12 ms·

Microsoft Partner Network changes spark uproar

136 points by miles 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
devoply 7y ago
We steals the Linuxes and then we pulls the precious partner supportsis.. But we need the partnersis. No we keep all the precious for ourselvesis.
- juststeve 7y ago
  Socialize the development (github), privatize the profits (corporate).
arto 7y ago
MPN = Microsoft Partner Network https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Microsoft_Partner_Network https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Microsoft_Partner_Network
- mkl 7y ago
  For those confused, Wikiwand is just a skin over Wikipedia content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Partner_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Partner_Network I can't see any way they make money, but they have lots of tracking opportunities, so maybe that's it.
  - karamanolev 7y ago
    Maybe you're looking at it with an adblocker? They serve ads...
    - mkl 7y ago
      I was indeed. Without it the place is quite horrific! Even more reason to avoid them.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Hm, cannot really understand the move from MS. Do too many licenses from partners end up in the wrong hands? I doubt the motivation is getting more licensing fees from those that are the responsible for distribution. That said, fewer partners that try to shoehorn dubious cloud licenses wouldn't be unwelcome.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses. MPN allowed their partners to use licenses for free for any "internal" use, now they are restricting it to only business development use cases. This means that you can have an IT services company that barely sells any microsoft products, paying a small yearly fee to be a partner whilst getting considerably more than they pay out in return in the form of free licenses (for all internal business uses), technical support, training and other perks. What Microsoft has done now is basically restrict the uses of MPN licenses only for business development and any other in good faith activities that are actually designed to promote Microsoft products to your customers. Basically with this new change you can't have a 500+ employee company anymore that doesn't pay licenses for Windows, CAL licenses for domain, exchange, gets free sharepoint and more importantly free tech support which is often misused to solve customer problems rather than their own. This more or less brings the MPN licenses closer to what say MSDN licenses are; you can use them to learn how stuff works, you can use them to demo the tech to clients, and for internal POC's but you can't roll into production on their back.
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    > No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses. This allows Microsoft to compete in prices with cheaper products without risking being accused of dumping. It also helps with vendor lock in by inducing higher dependency than would be achievable on pricing alone. Finally, it creates a steady flow of people trained in an artificially homogeneous ecosystem.
    - pkaye 7y ago
bencollier49 7y ago
I half expect the next Windows to be an XWindow replacement.
reallydontask 7y ago
I used to work for a company that was an MPN partner and the changes wouldn't have affected us. I'm assuming that I've understood the changes correctly, so I could be wrong. Maybe it's some vocal partners rather than the majority that would be affected by this? In any case, unless they have ample evidence of abuse this is a bad move
- TheSmiddy 7y ago
  This is the new licences available to partners: https://assetsprod.microsoft.com/en-us/mpn-maps-software-iur-competency-license-table.docx https://assetsprod.microsoft.com/en-us/mpn-maps-software-iur... I work for a silver partner and this literally doesn't affect us. There aren't many "good faith" configurations I can imagine that would struggle fitting into this model. I'd be all ears if there's someone affected but I imagine those businesses would be operating multiple arms, one of which is performing the functions of a Microsoft partner and the other is leveraging the free access to tools to drastically cut the costs of operation.
  - disiplus 7y ago
    yeah, i imagine that they are maybe hosting software for customers with the free licences or something else, or else why would that be such a big change for some of them.
    - aksss 7y ago
      It hurts the small partners the most. I think losing the silver and gold on-prem license grants are probably a good thing, and it will be interesting to see if any locals take a material hit having to buy up the replacement licenses for their operation. Like the guy above said, I do think some subsidiary arms are just fronts for buying cheap IURs in the Gold program. But the smallest start up service providers losing the 5-seat IURs for O365 in the action pack will really hurt them and the ability of new partners to start up.
Zanni 7y ago
Worst move in 30 years? Thirty years takes us all the way back to 1989. Just off the top of my head, here are some worse moves: 1) late to the internet, 2) squandering the marketshare lead of IE 6, 3) Windows Vista, 4) Windows 8, 5) late to search.
- oblio 7y ago
  You forgot: 0) Late to modern smartphones. That's the biggest blunder they've ever had.
  - sersi 7y ago
    x) appointing Steve Balmer as CEO
    - close04 7y ago
      Well he was the reason behind some of the other failures. But the title is obviously going for shock and awe clickbait, as most such "definitive" titles are.
    - gridlockd 7y ago
