RetroDex Plan D

It seemed like such a simple idea.  Everything Channel decided to bring back Comdex -- but as a virtual event.  I could not imagine Comdex without after hours parties -- even if it was set in a virtual Las Vegas.  Plus I could not wrap my head around a virtual party.  I even joined second life and walked around in there looking for ways to have a party -- my old brain just could not put that together.

So RetroDex was born.  In its current form, RetroDex is two after hours parties in local markets timed to coincide with Comdex Virtual.  

Along the way we had all kinds of ideas and not all kinds of time. We chased our tails a bit.  Built up a team, and today we launched events in Silicon Valley and Seattle.  You can read all about it at the RetroDex site.

If you are one of the many people we talked to while we have been making our plans, thank you.  Your feedback has helped immensely.  If you are one of my amazing team members working tirelessly on this project -- thank you for making this possible.

Here is a list of things that surprised me along the way:

1. Having a party just to socialize after a day of virtual event going is not compelling enough.  So we added great feature speakers (Robert Scoble and Larry Walsh).
2. Bringing together like minded channel partners to collaborate on an event is nearly impossible. So we skipped the collaboration and just hosted the thing ourselves.
3. Riding the media wave created by Comdex did not happen -- because so far there has not been a media wave.  I still think this could change, but I have been very surprised that the media has not picked up on the Comdex big, Comdex explodes, Comdex dormant, Comdex back as virtual, RetroDex as after hours Comdex parties story.  Seems interesting to me.

So here we are on Plan D.  This just would not be fun if we didn't make it to at least plan G before November 16th.

A few months back I wrote a post about how great things happen when they are tied to events -- because events have dates that cannot slide.  How true!

One Question

Harvey Mackay wrote a great book in 1995 called Swim With the Sharks.  In it he tells a story about going to a convention of envelope makers (hard for me to imagine too, but he was in that business) where a veteran of the envelope biz asked him:  "what do you get for your scrap?".  That is with the "s".  Turns out that the difference between making it or not making in the envelope business is how much you get for those little scraps of paper that don’t make it into a finished envelope.  I gather the envelope business is pretty price competitive!

I bring up this story because in many situations there is one question that can tell the whole story.  There is one question that illuminates layers upon layers of information about a person, a project, or a business. 

That old guy at the convention of envelope makers learned all he needed to know about Harvey Mackay’s envelope business when he asked that one question.  From the answer he would discover if Harvey knew what he was talking about, if Harvey’s business was running well, and if Harvey might know something useful. 

Every business and many situations have a “one question” like this.

If you hire a lot of people, you probably have your favorite interview question.  Sure you ask 20 questions, but there is probably one that tells the whole story.  For me it is:  “Tell me about the worst place you ever worked.”  Our company culture is very important to me and I want to know how someone is going to contribute positively to our culture.  The answer to this one question tells me if the person will take ownership of their positive contribution to our company culture.  If you are hiring for a technical position, you might ask a question specific to the technology – something like “How do you get around the memory allocation problem in ___?”.  You can see here that I don't hire the technical people but you get the idea.  The answer to one properly asked question tells you the whole story.

Great salespeople employ this one question methodology all of the time.  Our clients are marketing people and asking them:  “What is the performance metric you are most worried about achieving next quarter?” tells a lot.  From the answer we find out if they are inclined to measure things, if they have one problem or many, and what they are going to be thinking about when staring at the ceiling at 3 AM.  Armed with that information we know if we can help them or not.  All in One Question.

The Media Spotlight Eludes the Enterprise

Even people immersed in enterprise computing would rather follow the latest product announcement by Apple or Facebook than the latest news about Network Attached Storage, or Business Intelligence Software.

You might be thinking that those business IT people probably have their own media outlets to follow and we just don't see them.  After all, we don't see news about the sewage treatment industry either but we know it is there.

I would think CIO magazine would be the place that the enterprise types hang out.  Top story today?  Windows Phone 7 and Verizon gets the iPhone.

