The IT Melting Pot!

This is a great blog post by Steve Goodman!

Regular readers of my blog will know I’m a big fan of Microsoft products. As well as being an Exchange MVP, I’m very much a cloud fan – you’ll find me at Exchange Connections in a few weeks time talking about migrating to Exchange Online amongst other subjects. What I’m about to write doesn’t change any of that, and I hope the right people will read this and have a serious re-think.

Microsoft’s “Devices and Services” strategy is leaving many in the industry very confused at the moment.

If you’ve been living under a rock – I’ll give you an overview. They’ve dropped MCSM, the leading certification for their Server products. They’ve dropped TechNet subscriptions, the benchmark for how a vendor lets its IT pros evaluate and learn about their range of products. And they’ve been very lax with the quality of updates for their on-premises range of products, Exchange included, whilst at the same time releasing features only in their cloud products.

A range of MCMs and MCSMs – Microsoft employees included – have been expressing their opinions here, here, here, hereand in numerous other places. We’ve discussed the TechNet Subscriptions on The UC Architects’ podcast.

One thing is key – this kind of behaviour absolutely destroys trust in Microsoft. After the last round of anti-trust issues, it took a long time for Microsoft to gain a position of trust along with many years of incrementally releasing better and better products. A few years ago Microsoft was just about “good enough” to let into your datacentre; now it’s beginning to lead the way, especially with Hyper-V, Exchange and Lync.

Before I get started on Microsoft’s cloud strategy, let’s take a jovial look at what (from my experience) is Google’s strategy:

• Tell the customer their internal IT sucks (tactfully), ideally without IT present so they can talk about the brilliance of being “all in” the cloud without a dose of reality getting in the way.
• Class all line of business apps as irrelevant – the sales person was probably still in nursery when they were deployed. Because those apps are old, they must be shit.
• Show a picture of something old and irrelevant – like a mill generating it’s own energy. Tell them that’s what their IT is! You, the customer, don’t run a power station, so why would you run your own IT? If you do run your own IT you are irrelevant and getting left behind.
• Make out the customer’s own IT is actually less reliable than it is. Don’t mention that recent on-premises products cost less, are easy for the right people to implement and from a user perspective are often more reliable than an overseas cloud service.
• Only provide your products in the cloud so once you’re in… you’re in.
• Don’t let anyone from the outside be a real expert on the technology. You don’t need a Google “MVP”, because 99% of Google server products can only be provided by one company.
• Once you’ve signed up a customer remember, you don’t need to give them good support. They can’t go anyway without spending money on a third party solution to get their data out.

From a Microsoft MVP point of view, Google’s strategy is brilliant. It means that although we like a lot of their products, it drives away customers in their droves. Microsoft’s traditional approach to the cloud – and partner ecosystem would be a breath of fresh air to someone who’s been though the Google machine.

Unfortunately, based on recent experiences by myself and others – the above is actually looking pretty similar to Microsoft’s new strategy….

Continue reading here!

//Richard