<story><title>Microsoft Partner Network changes spark uproar</title><url>https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GTn8p4GxT9gJ:https://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/3078458/the-worst-move-from-microsoft-in-30-years-mpn-changes-spark-uproar</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wayoutthere</author><text>This is all intentional. They’re basically killing off their reseller model in favor of self-service for small clients.&lt;p&gt;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).&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft Partner Network changes spark uproar</title><url>https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GTn8p4GxT9gJ:https://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/3078458/the-worst-move-from-microsoft-in-30-years-mpn-changes-spark-uproar</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neilv</author><text>Quoting Wikipedia:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the matter of the &amp;quot;worst move in 30 years&amp;quot; article will get straightened out, and won&amp;#x27;t seem nearly as bad as the title suggests.&lt;p&gt;A backstab would be SOP for much of the last 30 years of MS, but I&amp;#x27;d be surprised if they&amp;#x27;re going to throw away a lot of the developer goodwill they&amp;#x27;ve been acquiring recently.&lt;p&gt;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).&lt;p&gt;Why would MS spoil that goodwill, by alerting all those developers to the proven business pattern of waiting until your partner&amp;#x2F;customer has built their business around you, before you do whatever you want to them?&lt;p&gt;Whether MS will someday lose their current goodwill, I don&amp;#x27;t know, but the timing doesn&amp;#x27;t seem right (unless someone is really desperate for short-term numbers).</text></comment>