This is all intentional. They’re basically killing off their reseller model in favor of self-service for small clients.
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).
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.
And buying O365 via a vendor is actually a huge liability.
The vendor/reseller has full admin access to your O365 account ("subscription advisor"/delegated administrators). They can also transfer this access. If your vendor gets purchased or otherwise decides to transfer your rep' they'll just unilaterally grant some unknown person/company admin access to your whole O365 account.
But you're forced to work through a vendor for any discounts. You're penalized for working directly with Microsoft. And if you revoke this access, don't be surprised if your partner tells you they cannot support you until it is re-granted (even buying more licenses, because they need to "confirm your license allocation" or similar).
I'm surprised how infrequently this is brought up. Folks are either shocked or dismissive whenever I bring this up, but it keeps me from being able to recommend O365 at all.
Because the concern comes across as a bit silly if you know how the platform works and you have experience changing your partner ID (say, from acquisition). A customer must deliberately grant a partner delegated admin privs for them to have that level of access to their tenant. If the company the customer works with gets bought out, the buyer doesn’t get access to the acquired client tenants automagically. They must go through and request delegate admin again under the different partner ID that’s bound to their partner tenant. A client can swap out (or dump) partners of record quite easily, and other service providers are happy to help you do it.
Years ago, if you bought O365 licensing through a reseller, it was very hard to add licenses yourself with direct purchase. That hasn’t been the case for a while now though. You can use redeemed licenses from a reseller alongside directly purchased licenses.
We encourage our customers to buy direct anyway, although I don’t see anything in the article talking about shutting down the reseller program anyway. They’re dropping internal use rights and support incidents for partners.
Yeah, this is an Azure play. The reseller model worked when Microsoft didn't want to deal with the sales channel and so if you're in Austin you find a local Microsoft vendor to deal with everything. Now Microsoft wants to bring it all in house so that they can upsell everyone on Azure.
And Microsoft offers the same support for a similar fee — the big change here is that the support is offered directly to the customer rather than through a reseller. Further design / build support can be acquired through the big consultancies as consulting engagements.
The big shift here is the customer now pays Microsoft directly rather than the reseller. They now own the customer relationship, which is everything in software sales.
As an enterprise customer of all three major cloud providers at an 8-digit spend, I can tell you without flinching that AWS offers (at least) 10x the support that its competitors do and that was also true when the spend was 5 digits.
I mean, they basically invented the entire cloud platform model; so it stands to reason they’re way out in front. Microsoft is making headway, but a high-touch support model is so far outside Google’s DNA I don’t think they’re ever going to get it right.
>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.
Is this anecdotal or is there some data on this? I'm kind of amazed how little attention G-Suite seems to get when there is such a huge gap in functionality between their office suite and Microsoft's. It seems like Google could be growing it by leaps and bounds if they wanted to.
> 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.
I suspect the matter of the "worst move in 30 years" article will get straightened out, and won't seem nearly as bad as the title suggests.
A backstab would be SOP for much of the last 30 years of MS, but I'd be surprised if they're going to throw away a lot of the developer goodwill they've been acquiring recently.
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).
Why would MS spoil that goodwill, by alerting all those developers to the proven business pattern of waiting until your partner/customer has built their business around you, before you do whatever you want to them?
Whether MS will someday lose their current goodwill, I don't know, but the timing doesn't seem right (unless someone is really desperate for short-term numbers).
Yes, this! Almost an entire subgroup of millennials think of microsoft as some cuddly bear. They do not realize how their machinations were so strong you could not buy a PC without Windows. PC OEMs could not sell you a PC without Windows. Or how they almost took over the web with their browser and proprietary JavaScript “extensions”.
Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s. Anyone who survived the '90s who didn't internalize those lessons deserves what they got, but I do fear there is a generation which doesn't appreciate just how lucky they are to be able to build an entire career dependent only on OSS platforms.
> Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s
Not sure what this is a reference to. Microsoft STILL supports running VB6/COM/C++/etc from the 1990s today. Only Visual J++ disappeared, but a court of law required that. I'd go so far as to claim that their success is in no small part because their backwards compatibility game is top notch.
