Microsoft Customers Balk at Hard Sell

HangingChad writes "ComputerWorld is running an article about Microsoft's latest type of sales force scare tactic. Apparently Microsoft is using the new title of 'engagement manager' to attempt sales via intimidation. From the article: 'Indeed, according to Microsoft's Web site, the responsibility of someone with Lawless' title of "engagement manager" is to "perform as an integrated member of the account team, drive business development and closing of new services engagements in targeted accounts."'"

Comments

it's all about obfuscation

[yagu]

What's up with Microsoft? I would recommend Thomas Peters' "In Search of Excellence" for their review. While I wouldn't agree 100% with all of "Search...", there are anecdotes and good evidence around "customer service", and what makes a company excellent.

Creating adversarial relationships, especially ones where Microsoft as much as accuses a customer of piracy (are we sure Microsoft hasn't purchased RIAA yet?) cultivates resentment and long term rot.

And now, Microsoft is creating account team members whose sole function is to instill FUD in their customer, intimidating them into shelling out even more money for services to ensure Microsoft checks and balances are in Microsoft's favor? Sheesh. This is a scam, pure and simple. As the article points out, if Microsoft truly thinks something is amiss "it sics the Business Software Alliance on the company. It doesn't turn the matter over to one of its sales managers".

Maybe Microsoft is doing this to themselves inadvertently, or maybe it's a strategy. From the Fine Article:

When I phoned Lawless to find out, she referred me to Microsoft's PR machine. The responses I got through that channel stressed that Microsoft's aim is to help customers navigate the complexities of software licensing and that one of the roles of engagement managers is to assist in that effort by informing customers of a potential licensing risk. I was told to attribute the responses to Lawless.

Microsoft's "complexities of software licensing" are the seed of irritation. Accusing customers of ripping them off because they can't figure these complex licenses out entirely is the fertilizer to grow that seed into full blown resentment.

If there were any real alternatives to technology in today's Microsoft dominated juggernaut, these "practices" would send customers screaming to the competition. Unfortunately, so far, there aren't.

Re:it's all about obfuscation

[throx]

I fully believe that everyone out there really wants to break away from Microsoft...

Actually, I disagree. Most people don't actually care. There's even a hell of a lot out there that actually love Microsoft products (they're an American company, wave flag, etc.), and another very large set that just likes the idea that a single source solution tends to play pretty well with itself.

Part of the problem for the alternate systems is to actually convince people that the MS monopoly is bad for them.

Re:it's all about obfuscation

[olddotter]

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Microsoft wants their customers to like them. Microsoft has several problems, some legit, and some they caused themselves.

The legit problems is that since they have a virtual monopoly their biggest compeditor is the version of Windows (or Office, etc.) they sold customers a few years ago. Hence the only way to grow is to "encourage" people to buy new software even if they don't really need it.

They have a history of upsetting their userbase. Given that they have a virtual monopoly they don't really care if their users like them. MS takes a corporate mafia approach to sales, trying to strong arm customers into paying them off. I've seen these articles in the nears every few years for most of the last decade.

I keep hoping it will drive defections to Apple's OS X or Linux.

Re:it's all about obfuscation

[NutscrapeSucks]

Part of the problem for the alternate systems is to actually convince people that the MS monopoly is bad for them.

No, that attitude is the problem itself. Trying to sell a product on the basis of "It's not Microsoft" doesn't work in the real world because Microsoft is not percieved to be any worse of a problem than the Electric Company/other benevolant monopoly.

The Linux world focuses far too much on the negatives about MS and Windows and far too little on whatever positives they have. It's not hard to read between the lines and realize that even the stalwart Linux advocates don't believe in the product on it's own merits.

Re:it's all about obfuscation

[Kadin2048]

I have yet to meet anyone in business who really cares that much about Microsoft one way or the other. Many (I'd venture perhaps to say 'most') people find aspects of Windows annoying or obnoxious, but in general it's "good enough."