According to Gartner the 2010 worldwide IT spending by the Enterprise will be $2.4 trillion of an overall market of $3.4 trillion.   Those of you doing the math know this makes the enterprise 72% of all IT spending.  Add into this the fact that many of the consumer tech companies like Google and Facebook are really paid in advertising dollars -- and we can't help but conclude that the technology industry is clearly dominated by the budgets of businesses.

So why no coverage?

According to Wikipiedia, Business Intelligence is computer based techniques used in spotting, digging out, and analyzing business data....often aimed to support better business decision making.  According to Gartner, the German firm SAP is the leader in the Business Intelligence market with 22.4 percent share.

This stuff is just not interesting.  No wonder we all just want to talk about the movie about Zuckerberg.

We have to figure out how to make enterprise computing interesting.

Facebook is the Paris Hilton of Tech

Smart phones, tablets, TVs, app stores, Twitter, and Facebook (and the movie) sure seem to get the bulk of media attention.  HP now has over $114 billion in revenues, the largest part generated selling to the enterprise, but their consumer products get all of the coverage.  IBM has 400,000 employees and also generates nearly $100 billion in revenues – rarely ever mentioned – because it is focused on the enterprise.  Microsoft, well Microsoft just never gets mentioned.  See my post the other day on the Pew Study.  If Larry Ellison wasn’t pulling stunts with the Americas Cup or Mark Hurd, no one would ever cover Oracle in the media.

Real work is being done hardening networks against cyber terrorism, lowering total cost of computing, developing and enforcing enterprise standards, safeguarding large amounts of sensitive data, and developing industry specific solutions.  This work is done with rarely a mention in the press.  My explanation:  enterprise computing is complicated, hard to understand or explain, and most of all it is boring.  To Journalists, Facebook is Paris Hilton.  Write about either of them and your web site gets hits.  Write about lowering energy consumption in data centers and you might as well be covering anything having to do with sub Saharan Africa’s problems.

We really have not had big coverage of business tech issues since Y2K – over a decade ago.  Could it be that we are due for a surge in enterprise coverage?  It may make sense to think for a minute about events that could cause this to happen and how it might impact the technology industry.

Here are three things that could bring enterprise computing closer to the center of technology media coverage:

1. A Big Security Event:  Let’s hope it never happens, but if a big section of the power grid goes down, or all of the credit cards become inoperable, or a cyber attack crashes the stock market, the media will start to pay attention.
2. Follow the Jobs:  If big tech starts hiring again and makes a dent in the unemployment rate it will be a big story.  Unfortunately, this probably is a result of the changes we would like to see instead of the cause. 
3. Someone Connects the Dots: Google and Facebook are largely considered consumer businesses.  They are however, big enterprise operations in their own right however.  The media could latch onto the fact that Google’s network of data centers, gigantic databases, and all of the infrastructure required to run its business is cool and worth paying attention to.

What would change and why should we care?

1. The Money Follows the Media:  A lot has been written lately about how the VC business is changing.  The story is that the investment exits are not there and new tech start ups don’t need as much money to start.  It is true that someone building for the Apple App store does not need to raise much if any venture capital, and may never go public.  Venture capital is needed just as much now as ever before.  The VCs do seem to follow the media, so if the media goes enterprise, maybe the VCs will too.  Thomas Friedman would sure be happy if we started funding green tech instead of another Twitter clone.
2. Exports Up:  Technology innovation is something we can do well and we can export.  Enterprise computing is harder to knock off than a movie or an iPhone. If we build more capacity in our big business computing services – we could export it.  Companies like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, and others are already doing this in a big way – so we know how to do it.  And the balance of trade needs attention.
3. Do Our Part:  If this were to happen, all of us could be proud of our contribution to the worldwide economic recovery.  Instead of presenting a military face to the world, or fancy financial engineering – which deploys just as much of a scorched earth approach as the military, we could be helping companies and governments around the world increase their productivity.  And they would pay us for it!  Good for us and for them. 

