OK, I realize this is a very old-school attitude, but I’m at least partly serious — the process of upgrading from an OK old computer to a great new computer can still be pretty eye-opening.

I recently upgraded my primary home office desktop to a screaming-fast Maingear F131 workstation, and it’s a huge improvement.  I wrote a review of it on the Maingear site.

I realize that Maingear is primarily known for high-end gaming desktops, but I’m no gamer.  Instead, I am what used to be called a “power user” – a guy who uses a lot of applications that eat up a lot of computing power.  In my case, it’s usually for some type of economic and statistical analysis on large and unwieldy datasets.  My review gets into all the specifics of the new machine and my experience with Maingear (I recommend the product and the company highly), but here I want to talk about the economics of desktop computing.

For as long as I’ve been buying computers (my first was 28 years ago), I’ve believed that computers are ridiculously cheap, and that buying the best one you can afford is pretty much of a no-brainer.  I’m amazed at how few others share this view, so let’s start with a justification based on performance and productivity.

Imagine I can choose to buy one of two computers — standard and high-end.  Let’s say high-end saves me ten minutes of lost productivity per day (more on that below).  That’s 50 minutes per week, or more than 40 hours per year.  If I replace my main computer once every three years, that’s more than 120 hours saved be choosing high-end over standard.  The value of my time (whether calculated on billing rate, take home pay, or any other reasonable measure) justifies paying a lot more than any real-world premium for a high-end computer.

In reality, this estimate is very conservative.  I hear experts, pundits, and defenders of the conventional wisdom howling that this analysis makes no sense if “all you do is email and Web browsing and a few spreadsheets” or whatever.  I submit that these experts have not done a lot of side-by-side comparison testing.  Just to pick a simple real-world example, starting Excel and opening a relatively simple one-page spreadsheet can take 2-3 seconds on a standard new computer, and takes less than one second on my new high-end computer.  Same with Word, and starting up Outlook, or opening a browser, etc.  (And yes, I’ve done the same kind of tests with a standard Mac and a high-end Mac, and I’ve also tried Thunderbird and OpenOffice on Windows; the results are comparable.)

For me, the real benefit is not just saving two seconds a few hundred times a day.  I also do some compute-intensive analysis from time to time in Excel and data-intensive work in both Access and SQL Server.  A not-especially-huge-and-complex spreadsheet I’ve used in recent economic analysis projects takes more than two minutes to open and recalculate on a decent new computer.  On my new Maingear box, that process completes in 45 seconds.  That’s a huge difference!  Yes, I can get up and make coffee while I wait two minutes, but when we’re in the throes of analytic work, we use many similar tools many times a day; even I don’t drink that much coffee.  The performance difference with Access is even more pronounced.

Yes, this post has all been about personal productivity and not about using this new system as part of a Digipede Network grid; I’ll have more to say about that another day.  But suffice it to say that a network of potent desktops like the Maingear F131 would make a very powerful grid indeed.

One of the most painful and joyful events in the life of a software company is the release of new software.  While this seems like an obvious statement, let me just say to all my friends who are NOT in the software business — you have no idea.

Many customers, prospective customers, and industry observers shrug and even smirk at a press release that “merely” announces the release of a new version of an existing product.  (Smirk away — here’s ours.)  But it’s gratifying to receive congratulations from those who actually understand this process (thanks, friends at Microsoft!).

So now that the apparently-endless cycle of build and test is over, and the last (known) snafu has been fixed (how the %^$&$! did we put an uninstallable version of our SDK out on our community site?), we can take a deep breath, step back, and discuss what this release means — to our customers.  Because, as our press release says, this is a software release entirely driven by our customers.