      Steve Ballmer wasn't a bad CEO. People keep talking about how he dropped the ball on mobile, but so what? So did Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia and those companies had mobile as their core business. To think a "better" CEO could've pulled it all off is delusional. Under Ballmer, Microsoft focused on core business and reached into cloud - successfully. As a result, Microsoft is now stronger than Apple. Microsoft doesn't depend on people buying luxury cellphones, a market which is reaching saturation. That's not a "sexy" story, but it's the truth. A more "proactive" CEO would've just blown more money on Zunes and Kinects to fail in the market.
      - solarkraft 7y ago
        > reached into cloud As much of a problem I might have with some of Ballmer's ideas and actions, this is simply amazing. It completely saved the whole company.
oblio 7y ago
Now that they're moving to a cloud strategy, my guess is that the value of their partners for on-premise stuff is going way down.
- lostmyoldone 7y ago
  It's not entirely impossible that many on-premises sales are actually, or are predicted to become, a net negative compared to a similar cloud solution. Based on these policy changes, one can argue that it's not only possible, but likely that on-premises is becoming a net negative. My interpretation, or at least one of them, is that Microsoft want to start pushing the smaller accounts entirely to the cloud by starving that channel while also gaining the option of engaging with more of the largest customers directly. The latter will only be possible once most of the MPN members prone to open critique towards MPN policies have left the program. It also seems to fit nicely into the "open source" narrative with it's implicit, or explicit focus on charging for various services rather than the software itself.
neilv 7y ago
Quoting Wikipedia: > Microsoft Partner Network or MPN [...] is designed to make resources available to a wide variety of technology companies so they can build a business around Microsoft technologies. I suspect the matter of the "worst move in 30 years" article will get straightened out, and won't seem nearly as bad as the title suggests. A backstab would be SOP for much of the last 30 years of MS, but I'd be surprised if they're going to throw away a lot of the developer goodwill they've been acquiring recently. Right now, I get the impression that a sizable chunk of HN think of MS as good-natured fellow developers who run GitHub and share an IDE, and that chunk has little awareness of earlier history (and how relieved a lot of people were by the escape route that the Web and Linux provided). Why would MS spoil that goodwill, by alerting all those developers to the proven business pattern of waiting until your partner/customer has built their business around you, before you do whatever you want to them? Whether MS will someday lose their current goodwill, I don't know, but the timing doesn't seem right (unless someone is really desperate for short-term numbers).
- yardie 7y ago
  Yes, this! Almost an entire subgroup of millennials think of microsoft as some cuddly bear. They do not realize how their machinations were so strong you could not buy a PC without Windows. PC OEMs could not sell you a PC without Windows. Or how they almost took over the web with their browser and proprietary JavaScript “extensions”.
  - griffordson 7y ago
    Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s. Anyone who survived the '90s who didn't internalize those lessons deserves what they got, but I do fear there is a generation which doesn't appreciate just how lucky they are to be able to build an entire career dependent only on OSS platforms.
    - Someone1234 7y ago
      > Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s Not sure what this is a reference to. Microsoft STILL supports running VB6/COM/C++/etc from the 1990s today. Only Visual J++ disappeared, but a court of law required that. I'd go so far as to claim that their success is in no small part because their backwards compatibility game is top notch. IE6 was a nightmare, but that wasn't "pulling the rug" rather just being lazy and not developing the browser at all (because it competed with their proprietary platform -- Win32). Once Microsoft deploys something and developers start using it, typically they support it "forever" (even IE compatibility modes remain to support IE5/6 code).
fergie 7y ago
No. This is the latest in a series of good moves that Microsoft has been making lately in order to regain some integrity. Microsoft's toxic and manipulative partner program has been used to extract excessive license fees from customers for years. Engineers and consultancies have been encouraged to "level-up" in the system, while customers and casual users are shut out. A whole proprietary ecosystem has been allowed to develop which requires a large financial buy-in just to provide simple services like databases and email. Its clear that this has to change, and Microsoft is right to reduce partner dependency and vendor lock-in, painful as it may be for those who have heavily invested in these ecosystems.
- reallydontask 7y ago
  > Microsoft's toxic and manipulative partner program has been used to extract excessive license fees from customers for years. In what way is the partner programme toxic and manipulative? (asking genuinely)
  - drcongo 7y ago
    It has been used to extract excessive license fees from customers for years.
  - TheSmiddy 7y ago
    To maintain partner status you need to sell a minimum quantity of products, with a tiered system that grants better discounts and more benefits for hitting higher tiers. This has the flow on effect of managed service providers recommending Microsoft branded solutions instead of far more suitable competitors for the customers use case. For example selling a customer a Windows server licence with SQL 2017 installed to run as a backend for a simple website that 10 people a day are going to visit when a centos box with postgres would be far more cost effective (and reliable) for the customer. Now this isn't unique to Microsoft, literally all the big vendors do this (eg Cisco, VMware, every single antivirus company, etc) so not sure what makes Microsofts one particularly toxic, other than the fact that the free stuff they provide is genuinely valuable to the partners which is not always true for the other vendors.