I hope someone figures out how to make enterprise computing interesting enough to get some media attention.  Could do us all some good.

Cool Car, Cool Idea

The new Tesla all electric sedan is not going to be out for over a year but that has not slowed down the Tesla PR machine.  Yesterday they did a joint announcement with Autodesk, the maker of Autocad computer aided design software about the new Model S going on display at Autodesk in San Francisco.  

This is a great example of using partnerships, in this case a vendor, to promote products.  Both Tesla Motors and Autodesk win and there is very little cost for either company.  Cool.

Follow the Money (budget) to the Money (revenue)

An interesting pattern is emerging in Tech Marketing.  The gap between the haves and the have nots is growing.  I don't mean the rich and poor citizens of our country, even though that gap is growing too, but the gap between the marketing ideas that get budget and the marketing ideas that do not.

The industry has been quantifying results for long enough now that senior decision makers are gaining confidence and cutting the budgets of marketing activities that cannot prove their value.  At the same time, new revenue is scarce and getting more valuable by the day, so those same budget cutters are increasing their spending on activities that work.

The days of doing the same thing as last year -- just because it was done last year (and the year before) -- are coming to a close.  The rotation is happening inside many large companies where one area is being starved of budget while another area is getting expanded resources.  I am sure there are examples of companies that are starving their entire marketing budget -- clearly not a strategy for survival.

All of this is about marketing ROI.  I don't mind bragging that my getting to the fourth paragraph of this post without actually invoking ROI, the most overused business term in the universe, is quite an achievement.  Want an eye roll in your meeting today -- start in about marketing ROI!  Anyone interested in restoring ROI to a position of usefulness in business dialog needs to campaign to tie ROI to the desired end result.  Discussion of ROI to intermediate results is a waste.  The desired result in marketing should be revenue, not impressions, page views, inquiries, leads, downloads or anything else that currently gets measured (because it is easier to measure).

If your idea can prove ROI to Revenue -- you will be in the big budget bucket.  ROI to intermediate metrics or no ROI at all -- the shrinking bucket. 

More Fuel for the Cloud

In the last 24 hours I have come across three stories in the media that give the cloud movement even more reason to be gaining momentum.  If you are following the cloud acceptance / cloud vs desktop story, you may want to check them out.

NPR On the Media - Laptop Searches at the Border:  The segment is towards the end, but the rest of the show is also worth listening to.  The story highlights the work of the ACLU in pursuit of the US Government for overly aggressive search and seizure of laptops at the borer.  This is a very good reason to use cloud services and not keep any data on your laptop.  I suspect the government is tracking activities on the cloud as well, so if you are up to no good -- you are probably no better off there.  But if you are a law abiding citizen worried about getting caught in the government's web -- the cloud is probably safer.

NY Times:  Microsoft + Russian Government against activists:  Unfortunately for Microsoft there is a very disturbing story on the front page of the NY Times today about how the Russian government is using Microsoft piracy claims to seize computers of people they don't like.  I suspect that if the Russian government wants to take your computer -- they are going to take your computer.  So again, the cloud would be a good place to put your data.  And for Microsoft -- any type of collaboration with the Russian government is likely to end badly (ouch!).

Dell Gets Blasted by the Haggler:  Again in today's NY Times the typical tale of woe.  Hard drive fails, sent back to Dell, lost again, lost again, in a Sisyphean tragedy we all know too well.  Same remedy, keep your data in the cloud and access it with multiple machines or devices or even someone else's machine.  Then you can still get your work done even while *insert vendor name here* is doing whatever they can to make your life miserable.

Maybe there is something to this cloud computing thing.

Selling to the Enterprise is Hard Work

Selling is getting harder and this is causing a vicious cycle.  The harder it gets the more desperate salespeople get.  Desperate salespeople do unseemly things (lying to my gatekeeper is a minor offense compared to full on deception through the sales process).  Bad behavior by salespeople brings down any prospect's willingness to engage in any sales process -- making selling even harder.  And so on...  The deflationary trend in the economy only amplifies these problems.