From the beginning, we set out to make the Digipede Network “radically easier to buy, install, learn, and use” than any other distributed computing platform.  Reviewers say we’ve done that, and customers tell us they can come up to speed quickly with our software.  Ah, but once a customer comes up to speed quickly, that customer gets ideas!  “Why does Digipede use all the cores on each compute resource? Can we reserve one or more for other uses?”  “When I try to delete thousands of jobs at once, weird things happen — are you guys just idiots or what?” “I thought you guys were supposed to be Microsoft-savvy; why can’t I host a .NET 4 application on your software?”  “When we run millions of jobs with lots of really short tasks, the Digipede database gets really big — can you fix that?”  You get the idea.

Well, to be honest, we never tested that “queue thousands of jobs while thousands of other jobs are running and then just delete the thousands that are queued” case, so yeah, weird things happened.  Should be better now.  And yeah, .NET 4 is a reasonable expectation from us — works fine now.   Yes, it’s true that there are ways to make the Digipede database grow — and while we’ve always had tools for managing that, those tools are simpler and more useful now.

That multi-core thing turned out to be the most popular one though, and it’s been one of my pet issues for a while, so let’s talk about that in more detail.  I’ve spoken at conferences, written articles, made videos, and given interview for years saying basically this:

• Mainstream developers know single-threaded object-oriented coding techniques, which take advantage of a single core.
• Meanwhile, chip makers are developing CPUs with more and more cores.
• The Digipede SDK is the simplest way for a mainstream developer to WRITE WHAT THEY KNOW (i.e., single-threaded object-oriented code) and EXECUTE that code on multiple cores on a chip, multiple chips in a box, and multiple boxes on a grid, all using the same programming paradigm.

And this has been great for us and for our customers — up to a point.  For purely compute-intensive applications, this approach scales linearly in cores and machines up to hundreds and even thousands of multi-core compute resources.  But many complex applications have a lot of I/O requirements as well, and just loading up (for example) an 8-core server (most likely, a dual quad-core box) with 8 cores worth of computation can actually slow down execution as processes wait for I/O.

So in the most recent release, we took a very simple brute-force approach to fixing this issue – we now allow users to “reserve” one or more cores per compute resource through a simple option in Digipede Control.  Early users report excellent results, with 6 or 7 cores computing away while the remaining one or two handle all other chores (including I/O).  Equally important, this approach is robust to additional increases in the number of cores per chip (which is forecast to reach several dozen within just a few years).

If you want to take the new version for a spin, ask for a free evaluation copy here.

Now, how about what’s NOT in our press release?  Well, you won’t find the word “cloud” in there…

Is it just me, or has the cloud meme really jumped the shark?  Look.  I used cloud computing before it was called that, and I’ll use it after that name has wandered off into the scrapheap of forgotten marketing buzzwords.  If a cloud is Google and a cloud is a cluster in a datacenter somewhere the user can’t see it, then a cloud is everything and nothing.  If a cloud is Amazon or GoGrid, then sure, our customers can deploy the Digipede Network there, or they can deploy it on their own infrastructure (then, if they want to, they can tell their bosses they’ve built a “private cloud” for all I care!).

The market knows Digipede as a provider of distributed computing software for the Windows platform, and as a provider of  high-productivity distributed computing tools for .NET developers.  That’s our role in the cloud and on the ground and everywhere in between.

Penny Crosman provided some good news for banks, hedge funds, and other money managers in her article today in Wall Street & Technology — good news for financial developers and IT professionals who need to access more processing power without complex application re-engineering. 

You can read the article for yourself — there are good quotes from AVM CTO Paul Algreen, a longtime Digipede customer – but from my perspective, the gist is this:

• CPUs are getting faster these days almost exclusively through putting more cores on a chip. 
• Hence, when you buy a fancy new server, performance only improves for applications that take advantage of multi-core architectures. 
• Yet most applications are single-threaded, leaving all but one core doing, umm, nothing. 
• AVM noticed this problem more than two years ago, and started using the Digipede Network to address it. 
• They’ve adapted compute-intensive legacy applications to run on a grid of multi-core boxes without expensive re-engineering, seeing huge performance gains. 
• Thanks to the intuitive programming model offered by the Digipede Framework SDK, AVM has added more and more applications to the grid since then, and they haven’t looked back.

