tech problems don't exist

I think it’s also about how Microsoft make their customers feel and how the Microsoft partners make their customers feel…
Sounds like they’re moving in a positive direction at any rate.

Fair enough, Rob. So what’s stopping you [or anyone else] from building a better mousetrap?

The problem with Microsoft’s image is that it mostly pays attention to marketers who only see trends after they’ve already happened. Even here is a good example. Did Microsoft hire you before you transformed a small South African winery? No.
They don’t take risks any more on small things and make them big themselves. They just wait for other people to do the hard work of building a doubling effect (which is what you did) and then they’ll either buy it, or clone it.
That is the condundrum of working at Microsoft. You have lots of resources (although they never really let the average employee go crazy) and lots of customers and lots of products. But lately Gates and Co have been fairly conservative. Particularly when it comes to the Internet.
Which is why we have Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and hundreds, if not thousands, of small Web 2.0 startups trying to do weird little things.
Can Microsoft get its leadership role back? Of course. Never bet against a company with billions in the bank.
But it will be fun watching what you do there.
Regarding microbrands. The marketing challenge for a big company is to appear small. The marketing challenge for a small company is to appear big.
Think about that one for a while. Might explain why I had a $250 camcorder when working at Microsoft but have a $5,000 one now that I’m at PodTech. 🙂

OK so Ill bite about ‘am I missing something.’
Maybe it’s the troll in me:)
As you say, it’s not enough to tell a cool story: you have to be doing cool shit. And Linux, Unix, Slax, Apache, YOutube, Google and Apple are ALL doing cooler shit. Where are the cool MS offerings? Vista? Zune? Hope you help uncover them.
MS could start by not inhibiting the democratization of media. If this were the case, we’d all be telling that story.

Robert – some good arguments. Big companies clearly find it harder to take risks and as you showed whilst at Microsoft, it’s the people on the ground who take the risks (both personal and on behalf of the company). Hugh got hired by some risk takers at Corp, not by Bill and Co.
With respect to Amazon, Google and others a major difference is Microsoft’s channel approach. Sure Microsoft will release something cool and innovative every now and then but more interesting is the channel of partners doing that on the Microsoft platform – people like Skinkers, Mydeo, Caspian, Horsesmouth, Dotnet, Thirteen23 and many more. That’s a pretty serious business engine that most observers of Microsoft miss. As Hugh says, we need to make them the rock stars as they’re a huge competitive advantage to Microsoft.

Steve: a lot of people inside Microsoft think what I did for three years was be an arrogant, egotistical asshat.
They missed the little secret sauce that I fell into by accident: these tools let you listen to customers and influentials and haters and respond.
I know of one cool team at Redmond that’s about to bring out something small at Mix07. It’s not a big thing that’ll kill Amazon or Google. It’s a small thing. But it’ll get lots of hype.
Why?
Because they demonstrated they are listening to the conversation that’s happening out there across tons of tech blogs.
That’s what’s magical about Microsoft letting average employees blog: it guarantees that a few will fall into the same secret sauce I did and will have to listen to people outside of Redmond for a few minutes a day.
It just was frustrating to me that I couldn’t get the leadership to really listen too.

Steve – you forgot to add: as long as it runs on SharePoint and ensures folk remain wedded to Office. That’s not a choice thing and choice is where people are at today.
When the Blue Monster finally caves in and says: ‘we’re dicounting 90% on the commodity but you pay for the real extras’ then I’ll be a huge fan. As it is, Microsoft sucks calories from IT that it doesn’t deserve. That’s why it is pretty much shut out of recruitment in the Valley – where the innovators are working. Or at least that’s what your company’s innovation team leader tells me.
No amount of fun stuff that Hugh does will change that. This ain’t consumery stuff that you can decide to take or not. This is serious business stuff with real $$/££/€€ at stake.
Oh yes – Hugh – with ROI embedded. -:)
Seriously though guys, if this has the effect on M$ that is needed then all the above just kinda slot into place.

Hugh, I think you are MS’s future “cool shit”.
Sincerely.

I’m not sure how “partner” is an honest term compared to “customer”. Let’s say Microsoft’s definition is, as you say: “A partner is basically a business, large or small, who uses MS stuff to make money.”
That’s just insane. A partner is someone whose star is tied to mine. And that’s bidirectional. As a result, I have direct leverage on them, and they have direct leverage on me.
Consider a small high-end clothing designer. They may use Brand X sewing machines in their work. But if Brand X machines can’t cope with a new fabric, it’s unlikely that the designer can get much leverage on Brand X, at least by themselves. Their recourse is to the market.
Brand X does care about the collective reaction of the people buying their machines. If enough are not satisfied, they will go out of business. But that’s the nature of a traditional producer/consumer relationship.
If I cannot directly, personally affect the strategy of someone, they are not my partner. And they should not consider me one either.
Now, let’s wander off to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzerainty …

I hate to say this Steve but if I’ve found the links to the companies you cite I can’t say I’m overly impressed. The nearest I get to a revenue number from any of them is a ‘hope’ that Mydeo might reach £1 mill in revs this year. And that follows an admitted mis-step in the offering that put them back 3 months AFTER partnering with Microsoft.
In the meantime, YT has cornered that market for the time being don’t you think? If not then PodTech is doing a pretty good job.
I saw Robert’s Thirteen23 vidcast and went to the site but again to me it was ‘So what? Futures. Show me when you’ve got something meaningful.’
Sorry but I don’t see ‘a pretty serious business engine’ in any of the examples you’re highlighting.
I already know what excites me as a business user and some of it is built on Microsoft technology.

