems too expensive for business if they impact knowledge workers for more than a day?

Over at MarketWatch: “Is the party over for behemoth Microsoft?”

If you read that and don’t feel uneasy; read it again. I don’t really have a comment short of just nodding my head in disbelief.

Last year was the first in the recent memory that I skipped out on WPC; two from my team went and had a far different impression of it than I used to. This year, I went again with the team that for the lack of a better word has been the “mop” of Own Web Now: cleaning up the mess left by years of vertical growth and lack of really solid business controls that we needed to get to our SAS 70 and many enhancements I said we were working on Jan 1 to bring more consistency to the business.

Every day counts.

But it isn’t every day that you’re challenged to take your game to the next level, working shoulder to shoulder with some of the best in business. When I think of where I started in this business, and where we are today, it just blows my mind.

WPC is the driving force behind motivating me to that step.

So, let me be honest about WPC and how it changes our future in a way that Microsoft won’t advertised it.

Community

We spent roughly the cost of a nice sedan on our presence at WPC as a sponsor. No, it was not to give out the tshirts and talk about ExchangeDefender.. It was to more efficiently work with our community.

This year, thanks to the SPAM Show, I am far more in tune with the backchannel of the IT space and the major movers and shakers. But do I get to sit down and have 2 hurricanes with Chris Rue? Curry with Richard Tubb? Faux-beef with Dean Calvert? Talk about acquisitions with Jamison West, who isn’t even our client? Noope. Never do.

The length, the intensity, the frustration of WPC is all about endurance and your willingness to be better. If you’re willing to participate, ask questions and offer advice – even when it doesn’t have material impact for you directly in ROI sense – it will offer you more perspective than you could ever buy from a survey. Face to face is important.

I am more confident now, than ever, to say that there is no real community left. Sitting in the tweetie bird lounge (SBSC Central) made it quite clear that it’s just a bunch of very successful, nice, people that are willing to help one another.

Expo

Ok, so the expo was a mixed bag. As you can tell by the video below, it was not well received by everyone (and I know this is going to come as a shock and disappointment to many, but it’s not my video):

The foot traffic was down from previous years but we still did remarkably well. If you are interested in “selling” stuff from your booth then WPC is not for you. It’s just not that kind of a show. People attending WPC paid $3-5,000 to just show up and they aren’t the ‘tards that want to buy the latest shiny toy for their client just so they could play with it. Those days are long gone.

I spent very little time in the booth, maybe less than 10% of the entire time it was open. Even then, it was simply to meet people there so we wouldn’t have to go through the WPC table meeting area that was as far from food as possible.

Expo was just my hub of operations. And it was worth every penny. Even if it didn’t sign up one more dollar of new business.

Microsoft

Meh.

The keynotes made it more apparent that there is very little vision in that company. They just see the word as competitors they are trying to catch up – Apple, Google, Vmware, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Amazon…  I know they tried hard to put on the fight paint but to me it just seemed like a long infomercial to check out the alternatives.

For example, we are a major Visual Studio / Hyper-V operation. But based on what I saw there, next week two monkeys are in charge of producing a competitive matrix and 2 year cost efficiencies of using Vmware on Linux vs. Windows/Hyper-V. If Microsoft tried so desperately to make a case against Vmware (and not for Hyper-V) then I have to think there are things we aren’t aware of about Vmware and owe it to check it out.

Small Business. Man. I am not going to name the partners and Microsoft employees I watched that presentation with but let’s just say that the disbelief was uniform across my row.

Lessons Learned

Undershirt, dress shirt, tie, suit jacket is no way to walk around the streets of NOLA.

British can get really aggravated when they haven’t had their “proper” tea.

This space is changing… always, changing…

Chris Rue, ESI: Enlightened Self-Interest.

Microsoft SMB’s focus on VAR’s may have jumped the shark at this point. “Thanks for building the LANs boys, we’ll take it from here.” Try the Windows Foundation Server / Home server.

Cost cutting. You could feel the ghosts of the 5,000 laid off Microsoft employees roaming the quality of the conference this year. There have been massive cuts in just about everything. However, Microsoft employees more than made up for it all and really put on a great show. As much as I would have liked more elaborate parties, I am even more impressed with their ability to restrain themselves and focus on fiscal responsibility.

Comfortable shoes. I’m a Bruno Magli / Timberland fan myself. But last week I decided to give a shot to something that a sales rep at Macy’s couldn’t say enough about: Johnston & Murphy. Cheap, look OK and feel like butter. I think these shoes are just about the best pre-WPC decision I made. I know, reading Vladville for shoe advice is a bit of a reach but I recommend what I like

Since Chris Rue is now done speaking and I can attribute quotes to him without fear that he’ll be gunned down for his low “Microsoft opinion / revenue” ratio, last week he really called the Microsoft/Partner relationship:

It’s kinda the equivalent of an abusive relationship

Like…MS keeps beating the fuck out of us

And yet….we all still think “We can change him”

I should wear a t-shirt with that poster from the X-Files

I Want to Believe

That really sums up the business relationship with Microsoft, one that the company becomes less and less sensitive to the more competitive it gets with the impersonal foes in organizations that hide behind fake taglines and misleading ads.