This is quite typical of the experience many Digipede customers have had — that for most applications in financial services, multi-core and grid computing can be handled most effectively as two cases of the same general distributed computing problem.  

And yes, I’m going to plug our now-famous four-minute video on this topic again — you can watch it here.  Then you can request a free evaluation copy of the Digipede Network, and try it out on your own compute-intensive applications.  Because Intel and AMD aren’t waiting for the world to re-tool a few million enterprise developers; they’re banging out chips with more and more cores with every new generation. 

But with the right tools, you can take advantage of all that power — and that’s a welcome dose of good news for Wall Street!

I, CEO of a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, do hereby proclaim my opinion, based on firsthand experience, that Microsoft AdCenter is entirely without value to our company, inferior in every measurable way to competing offerings from Google and even Yahoo, and a time-and-money sink of unusual scope, even for Microsoft.

I ran the campaigns myself, took advantage of consulting and optimization offers, tweaked and twiddled the knobs and dials on all three platforms, spent money on all three platforms, and Microsoft is — third.  Distant third.

I posted about AdCenter more than two years ago, and the improvements since that time have been numerous — and meaningless, from the perspective of actual business performance.  I’ve heard Gates and Ballmer and others brag about newer and better algorithms for their advertising platform more times than I can count, and I’ve seen no improvement in clickthrus from prospective customers.

Microsoft’s search engine is fine — it’s come a long way in the last few years, and is now nearly as good as Google in most ways.   But something is desperately wrong with (a) the ad placement algorithms or (b) the way those ads are displayed or (c) the audience that uses Live Search or (d) all of the above, because the right people click through to us from ads placed by Google, and they don’t from ads placed by Microsoft.

Of additional concern is the apparently defective billing mechanism, which (in my experience) continued to bill my account after all campaigns have been paused.  (OK, possibly I screwed up in some way using the less-than-intuitive AdCenter interface, which I find clumsier than its competitors, and somehow missed pausing something — although I doubt it.)  Last week I finished working through this last minor billing issue with a very helpful and friendly Microsoft representative (I’m screwed, but only out of about $80 — nothing compared to the losses from legitimate bills), and have shut down our account.

Anyone from Microsoft is free to call me about our experience with your online advertising service — I’m at 510-834-3645 ext. 101 — just so long as the call does not present me with new opportunities to use this offering.  We’re done with it.

The new head of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, says “The clouds will all run Linux.”

Really? What’s next? The head of Boeing telling us that all transportation will be via 787s? Or maybe a statement from OPEC saying that cars will all burn gasoline?

Get serious. “The Clouds” will run Linux and UNIX and Windows and OS X and whatever else paying customers want.

“The Clouds” are already running more than just Linux, and if cloud computing is going to grow beyond today’s super-early-adopter proof-of-concept market, it’s going to get more diverse, not less.

Every time there’s a new IT buzzword (oops, I mean “revolution”), some market-oblivious engineer or attention-deficit analyst declares that finally legacy computing is dead, a new paradigm is here, there’s One Right Way to do everything now, the open-source rapture is at hand, you’re free from your chains, yada yada yada.

But a guy like Jim Whitehurst should know better.  Yeah Jim, “the clouds” are going to kill Microsoft. Yeah Jim, “the clouds” mean Oracle is finished. Yeah Jim, “the clouds” will all run Linux, and Slashdot will replace all other news outlets.

I’ll have lots more constructive things to say about cloud computing soon here, but for now let me just say: the cloud computing offerings I’ve seen so far look a lot like computing. There’s hardware infrastructure, there are operating systems, there are development tools, there are applications, APIs, and user interfaces. There are administrative tools, management consoles, and buckets of kludgy tricks to make anything actually work the way you want it to work. Different vendors expose different parts of all this to their users in different ways as they struggle to differentiate. But anyone who believes that “the clouds” will “all” standardize on a single OS (or database, or programming language, or much of anything else) is just blowing smoke.

