SMB Thoughts by Brian Williams

The Windows Vista push by Microsoft to its partners is horrible. We’re being told Vista is here to stay, you need to have Vista implemented in your organization so that you can begin the push of Vista to your clients.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s public front represents a different story. We have a CEO making statements like Vista is a work in progress or we’ve made some mistakes but let’s just move ahead with it anyways. Are you kidding me, you want me to push Vista down my clients throats while at the same time you’re saying hey the products OK but we’ll get there.

In preparing our Spring newsletter, I drafted the front section on the looming XP deadline, Microsoft’s June 30th date and Dell’s XP deadline is stated even earlier, June 18th. Then all of sudden Balmer is publicly stating, hold on, we may revisit the deadline and re-extend that. So hold the presses, don’t print that newsletter, I can’t print something that arrives at my clients desk while right next to it in the Wall Street Journal in big print, “Microsoft extends XP distribution through 2009.” The client shaking their head, who is this guy claiming to be a Microsoft partner he doesn’t even know what’s going on with the products he’s recommending to us.

To make matters worse, while preparing ourselves for the Vista push and trying to believe in the product ourselves, Apple is on an all assault on Vista with a huge ad campaign just bashing the hell out of Vista.

So now we have a CEO waffling on the death of XP and the future of Vista while the competitor is justing chewing them up and down.

Come on Apple, just give me a beautiful server platform that competes with SBS 2003/2008 and I’ll consider making the jump, at least I could have a product that on the public front my clients believe in. They’re already buying iMac’s, iPod’s and more for the home they’d be more than happy to finish the transition if it made sense.