Comments on: Gold No More http://powersunfiltered.com/2010/02/02/gold-no-more/ An entrepreneur's journey into grid computing and partnering with Microsoft, by John Powers Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:26:46 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: john http://powersunfiltered.com/2010/02/02/gold-no-more/comment-page-1/#comment-87085 john Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:20:57 +0000 http://powersunfiltered.com/?p=215#comment-87085 Deborah - Good to hear from you again, although I'm sorry to hear about your experience with the CSAT results. That's worse than "Catch-22 double-speak;" it's plain ignorant. I mean that literally -- ignorant of any widely-accepted industry practices for addressing poor reviews (deliberate or accidental) that have been around for many years. Ebay has decent procedures, as do many hotel and restaurant review sites. Yet Microsoft continues to re-invent processes (badly) that others have already invented and improved for years. The Microsoft Partner Program's tenacious unwillingness to learn from the successes and mistakes of others dooms it to slow improvement and frequent backsliding. And I totally agree -- VSIP rocks, and it's even more ironic that MSPP has a fantastic example of how a partner program can and should work, right on the same campus. Deborah – Good to hear from you again, although I’m sorry to hear about your experience with the CSAT results. That’s worse than “Catch-22 double-speak;” it’s plain ignorant. I mean that literally — ignorant of any widely-accepted industry practices for addressing poor reviews (deliberate or accidental) that have been around for many years. Ebay has decent procedures, as do many hotel and restaurant review sites. Yet Microsoft continues to re-invent processes (badly) that others have already invented and improved for years. The Microsoft Partner Program’s tenacious unwillingness to learn from the successes and mistakes of others dooms it to slow improvement and frequent backsliding.
And I totally agree — VSIP rocks, and it’s even more ironic that MSPP has a fantastic example of how a partner program can and should work, right on the same campus.

]]> By: Deborah http://powersunfiltered.com/2010/02/02/gold-no-more/comment-page-1/#comment-87081 Deborah Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:18:49 +0000 http://powersunfiltered.com/?p=215#comment-87081 John, I couldn't agree more. I'm seriously thinking about taking it a step further and bidding MSPP goodbye. The partner program has never really figured out where ISVs fit. We get tons better value from VSIP. The final straw was trying to jump through the new customer satisfaction survey hoop. The points awarded are based solely on the answer to one question: the customer's overall satisfaction, on a 1 to 4 scale. Those results are weighted in some bizarre way that doesn't resemble anything I remember from my statistics classes. One bad response-- entered in error! -- threw the entire result off, and cost us the few points we need for Gold. I tried to get that entry corrected. MSPP's response? "Once a customer has completed the survey, responses cannot be altered under any circumstances. This ensures data integrity of the CSAT results for all Partners." What a fine piece of Catch-22 double-speak that is! Glad to see you're blogging again. John,

I couldn’t agree more. I’m seriously thinking about taking it a step further and bidding MSPP goodbye. The partner program has never really figured out where ISVs fit. We get tons better value from VSIP.

The final straw was trying to jump through the new customer satisfaction survey hoop. The points awarded are based solely on the answer to one question: the customer’s overall satisfaction, on a 1 to 4 scale. Those results are weighted in some bizarre way that doesn’t resemble anything I remember from my statistics classes. One bad response– entered in error! — threw the entire result off, and cost us the few points we need for Gold. I tried to get that entry corrected. MSPP’s response? “Once a customer has completed the survey, responses cannot be altered under any circumstances. This ensures data integrity of the CSAT results for all Partners.” What a fine piece of Catch-22 double-speak that is!

Glad to see you’re blogging again.

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