And as he reports, thanks to improvements in both Mono and the Digipede Network, the answer is — not much. We’ve got a working prototype of a Digipede Agent running under Mono on Linux that runs a Digipede job.

Digipede on Linux? Has the world turned upside down?

Hardly.

Since the beginning, Digipede has been focussed on adding value to the Microsoft platform. And customers know that. Customers also understand that Microsoft is getting better and better at making sure its products interoperate with others, even on other platforms, and Microsoft’s partners have to facilitate that. We get questions from customers pretty frequently about Mono, and lately those questions have gotten more specific, so it seems prudent to investigate any technical blockers from time to time.

So let me re-state what Robert said, and what I said above — this is an initial assessment, a technical experiment only, not a shipping product.  Rob’s post (and mine) are not a product announcement — this is a blatant “trial balloon.”  We want to hear what the market thinks of Digipede on Mono.

Why might this be interesting? Let’s back up a step and take a look at enterprise grid and HPC deployments.

Most enterprise customers have what is often called a “mixed” IT environment. That’s a euphemism for an unplanned and chaotic assortment of technologies that have piled up over the years into some type of barely-managed infrastructure. In almost every enterprise, Windows runs on most or all of the desktops. In almost every enterprise, there is some mixture of Windows and Linux servers, with maybe some Solaris and/or other UNIX flavor(s) thrown in. In almost every enterprise with an HPC infrastructure, most or all HPC nodes run Linux.

This is just reality — Windows is miles ahead in 2008 desktop market share, and Linux is miles ahead in 2008 HPC market share. Do I wish it were different? Sure — if Microsoft had a bigger share of the HPC market (and we’ve been working diligently to help make that happen), we’d have an even bigger market into which we could sell our software. And that will happen, I have no doubt. We tell all our customers “Windows HPC Server is the best option for adding power to a Digipede grid,” and that’s the truth. Go buy some now.

But the fact remains, there’s a lot of existing infrastructure — desktops, 32-bit Windows servers, Linux servers and cluster nodes, Solaris servers, and more — that enterprises are not going to throw away.  All this infrastructure represents potential grid computing power.  The Digipede Network has always run on heterogeneous Windows networks — with Agents running on 32- and 64-bit Windows desktops, 32- and 64-bit Windows servers, and cluster nodes running Windows HPC Server (formerly Compute Cluster Server). Our reluctance to include boxes that don’t run Windows has always been mostly about applications — it’s still relatively rare to find applications that are actually deployed across multiple operating systems simultaneously.

But as Mono gets better and better, we hear from enterprise customers and prospects who are getting more interested in it. They like the idea of being able to use more of their existing infrastructure more efficiently. They want to take advantage of Digipede’s great developer experience to deploy more applications — with minimal changes to that infrastructure.

So let’s get back to Robert’s closing question: “Now that we can do it, what should we do with it?” What do you think? Is the market crying out for a multi-OS .NET grid? Or is what we’re hearing just idle curiosity?  Let’s hear from all sides.

Sure, the individual steps like specifying, developing, testing, documenting, and planning support for new software features are difficult enough — but the discipline of knowing when to STOP adding features, and to focus instead on finishing a complete, polished, release-ready product is tougher than it sounds to those outside the industry.

In any software organization worthy of the name, there are more good ideas than can possibly be put into any specific product release. There are also just a stunning number of bad ideas competing for inclusion in shipping products (I am notorious within Digipede for proposing needlessly specific bad ideas. Mercifully, my partners of 20 years have honed their skills in talking me out of the worst of them.)

We decided early on at Digipede that our feature set would be guided by three principles: Performance, simplicity, and a focus on adding value to the Microsoft platform. Over the past five years, these principles have helped us make decisions on what to include (and as importantly, what to exclude) from our software.