In fact, if I had to pick a single phrase that sums up Microsoft, that's what it would be: "good enough."

It's not wonderful, and it's not cheap, but it basically does what it says it's going to do, and the pricing is such that most businesses can afford it (or that they've rolled the cost of it up into their products and passed it onto their customers).

The only people that probably 'hate' Microsoft are probably at competitor companies (insofar as they exist anymore), and that only people who really 'love' them are probably at companies that are making money off of their dominance in some direct or indirect fashion.

To the very great majority of people, Microsoft software is like 120VAC electricity: they understand that there are other ways to run their toaster, and perhaps are even dimly aware that in other places, things work differently, but it's not particularly relevant to their business, and as a result they don't care.

If people dislike Microsoft for something, it's mostly for their licensing structure. That's why you see most people trying to advocate Linux use to businesses focus on the small-F "free" aspect: very few people really care about the capital-F/libre definition of "Free," the only advantage of Linux is that it costs less.

However, I think during periods of market contraction, as companies look towards their overhead for ways to cut costs and maintain profitability, you'll see increased interest in free replacements for expensive software. Right now, most companies aren't under so much pressure that it's worth the transition problems to get rid of Windows (although it's worth transitioning from UNIX to Linux in many cases). As the market becomes more and more competitive and commoditized, I think eventually people are going to see the price of a Windows+Office license for every computer as a competitive disadvantage.

Re:it's all about obfuscation

[kbielefe]

The Linux world focuses far too much on the negatives about MS and Windows and far too little on whatever positives they have.

If by "Linux World" you mean "people who initiate threads about Linux on slashdot stories about Microsoft," then I agree wholeheartedly. Of course, they are often baited with phrases like, "no viable alternative."

Look on sites and mailing lists for Linux distros and developers, and you'll scarcely see a mention of Microsoft except in passing.

The same can be said for the Windows advocates around here. The highest praise I have seen in a while about Windows is "everyone uses it" and "I haven't had a problem in a long time and you wouldn't either if you patched religiously, never opened suspicious emails or installed suspicious software, and ran a firewall and 2 different malware scanners." That is, until your "benevolant [sic] monopoly" comment, which I'm not sure even Bill Gates would believe.

Re:it's all about obfuscation

[laughingcoyote]

By using *any* software, OSS or proprietary, you're putting yourself at the mercy of whatever development resources are working on that software, especially if you're not a developer yourself.

I must take exception to this especially. While neither I nor anyone else could possibly go over every line of code in every open-source program in an entire lifetime, that's not necessary either.

If I notice some unusual behavior from the kernel or a given application (for example, a program sending packets somewhere I didn't tell it to, a program accessing the Internet which should have no need to do so, etc.), I can go look at the -relevant portion- of the code. So can anyone else in the world-you are not at the "mercy of the developers" by any means with open-source. Even if you personally cannot read the code, you can call someone's attention to it who can, and that person can then alert the community if something untoward is occurring. This can also help prevent "false alarms"-it is entirely possible that the unusual behavior is perfectly harmless, and a look at the code will reveal this as well.

Finally, if it -is- discovered that the software is doing something it shouldn't be, it's then possible for anyone to fix the code. If a FOSS program were to begin installing spyware or malware, anyone who wishes can strip the malicious code out and offer the program without it. Any other developer can check to make sure they did the job properly, and fix it if they didn't.

Contrast that with closed-source software. Say I install a closed-source media player on my system. I have not asked it to play anything off the Internet, yet it is accessing (or attempting to access) it, and send encrypted information. Why? Is it trying to download ads or malware? Is it sending statistics about how I'm using it to someone? Is it checking a repository to see if a better version is available? I don't know-and I can't look. Or in other words, I'm at the mercy of the developers.

I find it exceptionally unlikely that commodity software will ever be open source. That's zealot speak.

Tell that to Red Hat, Novell, IBM, or any number of other companies who make pretty good money off commodity OSS. I'm sure those zealots will laugh at you all the way to the bank.