dogma1138 7y ago
Good MPN licenses have been abused for far too long; I worked for a company that didn't gave a flying fuck about MSFT was providing mostly networking/security services but since it had a large number of employees paying for a Gold Partner wasn't only valuable to draw in business because CIO/CTO's at the time liked to see the nifty Cisco/Microsoft/Nortel/W/ETel partner on your website but the yearly costs of attaining partnership was just a tiny fraction of what they would've paid for windows, server and CAL licenses.
ak39 7y ago
Could this be the reason: https://www.gtconsult.com/microsoft-terminates-eoh/ https://www.gtconsult.com/microsoft-terminates-eoh/ (South African IT company found to abuse the MPN license terms when a client lodged complaint with SEC). I do not have the link to the complaint to the US SEC but if anyone does, it might help.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
emilfihlman 7y ago
Linking to a document with file://...
locusm 7y ago
Have been a MS Partner for close to 15 years - ended up concluding that internal use software licenses are really the only benefit of this program. That said, I didnt renew this year.
wayoutthere 7y ago
This is all intentional. They’re basically killing off their reseller model in favor of self-service for small clients. When selling SKUs, a reseller model is great. They do the hard work of finding and converting long-tail leads, and all you have to give up is a little margin. When selling cloud subscriptions it becomes a burden — you have to continually pay overhead for your partners to manage your customers. Customer support expectations are low in the cloud (AWS provides minimal support, so MS can too). Microsoft has been investing in customer-facing solution architects for this reason. They are investing dedicated resources in their big accounts, and are driving their partner strategy through the big consultancies rather than small MSPs. Their strategy seems to be one of landing a lot of “big fish;” which isn’t hard to do with a lot of big customers backtracking G-Suite to Office 365. From what I’ve seen, it’s working: Google simply doesn’t have the kind of relationships in the enterprise IT world that Microsoft does.
- sascha_sl 7y ago
  >Customer support expectations are low in the cloud (AWS provides minimal support, so MS can too). What. Last I checked anyone with any substantial cloud deployment pays at least the 7%-3% of the bill for AWS support tier. Which is excellent support usually.
  - wayoutthere 7y ago
    And Microsoft offers the same support for a similar fee — the big change here is that the support is offered directly to the customer rather than through a reseller. Further design / build support can be acquired through the big consultancies as consulting engagements. The big shift here is the customer now pays Microsoft directly rather than the reseller. They now own the customer relationship, which is everything in software sales.
    - busterarm 7y ago
      As an enterprise customer of all three major cloud providers at an 8-digit spend, I can tell you without flinching that AWS offers (at least) 10x the support that its competitors do and that was also true when the spend was 5 digits. Their sales is high-touch too.
topkai22 7y ago
If I'm reading the document correctly the "on-premise technical support" refers to any products not in the cloud. Microsoft will still provide support incidents to partners for cloud based products. Microsoft is screaming "GET INTO THE CLOUD" as loud as it can...
partiallypro 7y ago
I've heard tons of complaints about the Partner program, so it makes sense to reform it. I never had a true partner account just an MSDN account that offered free licenses for internal use.
Proven 7y ago
The proposed changes are sensible. At first I couldn't believe the insanity of the current program - to give away software for free use in business. That is completely insane. Try to get a RHEL license that way.
thomaswang 7y ago
Makes sense, just like for cern and probably several other previously free riders that's being removed. MS is going for a personal subscription based lisencing solution in the near future. If you think office is a cash cow think what windows whould be, every company whould boy this for their employers, the employers when fired e.g without a job whould buy it so that they can log in to their machine and so on. They could easily fetch 5$ a month from about a billion people if not more. Pluss servers being maybe 100$ a moth per server per company and so on. Allowing MS to capitalize and companies being able to easier shape their own usage. And some whould argue... A lot of people will move to Linux (no they wont (some but not a lot) simply because for most people it looks, feels and works like something made in someone's garage. Just my guess.
jonbarker 7y ago
There are two types of partners in the MSFT ecosystem: those that build, and those that license. If this is a change to support the partners with product/implementation expertise, then it's a good change. But I think it's too early to tell.
aksss 7y ago
As a small MSP, who is a Microsoft Partner, the IUR elimination will hurt. I don’t really care too much about the support incidents (MS support has always been the last of last resorts). It will be that much harder for new IT services companies to bootstrap themselves without this program. I get the idea that companies can get their basic O365 licensing set up easily on their own, but once you wade into Exchange and MDM, it takes some good road miles to know how to implement things correctly. A lot of SMBs w/o IT departments will still need IT partners, certified or not.