Last month, we reached general availability of the latest release of the Digipede Network, Version 2.1. You can see what’s new in this release on our Web site, but now that our customers have had an opportunity to upgrade, let’s look at a few of the specific new features to see how we did in sticking to those principles:

Job concurrency: The improved Digipede Agent software can manage different applications running simultaneously on multiple cores of a single compute node, maximizing utilization of compute nodes on the grid. Users can set Job Concurrency values to allow the Digipede Agents to work on multiple jobs simultaneously: designate which applications can safely run with other applications, which applications can run side-by-side with themselves, and which applications are not compatible for concurrent jobs.

Performance! This one is just amazing. As new machines ship with more and more cores inside, I am continually baffled at the lack of attention from ALL the major vendors out there about how to take advantage of those cores. Sure, Intel talks about compilers and Microsoft talks about Parallel Extensions and so on — but in shipping products in 2008, there’s just incredibly little help for users and developers who want to take advantage of multi-core processors. What we shipped in Version 2.0 last September is still miles ahead of other software options in terms of both development patterns and execution modes for multi-core processing. With Version 2.1, we’ve extended that lead significantly — if you want to take advantage of dual-CPU quad-core servers and desktops TODAY, you need to take a look at how the Digipede Network handles concurrency. Watch the 4-minute video that shows how, then get an evaluation copy of the software and try it yourself!

Management APIs: New management APIs give developers programmatic ability to create, modify, and delete resource pools. (Available in Professional Edition only)

Performance (specifically, scalability), and Simplicity (of grid management). A browser-based UI for grid management is great — for small grids. As our customers deploy larger and larger grids, they need both the browser-based UI of Digipede Control and a wider range of tools for the programmatic manipulation of grid resources. It is vastly simpler to take advantage of thousands of grid nodes through simple extensions to our management API.

Risk-free sharing: “Pool Rank” permits risk-free sharing of resources: you can add your servers to the enterprise grid and ensure that they always work on your jobs first. That means that by joining the grid, you can only improve your application performance. You can donate your cycles when you are not using them without worrying that your application performance will degrade, because you are always guaranteed that your machines will work for you.

Performance and Simplicity. We’ve also referred to this feature as “Selfish sharing.” We hear from other grid vendors about how users “must” get over the practice of “server hugging.” We try not to be so arrogant; we’ve never found that scolding our customers is good business practice. If customers want to preserve unconditional priority on their own servers, we say “good for them.” So we’ve built a straighforward way to preserve absolute priority for the resource owner, even when they offer to share surplus resources. From what our customers tell us, we think this approach encourages efficient resource sharing far more than lecturing ever would.

First Grid Computing Solution Certified for Windows Server 2008: We followed the long and winding road of the Early Adopter program to become the first grid solution to obtain this important certification, so that customers can be confident that our software works not only with the Microsoft products they use today, but with all the latest improvements Microsoft is bringing to market now.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus. By aligning with Microsoft’s technology and strategy, we help our customers create a truly dynamic IT infrastructure. Server 2008 brings many benefits in performance and manageability, and we’re confident that our customers will be upgrading quickly (more quickly than, say, to Vista); we want to be sure they can use our latest capabilities on Microsoft’s best OS platform.

Let me be candid here; these benefits do not come free to ISVs. I have considerable anxiety over extending yet further the number of versions of Microsoft products we support — for example, while I think Server 2008 is great, and Visual Studio 2008 is great, and the new SQL Server 2008 will be great, staying current means we’ll have to start enforcing our requirements by turning away requests for support of Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000. The combinatorics for testing on multiple OS versions, .NET versions, SQL Server versions, IIS versions, and upgrade paths for our own software versions get out of hand quickly. I’ll have more on this issue another day. For now I’ll just say I’m happy with our decision to stay current — mostly.