Contracts in force between MS & AWC????

[winkydink]

It may have changed since I last did one, but it used to be that if you had
a Select or Enterprise Agreement with MS, they had the right to audit
spelled out in the contract. The article is mum as to whether or not such
an agreement was in force between MS & AWC, though most companies of any
size have one or both agreements.

So, if MS has a Select or Enterprise Agreement with AWC, then MS is fully
within their right to request an audit and this is a non-news article.

Also, note that Computer World doesn't call this a "sales force scare
tactic" as the headline implies. That term isn't even used in the article.

Re:Contracts in force between MS & AWC????

[ktappe]

if MS has a Select or Enterprise Agreement with AWC, then MS is fully within their right to request an audit and this is a non-news article.

Hardly.

1. They did not request a 3rd party, independent audit. On the contrary, they claimed their in-house auditing service was the "only unbiased" audit, which is exactly 180-degrees from the truth; it's the very definition of bias.

2. They completely disregarded without even a glance the customer's legitimate efforts to demonstrate his legality. This shows MS was not in any way acting in good faith.

3. Any party that believes another has wronged them is obliged to take that grievance to the proper authorities, not threaten unilateral actions. What MS did here reeks of extortion; the threat of one-on-one remedies in order to coerce behavior without any involvement of the court system.

-Kurt

Re:Contracts in force between MS & AWC????

[einhverfr]

I would think though that if there was an argument of bad faith, scare tactics, etc. as are present in this article, that one could possibly force them face you in court and explain why they didn't just politely work with you and your concerns in the first place. Right to audit ought not to mean right to intimidate.

"No your honor, I don't mind if they audit us, but this exchange shows that this is nothing more than an attempt to strong arm us into buying more of their products. They would not even work with us to ensure that the audit went smoothly!"

IANAL though.

Hmm

[beavis88]

Hmm, so there's a shitbag working for Microsoft, which automatically allows us to draw conclusions X, Y, and Z about the entire company. Allllrightythen....*sigh*. Slow news day I guess.

Perhaps they should provide reasons...

[segfault_0]

Perhaps Microsoft wouldn't seem like such a maniac for asking if they provided the predicates that caused the contact to be made. If they said that someone told us your not legal or you have registered 1000 machines and bought 900 licenses that would make sense - without this much i wouldnt even bother with corrosponding. They have nothing to lose by disclosing their concerns.

Re:Uhh. Yeah. It's called an account manager.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

After such an investigation both parties tend to want the violator to be legit so having access to a sales department (or being within one) does help that make that easier afterwards.

The problem is she wasn't satisfied with the same evidence the BSA would have been. The BSA would have taken the evidence of the audit, ran off to check it against Microsoft's records, and be done with it. She rejected the evidence and tried to send a SPY into his organization.

Re:Meaningless blurb

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I would consider it to be a petty scare tactic. It doesn't make sense to try to sue your customer, and I don't think that any prosecutor would bother with this sort of case unless there is proof of infringement. BSA people can complain to the local Attourney General but unless there is some sort of proof.

Personally, I wouldn't allow any hostile entity into facilities entrusted to me unless there was a legitimate warrant of some kind. I think businesses are probably being smart enough to check with their legal counsel before being duped into allowing fishing expeditions.

My advice: Ignore them and they will go away

[Proudrooster]

These has been a common tactic for years. I have trained all my higher-ups to ignore any offers to review licenses. Companies will call the higherups and tell them they can potentially save money by reviewing their licenses and getting into a new type of license program. Vendors are constantly switching license schemes e.g. network connections, to MIPS, to number of processors, to number of dual core processors, to number of instances.

Database vendors like Oracle also like to come in and do reviews/audits so they can help you save money and (sic) purchase the optimal license agreement. In reality, you already have the best license deal and the vendor wants to kill it and replace it with one that costs more.