136 points by miles 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

We steals the Linuxes and then we pulls the precious partner supportsis.. But we need the partnersis. No we keep all the precious for ourselvesis.

juststeve 7y ago
Socialize the development (github), privatize the profits (corporate).

arto 7y ago

MPN = Microsoft Partner Network https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Microsoft_Partner_Network https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Microsoft_Partner_Network

mkl 7y ago
For those confused, Wikiwand is just a skin over Wikipedia content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Partner_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Partner_Network I can't see any way they make money, but they have lots of tracking opportunities, so maybe that's it.
- karamanolev 7y ago
  Maybe you're looking at it with an adblocker? They serve ads...
  - mkl 7y ago
    I was indeed. Without it the place is quite horrific! Even more reason to avoid them.

raxxorrax 7y ago

Hm, cannot really understand the move from MS. Do too many licenses from partners end up in the wrong hands? I doubt the motivation is getting more licensing fees from those that are the responsible for distribution. That said, fewer partners that try to shoehorn dubious cloud licenses wouldn't be unwelcome.

dogma1138 7y ago
No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses. MPN allowed their partners to use licenses for free for any "internal" use, now they are restricting it to only business development use cases. This means that you can have an IT services company that barely sells any microsoft products, paying a small yearly fee to be a partner whilst getting considerably more than they pay out in return in the form of free licenses (for all internal business uses), technical support, training and other perks. What Microsoft has done now is basically restrict the uses of MPN licenses only for business development and any other in good faith activities that are actually designed to promote Microsoft products to your customers. Basically with this new change you can't have a 500+ employee company anymore that doesn't pay licenses for Windows, CAL licenses for domain, exchange, gets free sharepoint and more importantly free tech support which is often misused to solve customer problems rather than their own. This more or less brings the MPN licenses closer to what say MSDN licenses are; you can use them to learn how stuff works, you can use them to demo the tech to clients, and for internal POC's but you can't roll into production on their back.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  > No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses. This allows Microsoft to compete in prices with cheaper products without risking being accused of dumping. It also helps with vendor lock in by inducing higher dependency than would be achievable on pricing alone. Finally, it creates a steady flow of people trained in an artificially homogeneous ecosystem.
  - pkaye 7y ago

bencollier49 7y ago

I half expect the next Windows to be an XWindow replacement.