Automatic Failover Package and Integration with NLB: Failover has long been a feature of the Digipede Network Professional Edition but with the optional Automatic Failover Package, organizations can now have complete out-of-the-box integration with Windows Server 2008 load balancing, giving “hands-free” failover to mission-critical applications.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus — yes, even this advanced capability was guided by our goal of simplicity. While automatic failover is often considered a complex requirement, we made some basic decisions to keep it as simple as possible. First, we made automatic failover it’s own SKU, so customers without the need for high-availability configuration don’t even have to think about it. Second, we did away with a lot of the manual scripting that often slows implementation of failover solutions — you can have it running very quickly. Finally, we left as much as possible to popular existing technologies — SQL clustering and NLB — so the implementation steps will be as familiar as possible.

Reports Package: Assembles critical information about the use and optimization of the grid, with easy-to-understand charts and graphs, flagging of critical information, and drill-down capability, giving enterprises fully integrated optimization of grid performance, with tracking of who contributes to and who benefits from grid resources.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus — In larger systems, simple and informative visual tools are essential for wringing the most performance possible from a grid. Users and administrators become far more productive in their routine monitoring functions and troubleshooting activities with this new package, which plugs directly into Digipede Control (our admin UI). And by building on SQL Reporting, we’ve created a framework for future extensions.

Overall, I’m pleased with the extent to which we have driven the improvement of our product by staying focused on the three principles described above. To be a little less self-congratulatory, I wish we had stopped adding features at least two months earlier and brought most of these capabilities to market sooner, rather than piling quite so much into a single release (and there’s certainly more than I’ve had a chance to discuss here).  Perhaps another day, I’ll have a chance to discuss some of the things we (purposely) left out!  Now that V2.1 is in the market (and getting rave reviews from our customers), I’m eager to see what great new applications our imaginative customers create and deploy on our latest platform.

His article is in two parts, and this first part provides a good overview of the complex problem he’s facing — he confronts issues in financial modeling, data sources, genetic models and grid computing. As a result, Part One does not dig too deeply into coding details. But it’s worth a read — you’ll understand the architectural decisions he’s facing, and how he’s planning to address them. Plus, from what I’ve heard about Part Two (which will be out in June), there’s plenty of detail (and code) coming.

This is the second time in two months that we’ve seen influential financial modelers implement their public examples using the Digipede Network (see also Matt Davey’s recent Dr. Dobb’s article).

This is consistent with what we’re seeing from customers. While there are many grid offerings in the market, there seems to be a growing consensus that if you use .NET, there are significant advantages to working with a grid solution built on .NET. Or conversely, there’s no point trying to fit a square peg into a round hole — i.e., there’s no point trying to graft a .NET application onto a grid built for other technologies when a better option exists.

This is the “application centric” view — grids should follow applications, making it easier for developers to adapt applications to a grid, even if that means limiting the options for running those applications to a particular set of resources (in Digipede’s case, Windows machines running .NET).

The other view is “infrastructure centric” — that OS should not matter, that a grid should allow applications to be deployed across all resources, even if that means restricting the application technologies and development patterns allowed for such deployment.

Digipede has been unapologetically in the “application centric” camp for five years now, but what do others think? Has Derek made a wise choice by trading off ease of development for deployment limited to a single OS? We think so, but let’s hear from you!

2. Improve the compatibility of partner.microsoft.com with all major browsers, especially Firefox.
OK, I know, we’re all Microsoft partners and we’re all just delighted to use IE because it’s great, and because we’re all part of the great Microsoft dogfooding process. Mostly, I’m OK with that. But processes like obtaining customer references drive customers into parts of the partner site, and neither Microsoft nor its partners should be imposing IE on our customers. (One of my customers gave up on the reference process over this issue last month — thank you to the fine person on Todd’s team who approved the reference manually, but that hardly seems like the smoothest approach.)  Digipede is unusually highly focussed on the Microsoft platform — our software is written exclusively Windows — yet over 25% of visitors to www.digipede.net use Firefox.  Microsoft simply can’t assume partner customers use IE.
3. Speaking of dogfooding — Windows Live ID: All or Nothing.
After years of preaching to partners and customers about the value of Windows Live ID (formerly Passport) — why do so many Microsoft properties still not use it? Yes, I log into partner.microsoft.com using my Live ID — but when we go to the Worldwide Partner Conference, CommNet uses something else, and Structured Networking (now WPC Connect) uses something else else, and when we participate in the ISV Royalty Program we use something else else else, and so on. This is just login — how hard could it be to standardize?