IE6 was a nightmare, but that wasn't "pulling the rug" rather just being lazy and not developing the browser at all (because it competed with their proprietary platform -- Win32). Once Microsoft deploys something and developers start using it, typically they support it "forever" (even IE compatibility modes remain to support IE5/6 code).
While I really appreciate their efforts on backwards compatibility support, they also have/had a horrible track record of supporting anything outside windows for more than 2 versions then dropping it entirely.
I remember... I still have very little trust for anything MS comes up with or buys that supports something other than Windows, or in the case of Office, MacOS. Every single application they have for non-windows hasn't made it two releases after. .Net Core at least seems to be holding strong, and I do appreciate it.
I tend to prefer software that works everywhere I do. I use Windows, Linux and Mac on a daily basis. Though haven't done desktop Linux in close to a decade at this point (next desktop will likely change that).
On the flip side, I actually appreciate that MS has done a number of apps with web and electron focus. VS Code shows you can do a well performing editor in a browser, I almost didn't even try it after atom and brackets. That it's on all three, I really appreciate. WTF the Teams app isn't available on Linux irks me to no end. The Azure SQL Studio is also progressing nicely. I also happen to like the relative ease of using Azure's services, but it's more than I'm going to pay on hobby projects.
I was born in the mid 90's and didn't start programming until college, so I missed out on all the 'evil Microsoft' fun and am probably missing something - but I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a pain to uninstall it. But for example - Mac's and i-Devices's all come bundled with Safari, why doesn't Apple also have this bad rep?
> I thought the main issue was that MS was preinstalling IE and making it a pain to uninstall it.
The root issue was that Microsoft preinstalled the (free) Internet Explorer at a time when other web browsers were commercial. Netscape Navigator in particular was free for personal use, but Netscape wanted a fee for business use.
That was the original sin of the monopoly: Microsoft used its dominance in the operating system market to take over the browser market at a stroke. They compounded on this with "embrace, extend, and extinguish" practices, where they would introduce and maintain IE-only web extensions to the detriment of existing and upcoming standards.
You still see the modern legacy of this with Internet Explorer 'compatibility mode' hacks, since it turned out that Microsoft itself became stuck in its own morass.
Yeah as an enterprise web developer, I definitely have met my share of frustrating requirements to support ancient versions of IE. But that's definitely an interesting choice that I don't think I fault Microsoft for making - if you own the platform, why not extend your control into other popular apps running on the platform (word processors, databases, browsers, etc.). Pretty logical step to make imo, though their underhanded tactics were probably also to blame for the US Supreme Court monopoly case.
As someone who was around for the "evil Microsoft" era, I am also frustrated by this.
There's no reason Apple should be allowed to force Safari exclusively on iOS. We had an entire anti-trust decision about this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... It should be bog-standard-illegal, and Apple deserves an equally bad rep for this.
There is that. There is a lot of other things that put them in the bad monopoly category.
* Using secret API calls to make sure their software ran faster than the competition. If you had a database server or spreadsheet application you could had a myriad of choices in the early 90s but the fastest, stablest one was always from Microsoft.
* OEMs could not change the default browser. Even when given money to install an alternative the default OOB browser was required to be IE.
Early Macs had no browser at all and at <5% of the PC universe they had no monopoly status. Before Safari Apple used MSIE as the first browser. Firefox and Webkit weren't ported over until ~2005. And long before the Apple App store the only application on iOS1 and 2 was the browser. It didn't have apps as we know it today. It would be hard to prevent them from including the browser since it shipped with the device day 1.
I see, I knew a bit about the browser wars and the some of the shady stuff there, but I didn't realize they sabotaged stability of competitor programs. Thanks for explaining it
I think what you're saying here is analogous to "Al Capone? That was before my time, but wasn't he the guy who fibbed a bit on his tax return? Don't a lot of people do that?"
Sort of off-topic, but it's unlikely to be "millennials" as such. They grew up during the "Micro$oft" era. It's probably what the news would call "generation Z".
No, I chose those words specifically. Considering millennials spans 21-37 y.o. Some of them would have been in diapers when Microsoft was taken to court. The tail end would have grown up during the Microsoft era, but missed the destructive, pre-monopoly ruling Microsoft that the olds warn about.
No. This is the latest in a series of good moves that Microsoft has been making lately in order to regain some integrity.
