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It was a surprise to Multizone that Alison Watson was moving from stewarding the partner group at Microsoft to be replaced by Jon Roskill, an 18 year veteran of the company. We were pleased when he announced himself on Twitter and friended back. We made a lot of connections at #wpc09 last year, and thought Twitter would be an excellent way to do that this time.
It was.
@nuxnix (me) and @jon_roskill CVP Microsoft Partner Program at #WPC10
@nuxnix, the informal account for Multizone was the #1 non-microsoft twitter account at the conference. Partly due to my turning over of our WPC calendar for public consumption via #twical - an open source calendar to tweet web service we are developing. At a conference tweeting about what is going on is a very a good way to engage.
Because of being wired up to the tweeting, we noticed @jon_roskill tweet asking for people to lunch by way of apologising for cutting an appearance early. This is the guy that interviewed President Bill Clinton on stage and had been the anchor for the entire conference. He was either brave or stupid we thought!
The reply tweet 'sure - love to lunch' was almost immediate. Soon a direct message asked for name and email, then an email confirmation followed, Multizone was invited to lunch with one of steveb's inner circle!
Interesting.
Given that Multizone is a product management and marketing consulting business that barely qualifies for the Small Business Specialist competency this was a great achievement which would have been absolutely impossible without social networking.
At the lunch, in a private room at the conference, with a handful of other partners, we talked roundtable style about the issues facing partners and Microsoft, and Roskill told us he was on a complete learning curve - wanting to reach out and put together thoughts based on real feedback on how to improve the partner program at Microsoft. Not stupid then at all. He had as good a cross section of partners in the room as could be and we were unfiltered by the Microsoft subsidiaries. I made some specific notes about the conversation which was pretty free flowing round the room. He was genuinely interested in what we did, and who we were and had a lot to say.
Lunch discussion - challenges, no quick changes to partner program
It was a great time for Microsoft and its partners he said, there were big challenges for Microsoft, but he had seen them before citing the emergence of the Internet in thre 90's, and the Linux threat in 2000.
He went on to say he wanted to be flexible but he wasnt Alison so we should expect differences but that she had built a great team in the partner network at Microsoft. He stressed no quick changes and no crazy plans were being thought of, but he also talked about having to be ready for Microsoft mid year review with a plan for setting the tone for financial year 2012 (July 2011) for the partner network.
It was here that my Microsoft important comment detector went off in my head telling me to listen harder.
Listening, I realised that I was witnessing first hand, the evolution of Microsoft's partner network to new command and control
Pausing to think about it for a moment, I realised that I was witnessing first hand, the evolution of the partner program to new control. That new control is part of the inner circle of Microsoft executives and has considerable trust across the company. There must be a reason for that other than 'job rotation' which others alluded to during the week.
Multizone can only hypothesise that this was the type of extremely senior person you would put in place if you were going to evicerate something in order to make it better. Now that may well be the wrong conclusion, only time will tell, but we think the partner network is going to change, substantially, while the people that Ballmer called 'not our kind of folk' move on and the new people move in to take their place. Roskill acknowledged that Microsoft can be a difficult company to connect with, and said that sometimes they find it hard to answer the question,
'Who are the set of partners we are going to manage and what does that mean?'
This eviceration; if indeed that is what it is; is not going to happen overnight, Multizone believe, but in a carefully executed transition - part of the movement to the cloud. In fact we guess it is a required condition for the success of Microsoft's bet. This was backed up by the disclosure that the Azure appliance will not really be ready for a year or so, but it was needed to de-position Google, and that a public roadmap for Azure would only become available in the next three months from Microsoft. Also lending weight to the hypothesis the Azure container in the Expo was clearly not actually 'doing' anything - you could see that from the disk IO on the servers and one of the softies confirmed to Multizone that it was little more than a mock-up. The fact that there isnt a roadmap and this Azure mock up was centre stage is indicative of a last minute strategy change. Multizone can only hypothesies about this as we do not have access to information about these decisions. Time will tell.
Roskill said Microsoft were pleased with the consistency of the Online Services products and Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in particular. Other products and services would follow these models, and pricing. Windows Intune had taken the dashboard approach from BPOS, he added.
He indicated that he felt that more progress needs to be made on the technology stack that the Dynamics business bring with them, indicating that this should be a key area of interest for Microsoft partners. It would be, in the UK, if Dynamics CRM Online was available, which it is not.
We talked about how to keep the partner community together during the year, and whether to run WPC in Europe or Asia. I said no - Multizone want to hear direct from the execs at keynotes not from their alter egos in the subsidiaries. We need that direct input so that we can decode things and figure out what is going on inside the product and exec teams. But that is because our business is advising BizSpark startups and Microsoft Hosting Service Provider partners on strategy and engagement with Microsoft and others.
Lastly we talked about partner accounting for sales issues and the scorecards Microsoft use which Roskill acknowledged were too radical at times in terms of the change percentages weightings in impacted sales - a key partner metric.
It was a cordial affair. Very professional. In talking about Expression Studio not being available on the Mac, the platform of most if its target audience, and admitting this was a very poor decision, the opportunity arose to ask why the Mac Business Unit couldnt have a bit more representation in the partner program. We cited our only BPOS customer who only deployed it once Mac support arrived in the sign on tools. Mac Business Units products are a significant effort of the company ignored by the partner program. Microsoft have a huge Mac Office release coming in Office for Mac 2011 and are or were significant shareholders in Apple but appear to be resolute in not engaging with it with partners. Mac support is in BPOS and of course Office for Mac is a major product, and SharePoint supports Apples browser Safari and had elements of SharePoint workspace released for the Mac in 2009. But Microsoft see it as a distraction for partners from the platform and operating sysyem in Windows and its is absent from the partner network and MPN.
To his credit Roskill took lots of notes and promised to think about what he had observed and heard.
Conclusions
Multizone believe it is crucial that any company partnering with Microsoft understand what significant change means for them. Microsoft is changing. Partnering with Microsoft is changing. Business models with Microsoft inevitably need to change too. Planning for being a partner is changing. This change is in the next 18-36 months. It is crucial to plan, in hard and actionable terms. 'Steady as she goes' or 'softly softly' is not going to cut it.
"People under pressure", Roskill said, "are the ones sitting on their hands"
I asked one of the other guests to take the pic above - on my iPhone - which Roskill remarked upon but sportingly he allowed it. What an interesting day. Seismic insight for me. And all because of Twitter. |