4. Clear, useful, accurate, and complete partner status reporting
How was the number of points from our “Microsoft Tested Products” calculated?  How can my points associated with our only location be different from our total number of points?  Where did these 2 points I see in “Other Activities” come from, and when do they expire?

A long-standing request from partners far and wide is for a way to track the source and expiration dates of ALL partner points through partners.microsoft.com.  The Partner team showed a beta of this functionality at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver last July, and promised it “in the Fall.”  This functionality alone would be a great help to those of us who administer our firms’ participation in the Microsoft Partner Program.  Is this still in the works?
5. More human review of the partners.microsoft.com experience.
I hear Todd when he says:

We continue to invest in our on-line resources for our partners and customers worldwide. During 2007 we made several enhancements including a major release on November 30th. In early January, we realized we had some serious performance problems in some very specific steps in the enrollment process (eg. customer reference processing).

Since detecting the problem, we’ve been running 24×7 triage/test/fix cycles. We also added call center staff and extended hours of service to help partners work through enrollment and maintain their access to their benefits. We’ve made some fixes that have yielded improvement. We have more to do.

While parts of the enrollment process have been rough for some, partners have been using resources on the Microsoft Partner Portal in record numbers without problems, including online training, marketing and sales resources.

We continue to monitor system performance closely 24×7 worldwide. Status messages are being kept up to date on the site. Our Regional Support Centers are standing by to help partners.

OK — Granted. I realize that running a Web site for the largest partner program in the IT industry is complex, and I’m sure that somebody is monitoring system performance 24×7 — but let’s have a look at what I see today when I log in.

The first message, the VERY TOP item that Microsoft wants to bring to my attention today is:

Re-Enroll! It’s time to re-enroll the DIGIPEDE TECHNOLOGIES LLC in the Microsoft Partner Program. Read More

OK, no, it’s actually not time to re-enroll. I re-enrolled over two weeks ago. Let’s expand this message:

Re-Enroll! It’s time to re-enroll the DIGIPEDE TECHNOLOGIES LLC in the Microsoft Partner Program. Read More
Your Gold Certified Membership is scheduled to expire on Saturday, January 31, 2009. Continue your Partnership with Microsoft and retain member benefits by Re-enrolling Here.

OK, no, it’s really not important for me to rush out and re-enroll to avoid an expiration date more than one year in the future. As far as I can tell, there’s no reason for this message.

Let’s move to the second message Microsoft has for me today:

Attention! You must submit payment to complete your re-enrollment. Read More

OK, no, I submitted payment for my re-enrollment over two weeks ago, through Microsoft’s own interface, and received confirmation at that time.

Let’s expand this message too:

Attention! You must submit payment to complete your re-enrollment. Read More
The Microsoft Partner Program shows that you have not submitted payment for your Gold Certified Partner Membership. You may pay your Invoice now in the Payment Center.

OK, no, that’s wrong, I’m positive I paid, let’s dig around some more — sure enough, there in my Payment History (https://partners.microsoft.com/PartnerProgram/PaymentHistory.aspx) is the record of my payment, on 1/11/2008.  Now to double-check, let’s have a look over at the American Express site — yes, sure enough, I have a charge from Microsoft Programs two business days later for the exact amount I paid at the Payment Center.  So why is partners.microsoft.com still yelping at me for money?
By the way, this is not a trivial point. I’m not the only one at Digipede who can log into the Microsoft Partner site. I’ve promised my partners that I’ve taken care of our Gold Certified Partner status, and that we’re all set. Yet when they log in, they see Microsoft’s top two messages, and are led to believe that I’ve forgotten to pay and that our status is in jeopardy despite their herculean efforts to get our products tested and certified in time. This makes me look stupid (and I get enough chances to do that without Microsoft’s help).

