Over the past 12-18 months Microsoft has gotten a lot of bumps and bruises on this blog, ever since Kevin Turner and Allison Watson outlined the lack of vision for the company that is Microsoft as we’ve known and grown with. At the Worldwide Partner Conference in 2007, Turner announced the Microsoft shift to the more consumer-centric business and at the Wordwide Partner Conference 2008 both Turner and Watson explained where the partner community will remain - below 6% commission on cloud services with opportunities to integrate legacy platforms with the new way of Microsoft software service subscriptions. In November of this year at the Microsoft PDC, Ray Ozzie revived the much criticized Hailstorm .NET failure at the turn of the millennium into a thriving cloud based operating system and renewed the commitment to the developers that choose to build on top of Microsoft.

Yesterday, Microsoft also announced the launch of the Microsoft store where you can purchase software directly from Microsoft.

In a nutshell, in just under 18 months, we have seen Microsoft go from the largest software developer in the world to the largest technology conglomerate in the world with the funds, presence, talent and overwhelming opportunity to seize large shares of the markets that are struggling.

Do you think that bankruptcy of Circuit City and CompUSA had anything to do with the idea that Microsoft needs to go at it alone to reach the end customer? Microsoft’s inability to control the messaging in the retail segment has as much to do with the Vista failure as do the perennial Apple smears against it.

My biggest gripe with Microsoft for years has been in that Microsoft lacked leadership and vision. Ray Ozzie has changed that.

For years Microsoft roamed the post-monopoly-lawsuit desert in search of a hit - with many technologies seen as me-too would-be competitors that failed to catch on. The entire cloud approach, from search to storage, seemed like a neverending collection of summer intern code experiments that lacked in both purpose and refinement. It just seems cool became the norm at Microsoft Live, except none of the cool kids wanted to play with it.

And when it seemed like Microsoft was down for the count it seems something changed with it in a way that absolutely repositioned the company and its direction. Looking at the flow and innovation from Microsoft it no longer feels like a business software company trying to exert it’s will into tangent markets - it seems like a business platform company that wants to be the delivery mechanism for the services.

That is a tough call to make and a huge change in direction - one that has caused a lot of pain as the ship now plows over the partner marketplace that brought Microsoft to it’s prominence to begin with.

So as painful as it is to watch, it is ultimately the right thing for Microsoft and the right thing for the technology marketplace. We (software solutions people) strive to enable easy communication, trust in the computing process and data integrity, and the beauty of this business and profession is that you never stop learning with the constant change.

Microsoft has effectively shot the middleman that stood in the way of their direct relationship with the user - if you were that middle man your days are unfortunately numbered. As more technology jobs are sailed down the pink slip river there is a very bright and positive side to the development - more and more people are not just using but relying on technology for both business and leisure. As complexity is removed and reliability is improved the opportunity goes from “building IT” to “improving IT” and the great news is that the cost of entry in the new world is pretty much leveled.

If you intend to be in business or even employed five years from now I hope you are imagining your role in IT five years down the road.

Every day I see myself illustrated in Dilbert is another day I die a little inside.

Folks, I hear the grumbling, believe me. And no matter how closed of a forum or hug group you think you have out there, everything you say and do comes back to me.

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t like waking up every day just to be kicked in my face while I lose sleep trying to build and improve things - but the excellence and the value we deliver at Own Web Now are thanks to the haters and people that continue to push us, kick us, advise us and help guide the products, solutions and the entire business forward. I once asked a fellow partner why he seemed to have so much beef with how we did things but kept on bringing us business every day. His answer:

The more I recommend you and the more you succeed the more people you will hire and the value provided is unique to OWN and someone that I know. Minor bumps in the road are to be expected but you’ve never failed me in a way all of my other vendors have. You’re the only true partner I have.

Yes, he had the cowboy hat on.

When I gloat about how well we are doing in this down market it is a reflection of how well our partners are doing and how well our entire relationship with our partner base works. You see, we are partners, and there are times when one side is dragging the other.

Our current success and our current portfolio strength is due in part thanks to the major ass kicking I got last year at which point I dedicated a lot of time to fix the nagging issues in the products and services. This year we have worked very hard in August - October timeframe to hire and train up the new staff to help with where we are growing.

Every time someone that works with us gives us sh** either in private or in public it helps improve the situation. So folks, keep it up. I appreciate it.

And you know what, I do the same with Microsoft. We push a very large truck full of cash to Microsoft and I expect nothing but the best from them. I expect you to have the same attitude towards OWN.

Thank you, and you should be very happy with what you see in your inbox tomorrow, look for the OWN newsletter and check out the new properties we are building to strenghten our relationships and business opportunities together.