We learned long ago that these sales weenies are just fishing for anyone who will talk to them. If you ignore them, they will go bug someone naive enough to talk with them. They have no legal authority and are, dare I say sharks, trying to rewrite your license agreement to get you to fork over more cash.

Stay legal on all your licensing and simply factor licenses into the purchase price of every machine. If you know that you purchase licenses with every machine and keep your license count current for upgrades and maintenance, the matter will take care of itself.

Note, young inexperienced managers will fall for the "cost savings" sales pitch quite often since they want to be perceived as doing something for the business. If they are foolish enough to start licensing conversations, make sure that you explain how much time and cost the audit process with take. Ask who is going to pay for the labor to install auditing software. Explain that vendors are not allowed access to servers and PCs. Ask them who is going to assume the security risk for any audit software and who will take responsibility if it causes problems in your production environment. After all, I am sure that all audit software is bulletproof and well written. Itemize all the costs and risks then make sure your manager's manager and/or customer see this risk/cost assessment.

My advice: Just ignore them and they will go away AND put your grumpiest and savviest technical manager in charge of any license renewals.

Proper response

[Todd Knarr]

I think all the response this tactic deserves is an icy "If you want to discuss license compliance, let me transfer you to our legal department where someone can assist you.". Then you do just that, making sure your lawyer knows before the MS rep can talk that the rep has stated or implied that you lack licenses for some software.

Of course, also make sure you've got original media and license certificats and keys for every copy of software you've got installed, or relevant current license agreement documentation covering the installed software. Remember that there's what MS might like you to have to produce, then there's what you legally have to or should be able to produce, and the two aren't neccesarily identical.

Re:You must be new here

[rolfwind]

I take it you haven't used Linux in years to be spouting off that FUD. Ubuntu is as user-friendly as it gets for completely free (or perhaps Mepis). All I would say is a requirement is a decent internet connection to download programs/updates.

And for a lot of people, all they use the computer for is email/internet. Add in openoffice (already included) and a surprising large portion of the population is taken care of. Before I hear cries of "photoshop" this and that, already granted but that is a different segment of the populace. It's also nice using an OS where I can download what I need in most cases and that it's legitimately free, not loaded down with bloat/spyware, or have a friend reminder pop up every 30 seconds of how I should register some software.

If by it's not a real alternative "right now" you mean it's not "perfect." Well, no, but neither is windows. With that attitude, nothing will get developed far enough to be "perfect" because no ones using it. But it's good enough for a lot of people, so it is an alternative.

Seriously, I don't know if you were trolling or what, but Desktop Linux today is far ahead of Desktop Linux of just 2 years ago and light years ahead of Desktop Linux 1999. On my personal linux workstation, I haven't used a commandline in months and I'm a semi-power user.

And yes, I have introduce Linux to Newbs (former Windows users) who have stuck with it. These aren't l33t hackers either.

Re:Microsoft Customers Balk at Hard Sell

[Kohath]

Fairness? This is "fair" if it's true. It's "fair" if the story accurately reflects what actually happened. So what if other companies do this? This is a story about what Microsoft did. Some other story can be about what some other company does.

Re:You must be new here

[arivanov]

While you are correct that 70% of the Microsoft shops are not microsoft centric in their primary business function and workflow and can convert, very few businesses will even consider.

The reason for this is that 95% of the businesses which are Microsoft shops have a sales, marketing and middle management that is MS Exchange addicted and is living under the false impression that it is good process and business practice to drag any person from any other part of the business into a meeting on a whim based on his schedule in Exchange. They are the primary and usually unsurmounatble obstacle to conversion.
Just try going into a Microsoft shop and saying to the sales team "You will no longer drag Engineering into meetings. You will submit requests via an issue tracking (or CRM) system instead so they can have a correct resource allocation". The screams will reach CEO level with a speed which will make you wander if Einstein is right about C being the absolute speed limit.
In order to convert even a part of a Microsoft addicted business you have to create suitable processes and most importanly kill the S&M idea that the world is flat and they are the only pinnacle sticking out of it. This is a long and painfull process. Once it is complete parts of the business can use the right tool for their jobs (linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS, even Windows which is configured to a specific business task). But not before that. And Microsoft knows this and does their best to provide "solutions" which allow you not to compartamentalise your business.

