An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

Karl's open letter about Support...

E-Bitz - SBS MVP the Official Blog of the SBS "Diva" — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:39:19 GMT

Small Biz Thoughts by Karl Palachuk: The Death of SBS: http://smallbizthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/05/death

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 23:48:00 GMT

I just found this post and read it out of curiosity. Being another MS FTE (Blue Badge) I can definitely tell you its really bad in PSS now. I am not in SBS but Directory Services. I get calls daily from India engineers who really have no clue, and unfortunately just want to punt the call if its something that is not in their "script" or knowledge base. Yes we take the escalations for now and fix the problem then let the customer talk to our managers who can't do a darn thing about India.

Our call volume is through the roof now and even backed up with Premier customers due to the drastically reduced # of FTE's. Microsoft has been very smart about letting go some employees by firing a few at a time for "performance reasons" so as not to attract bad press. Of the FTE's on my team that are left, more than half are looking for a new job. Even both my Technical Leads are looking employment and they have 15+ yrs with MS combined. I have several years myself.

Until MS starts losing money and market share this isn't going to change.

Know anyone that needs a really good Active Directory engineer?

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:06:00 GMT

...well.... all I can say is that we SBSers have indeed built up a relationship with Mothership Shanghai as I call them. The guys and gals over there do have a bond with us and really want more of a bond with the MVP community.

I for one still see a lot of hard working people who care.

But don't worry, I'm still keeping an eye on things.

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 14:54:00 GMT

First off...great article. I wish there was a Susan in the Exchange user community to advocate for them to Steve and Bill.

I am a MS FTE (blue badge) in PSS and it was just painful to see a lot of my friends in the SBS group in Charlotte being given 60 days to find another job within the company or lose their job. There is a certain camaraderie that you build with people working around you - the attitude that if we have a really difficult issue then we will all work through it and fix it - I can't imagine having the same with somebody in India or China.

Being a management major I follow a lot of the "inside", "cloak-n-dagger" stuff in Microsoft's corporate management and the people who are responsible for these short sighted practices which will haunt MSFT in the future are people like Rick Devenuti (rickde at microsoft dot com), Lori Moore (lorim at microsoft dot com) and Marlena Werder (marlenaw at microsoft dot com). I bet these corporate big-wigs will be lining their pockets with fat paychecks and move on before the repercussions are felt - leaving us the employees, the company and most importantly you the customer in the lurch.

Clearly this isn't that dynamic, ravenous and innovative MSFT of the 80s and 90s...this is the lazy, deceitful and greedy MSFT of today.

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 04:28:00 GMT

What Ms. Susan Bradley writes to Sballmer is right on the money!
There is ALOT more that could be said: but for now, her concerns depict reality.
I for one have experienced the VERY instances that she refers to; and want to echo her statement of "We deserve long term support and not short term solutions."

Like her I want substantiative action from microsoft!

In reply: An open letter to Steve Ballmer

TrackBack — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 20:45:00 GMT

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 15:28:00 GMT

Hi Susan:
You are the best Marketing person SBS has and Microsoft should listen.

Customer satisfaction is the key to any succesful business and support is most crucial in achieving that satisfaction.

If SBS is a profitable product and MS continues to see sales growth in the product line then they may act on your suggestion. Customers will probably end up having to pay more for local support if they make it available.

Keep up the gret work.
Kind regards
Fred

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 14:44:00 GMT

hear hear

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 16:37:00 GMT

I completely agree with you here Susan, The India thing will level out eventually - there are teething problems in everything (Although lets hope the next time I've got to enter the licensing codes over the phone it is not through a heavy accent - Just a jibe at licensing again).

My voice will not do very much, but your voice and obvious knowledge does carry weight. You have my full support. SBS may be more intuitive than other systems, but unless you have a team of folk (regional variations absolutley required) that can provide hands-on knowledge the OS and friendly free information movement will win out.

I'm from the UK and our military only use opensoure now. And from past trends, industry usually follows suit soon after the military. MS provides uniformed hierarchies and protocols that go beyond language and culture. But if the strength of unity comes under threat flaws become exploited.

Lets hope 2005 with it's XML driven filling system will keep the network communicating!

Take care

-Scott Lyon

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 14:04:00 GMT

Susan

I hope your letter has success and that support for SBS will not lessen. Our clients, for the most part, have only one server that they rely on to keep thier businesses alive. They do not have failover servers. When they are "down" they are bleeding - quick and efficient support must be an absolute, not a wish list item.

There is nothing worse than speaking from a cell phone to a person in India (who has a heavy accent )- every other sentence is "I'm sorry, would you repeat that, I didn't understand what you said." You must speak in "MS" not just English. You cannot use any colloquialisms - they are not understood, and confuse issues. On some support calls to India it feels like they are going through a script and cannot jump over the non-relevent parts. I think this is because they do not know the products they are supporting and cannot visualize problems and/or make connections between cause and effects..

Susan - you ROCk and all your efforts for the SBS community are noticed and appreciated.

Cynthia Slade
Chicago SBS UG

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 09:03:00 GMT

Hi Susan,
I really appreciate your efforts towards the SBS Community. Tho I am not part of that & I am much more in to SUS/WUS Groups, but I really feel you are doing a lot.

Kudos to Susan.