Microsoft's toxic and manipulative partner program has been used to extract excessive license fees from customers for years. Engineers and consultancies have been encouraged to "level-up" in the system, while customers and casual users are shut out. A whole proprietary ecosystem has been allowed to develop which requires a large financial buy-in just to provide simple services like databases and email.
Its clear that this has to change, and Microsoft is right to reduce partner dependency and vendor lock-in, painful as it may be for those who have heavily invested in these ecosystems.
This is a rather incredible take, and you seem to be seriously arguing that Microsoft thinks customers are just giving them too much money and they just feel so guilty about it.
Microsoft once saw MPNs as necessary to get the sale. Now they don't, and they'd rather just cut MPNs out and make the sales themselves (more for them), and begrudgingly let it continue to exist in a minimal fashion.
I haven't done a ton of procurement in Microsoft-land but I have often heard the MPN described as a convoluted mechanism for offering software discounts through third-parties. As a Microsoft customer, I would rather they just have bulk licensing discount and easy-to-understand licensing one-click licensing rather than having to call (with a telephone!) up some third-party "distributor" to get a discount.
To maintain partner status you need to sell a minimum quantity of products, with a tiered system that grants better discounts and more benefits for hitting higher tiers. This has the flow on effect of managed service providers recommending Microsoft branded solutions instead of far more suitable competitors for the customers use case.
For example selling a customer a Windows server licence with SQL 2017 installed to run as a backend for a simple website that 10 people a day are going to visit when a centos box with postgres would be far more cost effective (and reliable) for the customer.
Now this isn't unique to Microsoft, literally all the big vendors do this (eg Cisco, VMware, every single antivirus company, etc) so not sure what makes Microsofts one particularly toxic, other than the fact that the free stuff they provide is genuinely valuable to the partners which is not always true for the other vendors.
> For example selling a customer a Windows server licence with SQL 2017 installed to run as a backend for a simple website that 10 people a day are going to visit when a centos box with postgres would be far more cost effective (and reliable) for the customer.
I get the point you're trying to make, but this isn't really a good example. If a customer is already a Windows user, introducing linux and Postgres may not be the best solution. A basic windows license, sql server express, and iis should work fine though.
> A basic windows license, sql server express, and iis should work fine though.
The point is that the partner was incentivized to not do something simple like this. I think many would, but many did not especially in the mid- and enterprise spaces where this stuff eventually caught up.
Worst move in 30 years? Thirty years takes us all the way back to 1989. Just off the top of my head, here are some worse moves: 1) late to the internet, 2) squandering the marketshare lead of IE 6, 3) Windows Vista, 4) Windows 8, 5) late to search.
Steve Ballmer wasn't a bad CEO. People keep talking about how he dropped the ball on mobile, but so what? So did Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia and those companies had mobile as their core business. To think a "better" CEO could've pulled it all off is delusional.
Under Ballmer, Microsoft focused on core business and reached into cloud - successfully. As a result, Microsoft is now stronger than Apple. Microsoft doesn't depend on people buying luxury cellphones, a market which is reaching saturation.
That's not a "sexy" story, but it's the truth. A more "proactive" CEO would've just blown more money on Zunes and Kinects to fail in the market.
Steve also managed to keep the company intact at a time when they were very close to get cut-up due to antitrust lawsuits. Also, Steve was probably the only one that could lead Microsoft post Gates as Bill remained in a decisive position pulling strings for quite some time (which in some sense is understandable, but not many could have faced such a situation).
> Steve also managed to keep the company intact at a time when they were very close to get cut-up due to antitrust lawsuits.
That was the change in administration. "Microsoft is a monopoly" came under judges appointed by Clinton. "The punishment is Microsoft has to give free Windows licenses to schools" was under judges appointed by the GW Bush administration.
I think the parent is saying that Nadella led the charge into the cloud inside MS under Ballmer, which is a big reason he was considered for the CEO position after Ballmer.
> Also MS reached into the cloud thanks to Nadella, not tanks to Ballmer.
So if Microsoft fails in one market segment it's his fault, but if Microsoft succeeds, it's solely the success of the people doing the work?
That's not how it works when you're CEO. You might have a point if Nadella pushed for cloud against Ballmer, but that wasn't the case. To the contrary. In any event, Ballmer ultimately called those shots, not Nadella. That's his job as a CEO.
