The Cost of Free

Let’s face it, times are hard. Depending on where you are geographically, times are really hard to depressing. We’re doing incredibly well (September on course to be the biggest month on record ever) but we saw this thing coming and redid our portfolio in order to keep on growing amid the market meltdown. Truth is, when people have less and less money coming in you have to help them spend less money. The pie-in-the-sky productivity savings and workforce optimizations do not work in this market, people do not invest in their information technology, they try to make it fill the gap and even find ways to immediately reduce costs.

Features? Forget about it. Upgrades? Dream on. Migration with the promise of a new OS that hasn’t been battle tested with all LOBs with documented support? Lights out.

Roll in the crumbling financial markets, continued housing slide, election throwdowns..

If your big play for 2008-2009 fiscal year was SBS or EBS upgrades and deployments, you’re.. well, you know. ___ed. Insert your favorite expletive there.

Thankfully, Microsoft is being very nice to the MVP bunch and has invited us up to Redmond for a week of SBS training. I’ve decided to take the trip as well since a lot of my partners are in the SBS land and I know you folks are struggling. We are doing what we can at OWN to help with the cause because we know that as bad as things are right now the crisis always shakes out the weakest fruit and makes the marketplace better and more profitable for the rest of us. So we are doing what we can to provide the training, ramp up our partner community and give it a shot in the arm it needs.

But what always comes up with projects like this is that there is a demand that it be free. So I figured I’d open up just what the cost of any “free” venture is. Let’s assume that my time is worth nothing, that I will collect salary no matter what. The price of the free training is still:

Plane ticket: $600

Hotel: $1,300

Cab, tips, etc: $120

So even eliminating the enormous cost of spending time away from business for a week, the cost of free training is over $2K. Folks like to complain about how little comes out of the conferences in terms of free videos, training, recordings and blog posts. Folks want to feel like they are there. Truth of the matter is, there is no such thing as free – someone always pays – and even when folks do something for free it buys them no goodwill – most people go about business as usual and reward companies on a selection criteria that is void of community contributions. Some solutions, as I’ve noted here, have even died in the SMB space due to the lack of support. Is it fair? Of course, absolutely, but that explains the suckiness of the sharing that is seen from the top down. I suppose I’m just a dumbass, so you’ll see something pretty special come around next weekend. Stay tuned.