Some companies get around this by eliminating salespeople all together.  Amazon and Google really don't have salespeople.  They have developed self service sales processes and have lowered their prices to a point where customers sell themselves.  I have a few posts on the topic of selling, here is a list.

Companies that sell complex products or services to big business clients (aka the enterprise), do not have the luxury automating and lowering the cost until the thing sells itself.  The most dramatic proof of this can be found in the sales and marketing budget of Salesforce.com.  I have a few posts about that as well, here is another list.  

What then do we do in an age where white papers and webinars and spam are well, just spam, and salespeople don't add value because any person with both the technical capability customers value and the social skills to be a salesperson increasingly chooses a technical career?   Here are two trends I have observed in the marketplace that may be the manifestation of this new reality:

Consolidation

Companies that know how to sell have a big advantage. Oracle is a company that knows how to sell.  Their sales practices are both legendary and ruthlessly efficient.  Sales and marketing at 20% of revenue may seem high, but only a fraction when compared to Salesforce.com's 50%+.  Think of it this way, when Salesforce.com spends a dollar on sales and marketing -- it gets $2 back.  When Oracle spends a dollar it gets $5 back.  Big difference.

It is this ability to sell to the enterprise that Oracle is counting on when it buys all of those companies.  Here is a blog post on SoftwareAdvice that has a great chart of the last 100 or so Oracle acquisitions.  There is no reason to think that Oracle is going to shy away from exploiting its unique ability to sell to the enterprise.  Gotta wonder of Oracle could fix Salesforce.com's cost of selling.  Hmmm.

More Dependence on Partners

Microsoft is a company that knows how to build partnerships.  In fact, running its channel partner program may be its core competency.  Microsoft partners know that Microsoft is committed to making them successful and both Microsoft and its partners invest side by side in the pursuit of new business.  Dell has recognized this and is working hard to build out a channel partner program as fast as possible.  If you sell to the enterprise, partners are critical.  

Consolidation + Partners = Opportunity

If companies that know how to sell to the enterprise acquire other companies, and companies that know how to sell to the enterprise rely heavily on channel partners, then the real work is going to happen when combining channel partner programs of merged or acquired companies.  We already see a great deal of this, and I suspect there will be more in the near future.  

The bottom line:  Highly valued high performance partners will benefit through this evolution.  Low performance partners will be redundant.  

Never Lie to the Receptionist

I get about half a dozen telemarketing calls per day and I don't take any of them unless they slip by my amazing gatekeeper.  I suppose this is ironic because my firm is in the business of managing channel partner programs for technology companies -- work we do mostly over the phone!  Thousands of times per day our valiant front line team members depend on the kindness of the gatekeeper to patch them through to the decision maker.  Granted, most of the calls we make are to channel partners with established business partnerships with our clients, but ironic nonetheless.

The other day a slippery guy from New York got past Kim by saying I was expecting his call.  She checked with me first, and I did not recognize his name, but she and I agreed to let him through.  The first thing I asked him was how we met -- we hadn't.  I then asked how I could have been expecting his call -- there was no way I could have.  I then asked him if he had lied to Kim.  He said that he did in order to get past her.

Turns out he was an investment manager.  He wanted me to trust him with my investments.  I suspect he wanted me to do that shortly after I forgot that he lied to my gatekeeper.  As you can imagine, the call ended rather abruptly.

Never lie to the gatekeeper.  If you have something valuable to talk about sell it on its merits.  If not, don't call.

Lowering Sales Costs

SoftwareAdvice.com had a great post recently about Oracle's next acquisition.  I encourage you to click through to the piece if for no other reason than to look at the great chart of Oracle acquisitions from PeopleSoft to the present.  