That’s it for messages, so let’s hop over to the Partner Dashboard to make sure everything’s OK there:

Partner Dashboard is not available right now or does not have data for the organization you are mapped to. Please see your PAM for more information.

You get the idea.

There’s lots and lots of wonderful information at partners.microsoft.com, and I’d love to use it more consistently — but my experience with the site is that information specific to our company’s program participation is often problematic.  To me, this feels like a testing issue; some part of the 24×7 monitoring process could still use improvement (as Todd’s message clearly states).

So there’s my list — what do other partners think?  Todd has stepped up, and is ready to join the conversation — who else has ideas that can help improve this community?

One thing I get to do every year is renew our status as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Fine. The program requirements are difficult enough without technical hassles. Previous years have been a joy — one time, partners.microsoft.com was sufficiently screwed up that I managed to pay our $1500+ fee twice (yes, I eventually got a refund) — and this year appears to be worse.

So far, using the forms on the Microsoft Partner Program Web site, following absolutely basic and routine steps that are completely necessary to renew our status, I’ve encountered timeouts a few dozen times in the past two weeks. Fine. If Microsoft wants to provide a poor online experience for its partners, we can assess for ourselves whether the value is worth the pain.

But those few dozen timeouts don’t even include the repeated timeouts encountered by Digipede’s best customers, who have agreed to serve as references for us.

That’s right — my best customers get to sit in front of multiple timeouts waiting for the Microsoft Partner Program Web site, following Microsoft’s own instructions in an autogenerated email, just so they can provide Microsoft verification that we’ve done work for them. And yes, I get to explain to my best customers that they should be patient with Microsoft in order to do Digipede a favor. And yes, this conversation is every bit as delightful as it sounds.

My experience is not “bad luck,” nor is it unique. I’ve tried to submit information at different times of day, and on different days of the week; my customers have tried the same. And yes, I have talked to technical support, and reproduced the problem for them (“yeah, we’ve been having some of those problems lately…”). Is this just viewed as an acceptable cost of doing business by other Microsoft partners? By the rest of Microsoft?
Hey Debra Chrapaty — do you really expect to deliver online “cloud computing” services to hundreds of millions of customers when you can’t serve 640,000 partners any better than this? Do you want the help of those 640,000 partners in delivering online services to your customers? What level of confidence do you think your best partners and best customers have in your ability to deliver responsive online applications when our primary online experience with Microsoft goes through partners.microsoft.com?

Hey Kevin Turner — is this the “operational excellence” we keep hearing so much about?

Hey Allison Watson — how can your team be so great in person (and they are) while your systems are so consistently flawed (and they are)? Never in all my interactions with Microsoft do I encounter as much eye-rolling and well-practiced apologies as when I talk with your team about your systems.

(Woohoo! Invoking Allison’s name must have been the key — I just hit “OK” for the 8th or 9th time on the dialog box that’s been sitting there mocking me as I type this — these are LONG timeouts –, and FINALLY I’ve assigned ONE additional customer reference successfully. Hang on — gotta go tell another of my best customers to hit retry while the site may (briefly) be working!)

And these minor trials and frustrations are NOTHING compared to the slog we’ve been going through to get Certified for Server 2008 — but that’s another story for another day.

UPDATE:  In the past two hours, I’ve had about 70 hits on this post from within Microsoft.  In the past two hours, I’ve had one of my customers give up trying to provide a reference through the Microsoft Partner Program Web site because he does not run Internet Explorer (not sure what he uses, but I just tested with Firefox 2, and sure enough, there are some features that apparently do not work).  In the past two hours, a different one of my customers tried again to approve his reference; he received timeouts again, and now wants to know how to fax in his reference instead.