It's been a hard day's night for our partners this week

Microsoft Australia made an oversight this week with regards to an SMB customer profiling campaign that we're undertaking.

I won't go into the details (Wayne has a good synopsis here and a follow-up here), suffice it to say that we could have been more attune to the concerns of our partners and let them know in advance whenever we are going to talk to businesses who may be clients of theirs. (And who are also Microsoft customers, but that's not the point).

What this has brought home to me is the old adage of "do you value what you can measure, or measure what you value?". For example: given that many of our SBS sales are sold via OEM (ie pre-installed on HP boxes or whoever), it means that we really do not have good visibility as to the VARs that are successful in this space. (And I mean that in the selfish Microsoft definition of selling more units - not necessarily referring to the many partners who do a fantastic job of servicing a static customer base).

For us, this means we often simply cannot measure the success of a vast portion of our partners, particularly in the SBS space, meaning that sometimes this success is not valued. It is not intentional, nor malicious, but like any complex business machine it is easier to value the cogs if we can measure how much they're turning.

A philosophical post perhaps, but my way of saying sorry to any Australian partner who felt wronged by this action. We have taken on board your feedback and will endeavour to do better next time.

Robbie

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Just a quick heads-up on this on behalf of the SMB customer team: The Microsoft SMB team are today sending