Clearly Oracle knows it is an enterprise computing company.  Selling to the enterprise is difficult and expensive and no one knows how to sell to the enterprise like Oracle.  Detractors often claim that acquisitions are a waste of money, and the recently announced Intel/McAfee deal will certainly add fuel to that fire, but when talking about the enterprise -- the cost of selling and long sales cycles is enough to make sense of many deals.

Ironically, Glen Hodges, President of McAfee until 2006 explains the Intel/McAfee deal with the same lowering the cost of selling angle in this post in the NY Times.  He points out that Intel's excellent channel partner program is underutilized and that the $7.8B price tag for McAfee could make sense just by having more for Intel to push through its highly efficient sales channel.

Now back to one of my favorite rants -- Salesforce.com.  One of the potential acquisition targets for Oracle listed in the SoftwareAdvice.com post is Salesforce.com.  Even Larry Ellison is not that crazy.  True, Salesforce.com proves the point that selling to the enterprise is difficult by spending over 50% of revenue on sales and marketing and combining the Salesforce.com and Oracle sales teams would represent hundreds of millions of dollars of savings.  But Wall Street never seems to notice this fact about Salesforce.com and has priced the stock at 193 times earnings!  In March I thought investors had lost their minds when the P/E was 114!  The industry is still in the low 20s.

Lowering the cost of selling is as important now as ever.  And it is on its way to even more significance as the talk of a double dip surges. 

Intel Wants the Consumer

The grass is definitely greener on the consumer side of the fence in 2010.  Companies that have built their businesses on their ability to sell to the enterprise, or that are a step or two removed from direct access to the consumer, are looking for a the gate through the fence. Increasingly mobile is that gate, and it appears that Intel thinks McAfee is their best shot at getting over there.

It is much more fun as a writer to be negative on announcements like this -- and the business press is having their share of fun with Intel.  Anyone that wants the business press to be positive should remember not to surprise them.  A few good leaks will get some of the journalists onto your side ahead of the announcement.  With the exception of Steve Jobs, who gets to play by a different set of rules, scoop equals page views, page views equals happy writers, happy writers equals "this is a brilliant idea".

Intel depends on the PC makers to get its chips to market and has managed to dominate that business over the years through business tactics that just keep getting them in trouble with the Justice department and the EU.   The top PC makers in the world control over half of the sales of new PCs including HP (18%), Dell (13%), Acer (12%), Lenovo (10%), and Asus and Toshiba tied (5% each).  The industry is on the rebound, up 22% in Q2, so everyone is growing.  However, HP and Dell are growing only slightly, and the other guys are smokin' with growth rates up to 87% (Asus).

The deal to buy McAfee may or may not be a good idea, but it does signal Intel's concern over its traditional route to market, and its corresponding desire to find a new route.  Their best domestic friends are getting pounded by the guys in Asia, and they are increasingly prevented from pulling monopolistic stunts, so I would guess there will be more deals to follow.

Other coverage:  

BusinessWeek

WSJ Digits Blog

Daily Finance

Read Write Web

CNet (for the PC industry numbers)

The Scoble Effect

If you think you are a big time tech blogger, google your name plus the word effect.  Good chance you will get nothing.  Then google "the scoble effect" and notice that the every one of the first 10 items are links to articles about the impact Robert Scoble has on the tech industry.  

So in my quest to figure out if Comdex Virtual is going to be anything in November I sent out this tweet yesterday:

@Scobleizer How are you going to cover Comdex -- now that it is virtual?

You probably already know that Robert Scoble gained his big time reputation because he is in the front row with his live audio or video feed running at literally every significant tech event .  Conversely, in the turn about echo chamber that is the tech industry, a tech event is not big time if Robert Scoble is not there.  His answer:  

Hmmm.  UBM has some work to do.

Comdex the Verb

Some would say that the adoption of your brand name as the accepted description of an action, preferrably the action of using your product, is the pinnacle of branding.  Xerox did it, Google did it, Kodak almost did it, although with a Kodak Moment, the brand is really an adjective modifying a moment. 