I would suggest that discovering the partners’ real ROI might be a worthwhile exercise. It’s ceratinly not 10 to 1 because that doublecounts the Microsoft take-out, so the figure would be 9 to 1 which is still a good number except that it takes no account for whatever investments the partners make. Who knows what the actual figure is?
Another way of looking at the same data is that Microsoft are taking 10% of the partners’ revenues as a licensing fee for their software – from a partners’ perspective that may be a good deal or it may not and the answer to that question might yield some insight as to how the partners feel about Microsoft and by extension how willing they are to evangelise Microsoft to their customers.

Just give me an OS I can boot up in under 10 seconds please.

Baldy Ballmer might be crying out “Developer”, “Developer”, “Developer” but the small independant developers are running in all different directions.
Take a look at any of the many successfully independant garage startups and see how many are running on or have been developed with MS tools. It’s all Linux, Ajax and Ruby on Rails with Apache on the server.
As long as Microsoft gears the pricing of its development tools to the corporations or startups with VC money to burn they will find their userbase being chipped away at.
There’s a lot more small independant developers out there but when they are forced between paying $1,195 US for the Visual Studio Professional Standard MSDN subscription and putting food on the table and using Linux / PHP etc guess which wins.
and thats not even taking into consideration the SQL Server and web server costs.
If they want to attract the independant Web 2.0 companies and encourage use of MS software then perhaps thinking like a cash strapped startup might help .. maybe even coming up with a LAMP alternative.
Not all innovations come from big partner channels anymore but Microsoft seems to have forgotten that.

Steve: I can find examples of Microsoft-based developers even in Silicon Valley (and have written about them too). Even Google’s #1 Canadian customer (Plentyoffish.com) uses .NET and is very happy. So does MySpace (although Ballmer did some arm twisting to get them to switch from Linux to .NET).
But, don’t look at the trees. Look at the forest. And even in Europe most of the time when I interview an entrepreneur I hear “we are a LAMP shop” or “Rails” or “Amazon S3.”
Microsoft also doesn’t get small things. Usually. How many Microsofties are on Twitter? Yet I can name tons of CEOs, journalists, even a presidential candidate, tons of Google employees on Twitter (even though Google owns a competitor named Dodgeball).
Why is that? What does that demonstrate?

I think Robert is “twitterpaited”.
Why is that? What does that demonstrate?
I predict today’s twitter is tomorrow’s something else. But I digress.
Which “partner” are you referring to? Microsoft registers/certified/gold partners? Or ISV partners? Because there are different types of partners in the partner eco-system.
Robert, as he always does, talking about the ISV partners that build applications. There’s another partner out there that just deploys the finished products.
Not everything is “Developer, Developer, Developer” you know. Sometimes it’s “VAR/VAP, VAR/VAP, VAR/VAP”. 🙂

I wanted to give my perspective on what Microsoft is doing in the Small Business space with its Microsoft Small Business Specialist Programme. This has been a serious effort by Microsoft to support small business Partners who were never on the radar of Microsoft. It has given us a voice, tools, training and Microsoft has listened to us to better deliver to our small business customers. I came to the Microsoft Partner ecosystem from being a totally Open Source focused business but quickly realised this was not serving my customers as well as it could. It’s not about “selling out” and doing business and making money is not a pseudo-religious crusade! We choose the solutions which best serve our customers and Microsoft does have a lead in a number of areas for small businesses. The SBSC Programme is something that other vendors are falling over themselves to get linked in with, so that sounds reasonably innovative and forward thinking to me!
In terms of development tools, you can sign-up for the Empower ISV Programme and get a MSDN subscription for about £300, or get the Express versions of the tools which still allow a significant amount of development to be done.

Your comment, Hugh:
i.e. From a marketing perspective, it’s not what MS says to their partners that’s important. It’s what their partners are saying to their customers about MS that’s important.
I think is right on: We have been talking about “Through Partner” vs. “To Partner” to distinguish our messages that they care a bout from a customer-facing vs. business-management perspective.
In the end, people sell what they know and love. If our partners love to work with our software because they know it and we make it easy for them to gain access to it (all of our business products are given free to partners to evaluate, test and use internally), that’s the best ammo we can give them to then convey to their customers. (through partner). Couple that with a bunch of great demos and some key competitive comparisons and that would probably be enough to start but we go waaay beyond that but I don’t want to turn this into a pitch.
On the to-partner side, we’re trying to crack the profitability algorithm to help take a way risk by walking through some key profitability calculations on what it would cost to take on a new technology, a new customer, a new market. (that’s the to-partner).
So we need to balance our allotment to “to” and “through”.
In the end, if I were a partner, I’d look at this Microsoft partnership like the cheapest independent franchise in the world. It’s a fairly turnkey approach to taking best practices, well-known software and charging my own price for the solutions I build.
Then, if I can get the right customer “value” stories refined to enough customers, I can hit the jackpot.
We’re not making this stuff up, it happens all the time. Guy starts in garage, gets the right combo of customers, skills and familiarity of product. Tells a good story to enough customers. Then tells us how they’re hiring their 10 or 20th person in 2nd year after moving out of their garage.
Those are the stories that get me to work every day.

Communication… something that MS has not done well, and is doing a remarkably bad job of at the moment. Bottoms need kicking — and I know the new MS UK MD is making changes.
One big problem is that MS doesn’t actually work as a global company. It works as a NW USA based small shop with outposts. I pray for the day when MS wakes up and stops treating MS UK as a regional sales shop and profit center.

One thing MS need to do then if they are incapable of making money without their partners – is to stop biting the hand that feeds then. Ref ‘Live.com’ strategy : considering the movement to hosted servers (and selling using the SPLA licensing scheme), hosting partners are going to be MORE important.
I can see it already starting to hurt MS as many hosting partners are talking to end-users (MS customers) about open source based products (ie. Zimbra vs. Exchange) because MS now say they are going to do hosted Exchange themselves.