reallydontask 7y ago

I used to work for a company that was an MPN partner and the changes wouldn't have affected us. I'm assuming that I've understood the changes correctly, so I could be wrong. Maybe it's some vocal partners rather than the majority that would be affected by this? In any case, unless they have ample evidence of abuse this is a bad move

TheSmiddy 7y ago
This is the new licences available to partners: https://assetsprod.microsoft.com/en-us/mpn-maps-software-iur-competency-license-table.docx https://assetsprod.microsoft.com/en-us/mpn-maps-software-iur... I work for a silver partner and this literally doesn't affect us. There aren't many "good faith" configurations I can imagine that would struggle fitting into this model. I'd be all ears if there's someone affected but I imagine those businesses would be operating multiple arms, one of which is performing the functions of a Microsoft partner and the other is leveraging the free access to tools to drastically cut the costs of operation.
- disiplus 7y ago
  yeah, i imagine that they are maybe hosting software for customers with the free licences or something else, or else why would that be such a big change for some of them.
  - aksss 7y ago
    It hurts the small partners the most. I think losing the silver and gold on-prem license grants are probably a good thing, and it will be interesting to see if any locals take a material hit having to buy up the replacement licenses for their operation. Like the guy above said, I do think some subsidiary arms are just fronts for buying cheap IURs in the Gold program. But the smallest start up service providers losing the 5-seat IURs for O365 in the action pack will really hurt them and the ability of new partners to start up.

Zanni 7y ago

Worst move in 30 years? Thirty years takes us all the way back to 1989. Just off the top of my head, here are some worse moves: 1) late to the internet, 2) squandering the marketshare lead of IE 6, 3) Windows Vista, 4) Windows 8, 5) late to search.

oblio 7y ago
You forgot: 0) Late to modern smartphones. That's the biggest blunder they've ever had.
- sersi 7y ago
  x) appointing Steve Balmer as CEO
  - close04 7y ago
    Well he was the reason behind some of the other failures. But the title is obviously going for shock and awe clickbait, as most such "definitive" titles are.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    Steve Ballmer wasn't a bad CEO. People keep talking about how he dropped the ball on mobile, but so what? So did Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia and those companies had mobile as their core business. To think a "better" CEO could've pulled it all off is delusional. Under Ballmer, Microsoft focused on core business and reached into cloud - successfully. As a result, Microsoft is now stronger than Apple. Microsoft doesn't depend on people buying luxury cellphones, a market which is reaching saturation. That's not a "sexy" story, but it's the truth. A more "proactive" CEO would've just blown more money on Zunes and Kinects to fail in the market.
    - solarkraft 7y ago
      > reached into cloud As much of a problem I might have with some of Ballmer's ideas and actions, this is simply amazing. It completely saved the whole company.

oblio 7y ago

Now that they're moving to a cloud strategy, my guess is that the value of their partners for on-premise stuff is going way down.

lostmyoldone 7y ago
It's not entirely impossible that many on-premises sales are actually, or are predicted to become, a net negative compared to a similar cloud solution. Based on these policy changes, one can argue that it's not only possible, but likely that on-premises is becoming a net negative. My interpretation, or at least one of them, is that Microsoft want to start pushing the smaller accounts entirely to the cloud by starving that channel while also gaining the option of engaging with more of the largest customers directly. The latter will only be possible once most of the MPN members prone to open critique towards MPN policies have left the program. It also seems to fit nicely into the "open source" narrative with it's implicit, or explicit focus on charging for various services rather than the software itself.