Sure it could be great if it happens, but an overt effort to make it happen could backfire.  Are we really ever going to say we Binged it?  Trademark lawyers advise companies to do whatever they can to avoid the adoption of their brand name as a generic description of an action -- because at that point protecting the trademark becomes difficult if not impossible. In fact, Xerox did for many years invest heavily to discourage people from using their name as a verb.  What an interesting world we live in.

Comdex is making a comeback this year after six years of dormancy.  Like many technology companies or even the technology industry itself, Comdex had an unbelievable rocket ship ride from 1979 to 2003.  The event topped out at about the same time that the internet bubble reached its peak in 2000 -- with over 200,000 people attending the main event in Las Vegas, plus the organizers staged many other events scattered around the world throughout the year.  At the end Comdex was the show everyone loved to hate -- and there was plenty to hate about fighting it out with a hoard of fellow geeks -- just to get a hotel room or a taxi.  I suppose that during its time as a must attend event, people eventually came to chafe at the must part.

United Business Media bought the carcass of Comdex in 2006 and has elected to bring the event back this year.  The setting is still Las Vegas, but this time it is a virtual Las Vegas.  No lines, no crowds, and much cheaper for everyone.  This virtual (and green) version of Comdex will really be something to watch.  The spectacle of the real Comdex had a way of dominating the tech news.  Strangely, we are 93 days from the virtual event, and the tech media is amazingly silent.  Google it and you get the press releases from March, search on Twitter and you get references to the MCX Comdex commodities exchange, search on valleywag - nothing, search on techcrunch - nothing, digg - nothing, techmeme - nothing.  Even a search for comdex on the UBM site  produces zero results.  Amazingly, a search on techweb -- the event producer -- no results.  (bear in mind that these links are live searches on those sites, so if content has been added after this posting -- search results may vary)

The other UBM company behind the event, Everything Channel, does not have search functionality on its web site, but does list Comdex on its events page. 

Given this media vacuum it would not be accurate to say that the whole industry is waiting to see what happens on November 16th and 17th.  It will be interesting however to see if the popular adaptation of "to Comdex" as a verb is different on November 18th.  

Who Talks on the Phone Anymore

Clive Thompson has a great piece in wired magazine right now about how minutes talking on the phone have been on the decline since 2007.  He points to the rise of other means of staying in touch, and the rising practice of text, email, or chat precursors to a call asking for permission.  I would imagine that caller ID helps us to not answer calls that we don't want -- further reducing the volume of calls.

I remember a time a few years back when I would come out of an hour long meeting and have 5 to 7 new voicemail messages -- in just one hour!  I had to clear out the box multiple times during a single day just to make sure callers were not presented with the voicemail box full message.

Now I have my voicemails delivered to my email box with caller ID info in the subject line.  Most of them never get listened to and I also get to listen to the ones I want in the order I want (like email).

The one thing that I would like to add to Clive's post:  I have more scheduled conference calls than ever before.  This must map to the expanded geography of the people I am working with, but I find myself doing this even for people close by that I would have otherwise met in person.

I wonder if this is tracked in the survey referenced, because often we will have ten or more people on these calls for a full hour -- something we never would have done before.  Also, does the tracking capture VOIP services like Skype and Google Voice -- there could be a rotation to that mode that is not visible to the phone data trackers.

Next up:  Video calls.  We are currently expanding our calling capabilities to have conference calls enhanced with video.  So don't count the phone as dead just yet.

Please Somebody Make the iPhone News Stop

I was not going to say anything about the iPhone 4 antenna thing because I thought that doing so would in effect say that I too think it is actually news.  

So instead I am going to just say the opposite -- this is not news, let's move on.  Can you believe the coverage?  Look at this search from the WSJ a few minutes ago:

If by some insufferable malady you still want to read more on this topic, try this post by Dave Winer.  I particularly like the part where he says this about Apple: "You have to count your change, and don't expect them to do the right thing, unless you twist their arm real hard, and usually it isn't worth the trouble..."