To steal a line from Microsoft: It’s a people business. (Or “People Ready”); You’d hope that as an organization they’d understand that there are people that also support and distribute that software and that it doesn’t “Just work” like Apple does(n’t).

In the past, Microsoft was able to bridge the gap by having some phenomenal field people that were interested in their community if for no other reason than to further their career and professional agenda: we all had to find the common ground.

Today, this is no longer the case. And I can tell you from touching base with many people at Microsoft that I consider friends, who have long moved up, that the spirit that helped Microsoft excel with it’s partners is just no longer there.

And the sad thing is, when business is just about business (which I’ve cautioned many of you reading this blog, that perpetually bitch about how your community resources are going away but you refuse to participate or show support in any freebie events we all do) the decision making is done only on what’s black and white and there is always a cheaper, more effective, more reliable or more suitable widget you can find from somewhere else.

The mass migration of long time Microsoft supporters that you can still see at this conference to Apple, Blackberry, Linux, Google and more ought to be an indicator to Microsoft what they ought to find important.

So I’m with Chris: I want to believe, but I just don’t. Sorry.

Kevin Turner

I always watch these live, from start to finish. Why? You can never underestimate the power of the sales guy to sell you the crap that won’t be available for sale for 2 years. Kevin, for all intends and purposes, runs the business of Microsoft. That business, in case you haven’t noticed, is no different from anything else: selling s***. CEO’s of the world evangelize, promote and motivate their companies forward. People signing the checks, making tough decisions and figuring out where to put money and where to cut it from, typically aren’t the ones that are always being begged for an interview, stuck apologizing for the company dropping the ball, so on and so forth. In case you doubt that, there is a reason I write this blog and none of you know my COO.

But back to Kevin. Kevin was the first guy to tell us that S+S was Microsoft’s new thing and that the era of selling software and solutions through partners was over. In 2006. He is the #1 reason I changed my business model in 2006. And to an extent, I probably owe him some carbon fiber from my Ferrari.

Today, Kevin talked about retail. Kevin talked about the consumer. Kevin talked about data centers.

Notice a pattern there? This is a company that is no longer going to be famous for having a beautifully landscaped campus in Redmond with geeks packed into big rooms where they can be comfortable to work all hours of the day and night. This is no longer a company that is going to have a logo and a web site and thousands of partners in order to reach every business and be a part of the solution.

This is a company that is going to go after it alone.

My take from the presentation: Get on the bus or get ran over by it.

SMB Vision

I’m a huge fan of the SMB Vision presentation.

Seriously.

Whoever came up with it deserves a friggin award. Let me know where to send it.

Brilliant.

Pay no attention to the lack of applause, your partners mumbling in the audience while you announced it, the lack of any excitement in the room. The people were just floored and awed by the opportunity. Really? Really!

The first few slides were awesome too. I love seeing a new person running the SMB business at every WPC and it was very exciting to see the slide with 4 people that preceded the current boss.

Ok, that’s as far as I can push my insincerity. There is no chain of profanities I can use to effectively portray my disbelief in what Microsoft showcased today. So please, feel free to use your own:

Are you _____ ____ insane? Who the ____ thought that was a good idea?

When you’ve got your own people shaking their head walking out of your presentation it tells me you didn’t even run this by your sales force. My god. I guess we’ll be meeting the SMB boss #6 at next WPC because if that was your vision for this market there may not even be a vision next year. It will be called the “SMB Tombstone: Lessons learned by not understanding our market.”

Final Day

Packing right now, looking forward to the final day at WPC. You can smell the cost cutting in the air in New Orleans and for the second year in a row Microsoft managed to deflate it’s audience (hint: It’s channel sales force).

Microsoft’s missed steps make a terrific opportunity for it’s partner base to further establish itself as a solid business void of Microsoft’s control and market dominance, all of which favors that business and the client, not Microsoft or any other vendor for that matter.

As I blogged recently, the Economics and Business 101 blog posts of last year are gone, as are the previous eras in this blog. It’s time to get serious, spot the opportunity and go after it. The time to just roll with the punches and see what happens is over, and this is a golden opportunity to think, act and succeed like Microsoft. No, not the Microsoft you are seeing today (hubmled, vulnerable, emotionally and competitively insecure) but the one that in the past had fantastic people doing their best to push fantastic technology and solutions and find a way for them to work for business.

Google, Apple and Microsoft have made an invisible pact, one that is unavoidable, that all technology will become an unavoidable necessity of life and be sold and provided as a common consumer good and service from a brick and mortar. But so long as there is business out there… there will be a solution opportunity. It’s just that pricing, scalability and solution will not involve the “trusted advisor” but a much more competent hybrid of a few things out there. I don’t think we’ll see the SPF resurgence…

Bring it on WPC….

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.