neilv 7y ago

Quoting Wikipedia: > Microsoft Partner Network or MPN [...] is designed to make resources available to a wide variety of technology companies so they can build a business around Microsoft technologies. I suspect the matter of the "worst move in 30 years" article will get straightened out, and won't seem nearly as bad as the title suggests. A backstab would be SOP for much of the last 30 years of MS, but I'd be surprised if they're going to throw away a lot of the developer goodwill they've been acquiring recently. Right now, I get the impression that a sizable chunk of HN think of MS as good-natured fellow developers who run GitHub and share an IDE, and that chunk has little awareness of earlier history (and how relieved a lot of people were by the escape route that the Web and Linux provided). Why would MS spoil that goodwill, by alerting all those developers to the proven business pattern of waiting until your partner/customer has built their business around you, before you do whatever you want to them? Whether MS will someday lose their current goodwill, I don't know, but the timing doesn't seem right (unless someone is really desperate for short-term numbers).

yardie 7y ago
Yes, this! Almost an entire subgroup of millennials think of microsoft as some cuddly bear. They do not realize how their machinations were so strong you could not buy a PC without Windows. PC OEMs could not sell you a PC without Windows. Or how they almost took over the web with their browser and proprietary JavaScript “extensions”.
- griffordson 7y ago
  Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s. Anyone who survived the '90s who didn't internalize those lessons deserves what they got, but I do fear there is a generation which doesn't appreciate just how lucky they are to be able to build an entire career dependent only on OSS platforms.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    > Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s Not sure what this is a reference to. Microsoft STILL supports running VB6/COM/C++/etc from the 1990s today. Only Visual J++ disappeared, but a court of law required that. I'd go so far as to claim that their success is in no small part because their backwards compatibility game is top notch. IE6 was a nightmare, but that wasn't "pulling the rug" rather just being lazy and not developing the browser at all (because it competed with their proprietary platform -- Win32). Once Microsoft deploys something and developers start using it, typically they support it "forever" (even IE compatibility modes remain to support IE5/6 code).

fergie 7y ago

No. This is the latest in a series of good moves that Microsoft has been making lately in order to regain some integrity. Microsoft's toxic and manipulative partner program has been used to extract excessive license fees from customers for years. Engineers and consultancies have been encouraged to "level-up" in the system, while customers and casual users are shut out. A whole proprietary ecosystem has been allowed to develop which requires a large financial buy-in just to provide simple services like databases and email. Its clear that this has to change, and Microsoft is right to reduce partner dependency and vendor lock-in, painful as it may be for those who have heavily invested in these ecosystems.

reallydontask 7y ago
> Microsoft's toxic and manipulative partner program has been used to extract excessive license fees from customers for years. In what way is the partner programme toxic and manipulative? (asking genuinely)
- drcongo 7y ago
  It has been used to extract excessive license fees from customers for years.
- TheSmiddy 7y ago
  To maintain partner status you need to sell a minimum quantity of products, with a tiered system that grants better discounts and more benefits for hitting higher tiers. This has the flow on effect of managed service providers recommending Microsoft branded solutions instead of far more suitable competitors for the customers use case. For example selling a customer a Windows server licence with SQL 2017 installed to run as a backend for a simple website that 10 people a day are going to visit when a centos box with postgres would be far more cost effective (and reliable) for the customer. Now this isn't unique to Microsoft, literally all the big vendors do this (eg Cisco, VMware, every single antivirus company, etc) so not sure what makes Microsofts one particularly toxic, other than the fact that the free stuff they provide is genuinely valuable to the partners which is not always true for the other vendors.

dogma1138 7y ago

Good MPN licenses have been abused for far too long; I worked for a company that didn't gave a flying fuck about MSFT was providing mostly networking/security services but since it had a large number of employees paying for a Gold Partner wasn't only valuable to draw in business because CIO/CTO's at the time liked to see the nifty Cisco/Microsoft/Nortel/W/ETel partner on your website but the yearly costs of attaining partnership was just a tiny fraction of what they would've paid for windows, server and CAL licenses.