Re:You must be new here

[NutscrapeSucks]

The reason for this is that 95% of the businesses which are Microsoft shops have a sales, marketing and middle management that is MS Exchange addicted

I've worked in a few places that operated just like this, except with Lotus Notes.

Probably the worst thing about working in a "Microsoft-Addicted" business is the attitude that Excel+Email is the universal tool for solving everything. Because Microsoft pushes tools and not solutions, people thend to be very ad-hoc about process related stuff.

Re:You must be new here

[drinkypoo]

The problem with linux on the desktop is the same as it's ever been: You can't go down to best buy and buy a 1,001 of the best screensavers compilation for linux. Even if you could, odds are it wouldn't run when you got it home because of some customization you needed for some simple piece of hardware, like your wifi card.

Even with ubuntu, you have to go add a repository (the multiverse or whatever stupid name they use for it, I just did it but I forget) just to install acrobat reader, or mplayer plugins for firefox. For that matter, you have to actually know that you need the mplayer-plugins from the multiverse. This took me a bit of googling to find. The average user has no hope.

Then there's the other problem, that support lags behind windows. The latest flash player, for example, isn't available for linux yet, so even once you figure out how to install it (it's got a package in the multiverse too; the package downloads the binaries from adobe's servers) you may not be able to view sites.

Linux is great, linux is good, I'm pretty happy with ubuntu dapper beta on my stinkpad so far (updates have been flowing regularly, thank goodness) once I got it installed. The partition creation/selection part of the installer in flight 6 was broken, and I still have no idea how I got it to work... But then, it's beta.

Until users can trivially install the software they need (like acroread) without having to google for instructions, Linux can not possibly be ready for the mass-market desktop.

Re:You must be new here

[killjoe]

Are you under some impression that it's not possible to get programs for linux that allow you to share calenders and schedule appointments?

If so you need to disabuse yourself of that notion right now because it's not true. There are numerous open source and commercial softwares that allow you to do that.

Unfortunately, Linux is not an alternative

[walterbyrd]

I like Linux, I'm using linux right now.

But, for most businesses, it's no alternative to windows.

Linux is good OS, but it doesn't run the apps that most businesses need. FYI: there are more apps than just wordprocessors and web-browsers. For just one very small example: UPS worldship software, used my many businesses, doesn't run on Linux.

Tons of specialized proprietary software doesn't run on Linux. I recently installed some specialized software for an auto-body shop. And guess what? It only runs on windows.

Sure Linux is fast, secure, stable, and inexpensive. But nobody runs an OS just to run an OS: it's all about the apps.

Re:You must be new here

[mangu]

Until users can trivially install the software they need (like acroread) without having to google for instructions, Linux can not possibly be ready for the mass-market desktop.

Funny that you mention this, because I haven't a good idea on how to install acroread for XP. Do you go to superdownloads.com for that, or should you buy a CD at CompUSA? Who sells this "acroread", how can I install it in XP if all I know is the software's name?

In (K)Ubuntu I know it's very simple: click on the button at the lower left corner of the screen, go to the "System -> Packet Manager" menu, type the system password, type "acroread" in the box labelled "quick filter" and click on the button labelled "install package". It's the same way for every one of the 18000 or so packages that are available in the standard KUbuntu distribution.

I don't even have to know the name of the software, if I want to a software to run my scanner, for instance, I type "scanner" in the quick filter and Adept will show me all the packages which have scanner either in the name or the description. By reading the respective descriptions, I can tell the picture scanners apart from the virus scanners.

For anyone who can read and understand plain English (or whatever is the language in his installation), Ubuntu is more ready for the mass market than XP. Only power users know exactly where to get those CDs from which they rum "setup.exe" to install software.