<rant>

So it must be the time of year for Microsoft surveys again, filled out a few lately…

Now just in case anyone within MS does care…. what partners actually want (these are specific to my experience and therefore are likely to be Australia specific), instead of the crap asked in surveys. (how do microsoft products make me feel ?… I know how questions like that make me fucking feel…)

1) When you sub us for MCS gigs, give us POC/VIP/RDP etc funding, pay the frakkin invoice on time! Having to follow up every invoice, every time is just painful.

2) Kill the packaged services program… if you want us to write that amount of absolute shit to complete a DDPS gig, pay 60-70% of normal consulting rate and dont pay for 6 months plus – why bother?

3) PSS/CSS, whatever you call technical support services now. They may be different elsewhere in the world, but in Aus, logging a call with PSS is a complete and utter waste of time. Sure, the language barrier doesn’t help, but the technical knowledge at the other end just isn’t good – and definately not helpful. The focus is on closing the call, not helping the customer. You want partners to say good things about PSS to our clients, dont manage our expectations, fucking fix it. Give us somewhere 2 former MCS consultants can get REAL technical assistance (granted, not needed often, but it would be nice to have somehwere to fall back on)

4) Partner support – even bigger waste of time than PSS. Sure, Sarah Arnold seemed to listen to concerns, which was good, but i cant go to the top every time i have a minor question about the partner program. What a waste of her time.

5) Stop sending me a bloody fed-ex box, which contains a smaller box, which contains an A4 envelope, which contains a letter, which has got some useless piece of crap i throw out. For the amount you could save sending us (collectively) this rubbish, maybe you wouldn’t have had to sack 2 of the local guys in the Adelaide MS office when you canned the 5000+ people a while ago. Dont say your implementing cost cutting measures and then continue to do stupidly expensive and needless things.

Now i get that even if someone at MS did care about this type of stuff, no-one could actually do anything about it, as there would be 17,000 forms to fill out in triplicate and an internal tool to use which would be absolutely shithouse and managed by someone in china that didnt speak a spec of english…. but it still feels good just to let it all out every now and again. 🙂

</rant>