Have a nice day,
Athif
Mohammed.Athif Khaleel.
http://faqshop.com/aboutmain.htm#Mohammed_Athif_Khaleel

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 21:43:00 GMT

Come out to the newsgroups... we do.

And if your statement is true how come my vendor screwed up my SA order, and people in AU were told that SA on an OEM box would not be able to be moved, we get people confused over device versus user cals, and our SBS boxes can't accurately count what licenses we have.

Then we still need a SharePoint that allows a private logon but does not "suck" a domain cal.

The PUR document gives me a headache.

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 21:19:00 GMT

dont understand why people have such a problem with MS licenseing (especially for SBS). MS generally have nice whitepaper to cover all your answers (that said I never trust product managers for any advice).

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 14:35:00 GMT

I really emailed both Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. I've already received communication that because of travel he's not going to get back to me right away but plans to.

steveb-at-microsoft.com
billg-at-microsoft.com

I've emailed Steve before and he has emailed me back.

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 13:52:00 GMT

Susan,

Did you really email Steve, or just posted it here?

thanks,

Mark-Allen

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 14:11:00 GMT

Our company, North County Technology Group (NCTG), is a Microsoft Certified Partner with the Networking Infrastucture Solutions competency. We focus on the small business market and specialize in the Small Business Server. My business partner and I have experience with this product back to the first release of this product - SBS 4.0 in 1999. Our former business name was InTouch Systems and we have been Certifed Partners since 1997.

We contact MS PSS many times each year. As a Certifed Partner we receive 5 support calls for use at our discretion. This year we have initiated contact about 20 times. We concur with Susan's history of support and would like to add that Business Critical Support (formerly Server Down Support) has been most important to the timely resolution of qualifying issues. In past years, getting someone who knows about or understands the unique characteristics of SBS was virtually impossible. Now (finally) we can almost always get a support professional who really knows this unique product (a collection of servers on one box) and resolve the issue whether it is a one hour call or one that spans a few days.

Watching the support erosion over the last two years at an organization like Dell Computer has been painful (to my clients and me). The only area that is still worthwhile is server support and Dell now contracts with Central America for some of that support (which has been acceptable as far as I've seen and much better than that contracted with India in the past). The real problem is that some of our clients are hearing that Dell is not as good as it once was and are requesting an alternative. Hence we now work with Hewlett Packard. Reputation is important to all of us.

We utilize some outsourced contacting services too. Our company subcontracts some development projects with two different India based companies. My business partner has been doing subcontract work with them for about ten years now. Not all projects go that route but it works for some and allows us to provide the technical expertise required and the turnaround time desired. We provide all the 'human contact' element to our clients which is what makes the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful undertaking.

We know that there is always pressure to streamline and improve business performance and that the decisions can be difficult to make. We also know that NOT listening and NOT considering all implications in advance can be permanently damaging to a reputation that has taken many years to build. Our business depends on so much that Microsoft does and there are many out there waiting in the wings to jump on the 'alternative OS bankwagon'. Let's not give them more fuel for that fire.

Respectfully,
Karen Christian
North County Technology Group
Microsoft Certified Partner

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 13:26:00 GMT

Quite frankly PSS was a lifesaver to me on SBS 2000. It was a major change from SBS 4.0 and 4.5. The quality of support wa outstanding. It was more than "just follow this procedure." I walked away with a much greater depth of knowledge.

More than that, I became completely sold on the package. I am a small VAR. I deal with small businesses. I always quote SBS. Microsoft support is an important part of that.

One of the distinguishing factors that we have over open source is having a vendor you can contact and suggest product improvements. A vendor where you can pick up the phone and say: "I have t get this running for my customer." This can happen in some pretty high pressure situations. There is nothing more frustrationg than getting a support person who isn't familiar with the product or its real life applications.

Through the years, Microsoft has done a great job of becoming approachable. This is especially true for those of us who deal with small business. Please, "don't fix what ain't broke."

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 11:35:00 GMT

I have called on SQL Server support been directed to India. Now I have nothing against India, or East Indians. However, have you ever called someone on a cell phone and strained to hear through the static? That is what it was like. Then the support engineers were in general terrible. One did not even have SQL Server installed on her desktop. The other had no idea what vbscript was. He knew all about .Net!

Problems which normally could be solved in several hours, now take days as the engineer has to understand the problem, research it, and get back to me.

This simply won't work in a production environment.

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 04:20:00 GMT

I emailed this to Mr. Ballmer yes, and he has responded to me in the past. I'm just putting Mr. Ballmer on notice that I will be monitoring this. If I feel that the support that I am accustomed to in any way is reduced, I will be emailing him again. Right now I have contacts in Charlotte, in Texas, in Shanghai. I don't in India.

I know when things "hurt" the SBS community. When we, the community, lose the connection with support that we've been accustomed to now, we all lose.

I'll be monitoring that the level of communication that I rely on now for the SBS community will not be affected.

I'll be calling in once the transition takes place to monitor the quality of phone support.

This is just a letter to let Mr. Ballmer know that I'll be watching. I'm making sure there IS no pain to my community.

re: An open letter to Steve Ballmer:

bradley — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 04:10:00 GMT

What are you expecting from this open letter? Do you expect Ballmer to respond? Are you getting over the fact that M$ is offshoring PSS to India? What is your pain?

Anthony