Stuart R. Crawford

I have nothing to say today!

Wow, this has to be a first, so I will start typing randomly and see what happens. 

I recently posted a comment on my colleague Vlad’s blog site today at http://www.vladville.com/2008/04/disaffected-feedback.html about the state of marketing from my biggest partner - Microsoft.  Now don’t get me wrong and I actually never even thought about it until Vlad’s posting this morning, however it is so very true on what is happening in the marketplace with Microsoft.  I believe that they are getting blown out of the water with some pretty agressive advertising from the Apples and other of the world.

How does this make me feel as a partner?  Well, pretty tired I must admit.  Here we are trying to make a living working with Microsoft technologies, and for the most part it is a pretty good living, however, the clients are knocking down the doors for a lot of the newer technologies that Microsoft has to offer.  Vista is like a dead whale washed up on the shore, it is going nowhere, great technology when the third party applications work on it.  Windows Phones are bandwidth hogs compared to a Blackberry (and yes I still get talked about Blackberry vs. Windows Phone when I attend Partner events) and we haven’t seen any real advertising for the new server lineup (Vlad even commented on it).

So what is a partner to do?  Although we have been successful in working with Microsoft on MDF money for our awareness events, I have heard from other partners especially in the US that it is not flowing all that easy right now.  We at IT Matters are just a small fish in a very big pond and although we try we are struggling to share the news about these solutions that we can promote, sure we are selling some, however, it is only to the ones that we can reach daily.

OK, so I have said alot for having an empty mind this morning.

Filed under: it matters, marketing, microsoft