Microsoft Markets Like a…

One-legged cat trying to bury shit on a frozen pond. I know. I know. Mac Davis spoke that line in North Dallas Forty, but it fits, so I borrowed it. At least I give credit.

I attended a SQL 2005 launch event here in podunk Virginia. Microsoft hates this region, which is why they don’t host many events here at all. TechNet events is it. Nothing else. Want to see a product release? Gotta drive 2-3 hours or more. This is “Hampton Roads”: Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Hampton, Yorktown, Newport News, Williamsburg, yada yada. Land of settlers doing bad things to Indians. It’s also the land of infinite MILITARY and military support. The amount of computer horsepower employed in this area is worthy of more interest than we get from most vendors. To be fair, none of the other major software (or hardware) vendors pays this area much mind. We’re ugly step children. We’ve become used to it also.

The SQL 2005 event was L-A-M-E. Hosted/presented by a local training center, it missed the point and failed on almost every basic Marketing 101 course outline. Instead of top-down topic flow, it dove into minutae that eluded the entire audience. Nevermind that cold, stale bagels and plastic+foil top juice containers were the “catered lunch”. They rented the city convention center, which is pretty nice, but almost any hotel in the area would have been nicer (and provided better food and ammenities).

So, if you’ve ever seen SQL 2005 and were familiar with SQL 2000, you pretty much have a clue about what’s different. If you were to explain to a SQL 2000 user what makes 2005 different/better, would you START by explaining clustering improvements? Yes, I said “START”. As in, the first sentence being about clustering, journaling, and log shipping and mirroring. Ok, so maybe you would. You’re a freak of nature. Freaks are cool, but not doing presentations to people with checkbooks. Now, hold onto that thought about clustering, etc…. By the end of the whole “event” (3 hours mind you), there was not a single mention about the UI changes. Nothing mentioned about DTS becoming SQL Integration services. Nothing. Zip. Ziltch… Nada. As I said: LAME.

Now, I look at all the preparatory marketing fodder Microsoft has been gradually foisting to their web sites, shipping out to partners, vendors, etc. Almost every aspect is focused on 50,000 foot overview stuff. Aero. Media. Vague security discussions.

If you count the instances of “Aero” being the predominant topic, and compare that to, say, discussions about improvements to Event Viewer, automatic disk defragmentation scheduling, registry virtualization, super fetch improvements, and maybe Task Manager and my personal favorite (even in Vista Ultimate): Parental Controls…. you should realize that the latter topics are almost always mentioned in passing. Again, they’re missing the boat.

There are two customer groups essentially, even though you can easily demographically subdivide each: Businesses and Home Users. Businesses constitute the majority of revenue for Microsoft, however, Home Users provide significant revenue via VAR licensing (the Jones’ buy their new Dell with Vista pre-installed, but remember: Dell gets a cut). Volume Licensing is almost always tied to business customers. Businesses are driven by IT geeks and CIOs doing the Vulcan mindmeld of MBA+MCSE+Starbucks. A successful upgrade campaign MUST focus on wining the hearts and minds of the IT geeks, who in turn put the bug in the CIO’s ear, which opens the magic checkbook. Somehow, most software vendors have forgotten that in the past five years especially.

Microsoft should mount two marketing campaigns: One continuing with the consumer-oriented (e.g. “home user”) topics. The other focusing on business needs; rolling up their sleeves and don’t be ashamed to tout the intermediate features that save little bits of time over a day: the things I mentioned earlier (defrag, event viewer, task manager, etc.). Yes, they mention it now, but it gets lost in the haze of .NET this, and Aero that. I’m sure we’ll see more of this in December and January, but November is key to hitting the ground hard and fast. Many corporate shops are racing to stuff their budget plans for the coming year. Many already have closed that book, but there’s still room to make last minute adjustments. I don’t think Microsoft is putting a lot of weight on that side of the customer split. With Zune and XBox Live, they appear to be shifting back to consumer focus right now.