Let's move on to something...anything.

Dear Microsoft (or anyone): Please Make This

I have written a bunch about how Microsoft should just focus on the enterprise.  However, if they are committed to the consumer -- I this is what I would want:  the iTunes of PC management -- maybe it could be called iPC.

I think Windows 7 is great.  Each of the two times it was installed on my machine it ran great.  Well it did for a month or so anyway.  After a while it just seems to get full, and like someone that can breathe in but not out.  Once it gets that full feeling everything seems to slow down.

But wipe the thing clean and it smokes again.  Unfortunately, to wipe it clean is a 3 or 4 day process.  Half a day to find the my files all over the thing and back them up, half a day to reinstall the main applications, a couple of days to chase down the other apps as I discover I still need them.  I am getting better at keeping track of all of my software license keys and install files, but the install, update, configure process is taxing.  Yes I do know about the rollback feature, but it has never worked well for me.  I go back to a prior point but the bloat hangs on and the performance really does not seem to change.  The last time I did the wipe and reinstall I got 10GB of disk space back!

So I would like someone to make iPC – essentially a parallel to iTunes that would run my computers.  One of the things I like about my iPad and my iPod Touch is that any time I want I can wipe the device and reinstall everything – in just a few minutes – push restore and faster than rebooting a Windows machine my iPod is completely reinstalled.

I think it would work like this: An application that would run on my desktop, backs up in the cloud, and keeps track of everything I install on my machine from the "App Store".  It would enable me to wipe my machine clean and reinstall everything with just one push of a button – it would be an infinitely better experience.

Now the insiders are going to say either: we have that already or we tried that already.  To that I say -- if it exists sign me up, and come on already -- Bob was 15 years ago!  Let's try again.  

Kevin Turner has Gloves Off and is Ready to Fight

It was a sharp contrast to Steve Ballmer's presentation when Microsoft COO Kevin Turner took the stage today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.  For every implied competitive situation in Ballmer's presentation, KT took direct aim at a competitor, and was not shy about naming names.  It will be interesting to see the press coverage, because he was handing out some juicy quotes.  Try these:

"We (Microsoft) are the undisputed leader in commercial cloud services."

"Sharepoint online is the fastest growing product in the history of Microsoft."

 "The smartphone game is just starting."

"The Go Do is don't let our customers get Googled."

"We don't want some of the customers, we want all of them."

"In a market where we were left for dead." (about search)

"Don't let Customers pay the Apple Tax".

"It looks like iPhone 4 may be their Vista."

He didn't stop there.  Without hesitation he rolled into direct assaults on Linux, VMware, and Oracle.  After Turner's show, Microsoft's 640,000 strong partner army know one thing:  General Turner is itching for a fight and he is willing to engage on not just more than one front, but all of them.  Forget Sun Tzu and wasting time trying to figure out whose enemy's enemy is the friendliest.  Let's get busy shooting.  

As crazy as it seems for a strategy, it could just be the right recipe for Microsoft.  Microsoft's partner army is so large, so deep, and so well developed -- this kind of thing just could work.  Given the press over the past few months and the morale in Redmond, Kevin Turner's energy did seem to be quite welcome.  The Ballmer / Turner 1-2 could be a knock out.

Bill Says Steve has Taste, and Steve Says Bill can Partner

In my quest to figure out what is happening in the computer business I have been thinking a good deal about how we got here.  In two separate conversations in less than a week friends have pointed me back to the 2007 All Things Digital conference where Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together.  The whole thing is available on YouTube here.  There are many fine moments, but if you want to cut to the best one, go to 3:30 of part 11.  Where an audience member has just asked what they had learned from each other and Bill Gates says:  "Oh I would give a lot to have Steve's taste."  He then goes on to eloquently summarize the magic of Steve Jobs all in a couple of sentences.  