ak39 7y ago

Could this be the reason: https://www.gtconsult.com/microsoft-terminates-eoh/ https://www.gtconsult.com/microsoft-terminates-eoh/ (South African IT company found to abuse the MPN license terms when a client lodged complaint with SEC). I do not have the link to the complaint to the US SEC but if anyone does, it might help.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

emilfihlman 7y ago

Linking to a document with file://...

locusm 7y ago

Have been a MS Partner for close to 15 years - ended up concluding that internal use software licenses are really the only benefit of this program. That said, I didnt renew this year.

wayoutthere 7y ago

This is all intentional. They’re basically killing off their reseller model in favor of self-service for small clients. When selling SKUs, a reseller model is great. They do the hard work of finding and converting long-tail leads, and all you have to give up is a little margin. When selling cloud subscriptions it becomes a burden — you have to continually pay overhead for your partners to manage your customers. Customer support expectations are low in the cloud (AWS provides minimal support, so MS can too). Microsoft has been investing in customer-facing solution architects for this reason. They are investing dedicated resources in their big accounts, and are driving their partner strategy through the big consultancies rather than small MSPs. Their strategy seems to be one of landing a lot of “big fish;” which isn’t hard to do with a lot of big customers backtracking G-Suite to Office 365. From what I’ve seen, it’s working: Google simply doesn’t have the kind of relationships in the enterprise IT world that Microsoft does.

sascha_sl 7y ago
>Customer support expectations are low in the cloud (AWS provides minimal support, so MS can too). What. Last I checked anyone with any substantial cloud deployment pays at least the 7%-3% of the bill for AWS support tier. Which is excellent support usually.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  And Microsoft offers the same support for a similar fee — the big change here is that the support is offered directly to the customer rather than through a reseller. Further design / build support can be acquired through the big consultancies as consulting engagements. The big shift here is the customer now pays Microsoft directly rather than the reseller. They now own the customer relationship, which is everything in software sales.
  - busterarm 7y ago
    As an enterprise customer of all three major cloud providers at an 8-digit spend, I can tell you without flinching that AWS offers (at least) 10x the support that its competitors do and that was also true when the spend was 5 digits. Their sales is high-touch too.

topkai22 7y ago

If I'm reading the document correctly the "on-premise technical support" refers to any products not in the cloud. Microsoft will still provide support incidents to partners for cloud based products. Microsoft is screaming "GET INTO THE CLOUD" as loud as it can...

partiallypro 7y ago

I've heard tons of complaints about the Partner program, so it makes sense to reform it. I never had a true partner account just an MSDN account that offered free licenses for internal use.

Proven 7y ago

The proposed changes are sensible. At first I couldn't believe the insanity of the current program - to give away software for free use in business. That is completely insane. Try to get a RHEL license that way.

thomaswang 7y ago

Makes sense, just like for cern and probably several other previously free riders that's being removed. MS is going for a personal subscription based lisencing solution in the near future. If you think office is a cash cow think what windows whould be, every company whould boy this for their employers, the employers when fired e.g without a job whould buy it so that they can log in to their machine and so on. They could easily fetch 5$ a month from about a billion people if not more. Pluss servers being maybe 100$ a moth per server per company and so on. Allowing MS to capitalize and companies being able to easier shape their own usage. And some whould argue... A lot of people will move to Linux (no they wont (some but not a lot) simply because for most people it looks, feels and works like something made in someone's garage. Just my guess.

jonbarker 7y ago

There are two types of partners in the MSFT ecosystem: those that build, and those that license. If this is a change to support the partners with product/implementation expertise, then it's a good change. But I think it's too early to tell.

aksss 7y ago

As a small MSP, who is a Microsoft Partner, the IUR elimination will hurt. I don’t really care too much about the support incidents (MS support has always been the last of last resorts). It will be that much harder for new IT services companies to bootstrap themselves without this program. I get the idea that companies can get their basic O365 licensing set up easily on their own, but once you wade into Exchange and MDM, it takes some good road miles to know how to implement things correctly. A lot of SMBs w/o IT departments will still need IT partners, certified or not.