Mon, Dec 6 2004 17:12
bradley
An open letter to Steve Ballmer:
Mr. Ballmer:
My name is Susan Bradley and I'm a Small Business Server MVP.
This is my open letter to you:
A while back in the blogosphere there was a blog post that [per reports], made a lot of impact on Microsoft. It was a post on how Microsoft lost the API wars by breaking backwards compatibility and focusing on web applications. The infamous Joel on Software post was discussed and even nominated as one of the top essays on software for the year. There’s another trend out there in the tech world that disturbs me even greater than APIs and web applications.
In general, in my view there are three things that impact Microsoft:
Security.
Licensing.
Product Support.
I’m putting you, Mr. Ballmer on notice that I’m going to be very carefully monitoring one of those three. I sincerely hope you are not making a grave short term mistake that will have huge long term consequences more than you realize.
Security is still a big public relations nightmare. Even though I believe that any operating system can be made secure and you have employees of your firm practically living out of a suitcase trying to get CIOs, admins and techs to realize this, that’s a long term problem still being worked out. But for the most part, all in all, I’ve seen the changes that the Security push has made and am quite pleased. I think we're on the right path. Sure, we’re still fighting over features versus security, but we’ll be doing that until our dying day.
Licensing and simplicity in the Microsoft world is an oxymoron. I can’t tell you how many times myself and my fellow Most Valuable Professionals have brought up to even as high as to you at the Microsoft MVP summit last April, that licensing “sucks” and the attitude we constantly get back is that they’ve tried to make it flexible. It’s not flexible, it’s complicated and confusing and you practically need a team of Attorneys to figure it out. When 32 SBS MVPs have long threaded email discussions over the interpretation of what a DEVICE CAL is all about, sir, you’ve got a problem. Small Business Server platform in particular is “supposed” to be easy, simple, and I’m sure I’ve got a few grey hairs under this hair coloring I apply every now and then that I’m sure are directly caused by me trying to track down my correct information for Software Assurance. To top it off when we’ve had to go up the ladder to clarify licensing and then go back to local Product Managers because THEY were giving incorrect information about licensing, sorry, but you have a problem.
And now we come to the reason for this blog post in the first place.
Support. In my mind it’s the ONE absolutely positively one thing that Microsoft has over any other platform, over any other operating system out there. Support. You’ve supported me. I could be guaranteed that if I called in and specified “SBS” that there would be a person on the other end of the phone call that was an SBS expert, might even have it installed at home, and might even have been around the product longer than I have been. As has been discussed on other blogs, the beancounters at Microsoft apparently have been looking around to cut costs and one area that is now under the block to chop is support.
I just heard that starting next year; front line support for the Small Business Server platform [the first call] will be to India. Now before you think that this is about nationalism and loss of jobs or anything, it’s not. I’ve heard that the folks that used to be SBS product support team members in Charlotte will just be moving around to other areas and Mothership Los Colinas will be our main escalation “home base”. [The term of “Mothership” is an affectionate term that I use that refers to the places in the world where the technical support staff that live and breathe SBS work out of].
While we will still have “Mothership Los Colinas”, “Mothership Shanghai”, but we will no longer have “Mothership Charlotte”. It’s not about a concern of where SBS will be supported; it’s a concern of the loss of history with the product, a loss of team members, a loss of connections to the community out here. Now to give credit where credit is due, we’ve expressed our concern and those folks in Microsoft that understand how special the SBS community is, are ensuring that there are connections and ties be put back in place. But it still concerns me that the first call will be to a person who might not have the depth of history with this product that I do. I’ve lived and breathed an SBS box since SBS 4.0 in 1999. I have a network at the office and one at home. I have a Virtual PC version on my laptop. I know when this system sneezes and catches a cold. I know when Security Patches hurt us and when they don’t. I know what works and what doesn’t work on this box.
Already we’ve seen erosion in the support surrounding the SBS platform. We used to get 2 free calls on the SBS 2000 platform; now on SBS 2003 we have guaranteed newsgroup response. Even then, some folks have indicated that they are not getting the guaranteed response that they thought they would. Me, I’m just a volunteer in the newsgroups and it’s not my job, it’s just a hobby. Granted an addictive hobby, as addictive as blogging, but I do it out of passion for the platform, for this community.
I’m always amazed of the attitude towards product support I see elsewhere [and sometimes with large firms with premier contracts], that the attitude is that support is not good and sometimes useless. I’ve never felt that way about the support that the Small Business Server platform has received. SBS product support rocks. In fact the folks that first coined the phrase SBS Rocks was Product Support Services in Charlotte [at least that’s my understanding]
Funny thing, though, this is only a USA phenomenon. In fact outsourcing of support has been going on overseas for some time and my fellow MVPs from the International arena were actually quite pleased to see that your firm is finally outsourcing US support because they hope that once we in the United States have as lousy support as they have had to suffer through that perhaps, finally, the overall quality of support will be universal… that is we will ALL have lousy support. Perhaps only then will a long term systemic plan of action to the problem of support at a level and quality that is appropriate throughout the world will be addressed.
I wouldn’t call myself a Microsoft partner but your support policies impact a lot of Microsoft Partners out here. The ones that sell your products. Your Small Business Server boxes. Your real sales staff members. I will say that I’m a wacko end user who only wants what’s best for SBS and the customers of SBS. I always have since the first day I went searching for help and guidance and found the SBS communities and used the SBS support. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/support/default.mspx
There’s a scene in the Goldie Hawn movie “Protocol” where she’s testifying in front of the Senate and she tells the Senators …the gist of it is…. that it’s her fault that the events of the movie happened… that there is no such thing as a free ride…that it was up to her to make sure that they, the Senators and others in the Government, were doing their jobs. Her character in the movie said “I’ll be watching you.”
Well Mr. Ballmer, this is a blog post to put you on notice. I’m a SBS community member. I’m used to a level of support that I and my community have come accustomed to. I’ve called in the past, paid the US$245 and more than gotten my money’s worth. I’ve been pleased with the support I’ve received. I think my community has been too.
Here and now, I’m putting you on notice that I’ll be watching out here and monitoring. And making sure my SBS community gets a fair deal. We deserve the support that we’re accustomed to now. We’re rolling out your new technologies faster than those big firms. We deserve folks that care about our Community, about our platform. We deserve long term support and not short term solutions.
I hope you understand, Mr. Ballmer that I think this cost cutting binge your firm is on lately is very short sighted. I’m a shareholder and I’m concerned that the short term decisions that your beancounters are doing now will hurt the company in the long run.
Partners can learn other operating systems and tend to choose the best solutions for their clients in the long run. You take away support, or have it lowered to a level that makes it comparable to everything else out there, combined with the complexity of licensing, and small businesses don’t have quite the same resistance to rip out and totally change that large entrenched firms do.
Bottom line, Mr. Ballmer, if I see erosion in the level or quality of support that I see now, that my community is used to now, you’ll be hearing from me again.
I’ll be watching you.
Update: 12/14/2004: Director of SBS, Eugene Ho responds:
Filed under: Rants
![[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.]](http://www.sbslinks.com/images/headertop.png "There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not!")