The focus moves to Steve and he talks about Microsoft's skill at partnering: "Bill and Microsoft were really good at it." and Steve further explains how Apple didn't need to think that way because they were building the "whole banana" and Microsoft needed to be good at it because they needed partners to succeed.  This could not be more true today.  While a fair amount has transpired in the three years since this interview was taped, the basic facts are as the two founders said on that day:  Apple has taste and Microsoft knows how to partner.

There has been all kinds of news out of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference this week about how Microsoft is going to leverage its partner ecosystem to be the biggest player in the cloud and other areas.  I don't think anyone could have said it better than Bill and Steve did in 2007.

The entire hour is very much worth watching and amazingly revealing about post PC devices, tablets, social media, multiple screens -- all the stuff we are talking about today.  Check it out.

Parsing Ballmer at WPC 2010

A couple of days ago I said that it was time that Steve Ballmer step and take a swing... at just about anything.  Today he was the keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Washington DC.  

Here it is point by point:

• Thank you, Thank you, Thank you - to partners (9,500 in attendance) for taking Azure (cloud services) from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in the last 12 months.
• Cloud - A rework of the UW Speech from February - getting IT savings reinvested in services is both an opportunity and responsibility -- big emphasis on enterprise.
• Cloud - can do things that could not be done anywhere else (natural language, search...again focus on enterprise).
• Cloud - Better social and professional interactions (Sharepoint is the answer to Salesforce.com's chatter); Dynamics CRM online.
• Cloud - Server advances drive the cloud.  Managing scale is different.  Microsoft knows scale through windows update, Bing, Live, Hotmail.
• Cloud - Rich Client instead of thin client.  Smart cloud and smart/rich clients (not thin) - HTML5 is supported by MS. Cloud enabled Kinect (Natal). 
• Cloud - Windows 7 Slates and Windows 7 Phones - this is on to the consumer, uses language like "you need to see" and is different from the more concrete statements in the earlier points.

We are ALL IN together.  You want to know if you can bet on Microsoft?  If you want to help people be more productive -- you need to bet on Microsoft.  Microsoft Enterprise IT and IT management. If you don't want to move to the cloud then we are not your folks.

Here is some other coverage of his talk and the event:

eWeek's Microsoft Watch

Channel Insider

Seattle Times

My take:  He delivered on the enterprise, promised on the consumer.  Since it was an enterprise audience I suppose that works.  The slate promise was really the only new product announcement, but new product announcements were not what was needed.  There was not much encoded partner messaging -- and I think that is a good thing.  Microsoft has so much to offer the enterprise customer -- it is nice to see the focus on that and a minimum of other distractions.

Microsoft Partners Ponder Their Future

The Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference starts on Monday at a time when many people inside and outside of the company are wondering what the company is doing and where it is going next.  Ever since AAPL passed MSFT in market cap everyone has raised the issue -- is Microsoft doomed?

The announcement last week that the KIN was dead did not help.  The Mini Microsoft blog really lit up with that one and the lay off rumors.

The consumer geek world has been amazingly silent about Microsoft -- which may be a good thing but says a good deal about where the excitement is in the industry (not at Microsoft).  John Dvorak wrote a column on Marketwatch about what Steve Ballmer should do.

The list of people giving Microsoft advice is long.  Here is a post I did summarize some of it last month.

Mark Anderson did a short interview on KPLU this week where he boiled it down to this:

• Microsoft has to decide if it is going to be in the consumer business or not.
• If yes, it needs to create a new division and get outside leadership.
• If no, it needs to double down on the enterprise.

I could not agree more.  In fact, I think Microsoft's strong position with the enterprise has been under appreciated and undervalued for a long time and mostly because Microsoft under-appreciates and undervalues it.

Microsoft has 9,000 products -- most of them are aimed at the enterprise, and many of them are quite good.  Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of partners that are in place and driving billions in enterprise business.  These are partners with substantial and established businesses with big revenues and loyal customers.  They are a significantly different group than could be found at the Google partner conference or the Apple Developer conference.

So this is it.  Monday morning Ballmer gives the keynote -- its showtime.