I will be out until the first so the opinionated asshole blogging activity will be pretty light and limited to the few announcements.

November will be a huge month for us, we’re announcing new products and new licensing options for all our products to help our ExchangeDefender MSPs compete in the slower economy effortlessly. There is so much in that word I can write paragraphs just to explain the lengths we’ve gone to. It’s sort of necessary. Although October is almost 90% likely to be yet another record month for OWN, the SMB part of that is struggling so we’re teaming up with some people you might know very, very well and the automation of that is key so I’m actually the one leading the project. The new offerings will be limited to ExchangeDefender SPs only, I feel it’s the only fair thing to do for people that support our flagship product for us to get some exclusive battle gear from us.

Till the first, enjoy the cans…

Two more days till the first issue, gonna be big. http://www.vladville.com/signup.php

-Vlad

If you happen to be in Downtown Seattle this weekend, track me down.. I’ll be at the SBS UG meeting tonight to talk about a new community project, out drinking with the boys later tonight, and tomorrow morning/afternoon just hanging out at the hotel. If you’re one of my partners and we’ve never met face to face track me down.

* Ok, obligatory community note here - Yes, I have tshirts. I am also here on behalf of Andy Goodman as the Deputy Riffraff General. No, I am not going to the Garbage Truck Driver Convention.

Starting with next week I am coming back to work full time (and then some) from my paternity leave. Depending on the little monkey’s sleep schedule I might be putting in a lot more hours in odd hours of the night and I’m committing to my comeback full on.

So I have started something.. several things in fact..

My first goal is to clean up Vladville a little. There are a lot of serious technical and business articles I have written but decided to pull back from Vladville since they don’t really fit into the vibe of the fun-n-gun style of humor displayed here.

So sign up for it here
Vladville Newsletter

It’s free and it’s actual content and it’s what I actually do (sans the satirical view of it you will still get here daily I promise you will love it.

Take a room full of MVPs and give them a bunch of interconnected servers for lab purposes. Take away Internet access. What happens next?

Monkeys launch a mailbomb at each other. It’s the equivalent of a slap fight, for geeks.

Vlad: At some level this is really childish..

Tim: This is childish at every level..

Who is YOUR daddy Wayne & Dana, who is your daddy?

Took the (out of town) team out to lunch today and they really enjoyed this lovely sign, on behalf of Orlando, the city beautiful:

Don’t be homeless. If you are homeless, remain in state of perpetual motion or sleep on the pavement. Other options include mounting the bronze alligator statue, sleeping at the bottom of a fountain or suspending yourself upside down from a city light.

Gotta love government bureaucracy. I wonder how many people got together to define the instance of a homeless person sleeping in a park.

Aaron Booker from Hardlines caught up with me at the recent Connectwise Summit. I’ve blogged about VarVid video blog that Aaron and Pat Dolan put together to give you the street-vibe around WPC. Now it was my turn, but first a bit of background:

Slimy Vendor Whore is something Dana and I came up way back in 2005 when I got introduced as Vlad Mazek, the Microsoft MVP, Exchange guru and an outspoken community leader and Dana got introduced as a vendor. As Dana sat there outraged at his introduction I of course piled on by not just saying he was a vendor but a slimy vendor whore at that. Ever since that my official introduction to anyone that was a potential lead outside of the general pitching/networking areas has been that I’m a slimy vendor whore.

As you will see in this video, I’m proud to unseat Eric Ligman from his throne as the king of our slimy vendor whore kingdom. Please watch the video and count the # of sales pitches and gratuitous self-promotional messages - I’d say make it a drinking game and down one every time you hear a sales pitch but you’d likely end up dead from alcohol poisoning.

Vlad Mazek Interview from Aaron Booker on Vimeo.

If you are thoroughly disgusted at what you just saw I’m going to let you in on a little secret that I see far too many people are not too clued in on: When someone sticks a mic and a camera in your face it is not to get to know you, the real you, your soul. It is a self-promotional effort of getting the content that others will want to get something for - you have only a few moments to present yourself and what you do for others. In crude terms, it’s an invitation to pimp. Unless you are a twelve year old girl nobody wants to hear your shoutouts, your thoughts on world peace or a funny joke or an anecdote of what the times were like when you worked on mainframes - they see a goofy picture you’re guaranteed to hate and they want to know what you can do for them. This isn’t 60 minutes, it’s 5 minutes - sell yourself.

Oh, and for those that haven’t met me and wonder if Vladville is just an act and what I’m really like in real life…. that’s me without caffeine in a basement in Florida during summer.

P.S. If you don’t creep out the guy interviewing you, you simply haven’t done your job.