From what I've read, Nokia had some issues where certain departments wanted to stick with Symbian, and others were working in a new OS. The Nokia N9 was the last phone they released with the new OS (Meego).
I believe they would have been fine if they focused on the European and Asian markets instead of the US.
Even at the time of the Microsoft deal in 2011, Nokia hadn't been US-focused for at least 5 years. US carriers weren't carrying any Nokias beyond the $50 dumbphones you could get anywhere. Unlike the rest of the world where people bought phones at more or less full price, the US market had mostly carrier subsidized pricing, and carriers ran the ad campaigns, not manufacturers (except Apple).
Back when the iPhone, HTC G1 and Motorola Droid ads were saturating TV around 2008/9, I couldn't recall seeing a single ad for Nokia. Nokia's only real sales outlet were 3(!) retail stores in the entire US. And even those shuttered well before 2011.
The idea that focusing away from the US might have saved them as an independent entity doesn't hold up because their average selling price (ASP) was falling due to low-end models selling better than their more expensive smartphone line. Eventually it reached a turning point where the brand was more closely associated with super-durable and super cheap "burner" phones than upscale smartphones.
Finally, their smartphone line was a mess because like Windows Mobile 6.x, the OS appeared on a variety of screens, both touch and non-touch. The Ovi app store was deeply fragmented as a result, because old apps scaled badly on larger touch devices, and newer apps didn't work at all on the non-touch phones.
> The idea that focusing away from the US might have saved them as an independent entity doesn't hold up because their average selling price (ASP) was falling due to low-end models selling better than their more expensive smartphone line.
How much per unit profit were they making with their low-end models compared to the expensive smartphone models? As I recall, I spent roughly $300 to $350 per phone when I purchased models like the N95 8GB, N8, N9, and 808 (which isn't that expensive compared to certain smartphone models).
Most people I know/knew, before they switched to Android and iPhone, were using the higher end model Nokia and Blackberry phones. In fact, they had features that early models of the iPhone lacked (IIRC, the ability to copy and paste text).
> So did Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia and those companies had mobile as their core business.
I think one difference is that BB, Motorola and Nokia dropped the ball technically; Microsoft had a technical solution that was ahead of its time, but failed on the business side.
Well he was the reason behind some of the other failures. But the title is obviously going for shock and awe clickbait, as most such "definitive" titles are.
Eh. I remember ME. It was the worst version of Windows at the time, but obviously predated Vista and 8. ME generated a lot of bad press, but it was mostly stability stuff that was quickly fixed. Vista was terrible and only ever got slightly less terrible before Windows 7 arrived. Windows 8 was so frustrating (from a usability standpoint) that I defected to Mac.
In any case, it's not meant to be an exhaustive list ...
It's funny because I felt Vista was perfectly fine as an OS, whereas ME was almost unusable (with the stability issues you mentioned). Vista was just boring, not great, but it worked. So it surprises me that so many people were frustrated by it.
Maybe I just hot lucky with my hardware choices at the time.
> So it surprises me that so many people were frustrated by it.
That might have been (in part) due to all of the underpowered PCs sold with "Windows Vista Capable" badges, IIRC there was a class-action lawsuit because of it.
My experiences are the same. I got a laptop around that time (one that promised an upgrade to Vista for free). XP would crash and blue screen about once a month. With Vista it never crashed or blue screened at all, and I was using it heavily for months. I built a PC soon after, which did blue screen with Vista, but I suspect it was the NVidia drivers (laptop had an ATI GPU).
I agree, Vista was boring, in the sense that it just worked and didn't get in the way. Now that I think about it, the built in Start Menu search bar made it awesome.
Oh, WinME had much worse issues than just some crash here or there. As someone who at that time made a living by (among other things) deploying, maintaining and repairing Windows PCs at various small business offices, it was a nightmare.
Every install behaved differently and had random failures which were gone without a trace after a reboot, never to appear again. Troubleshooting a non-booting WinME box was a nightmare compared to troubleshooting a Win98 box with similar issues, which had all kinds of emergency "shell" with dozens of useful utilities (which were absent in WinME, with no replacement), and a "safe mode" which was actually useful and predictable.
The Control Panel, and all the GUI around configuration was a difficult to use abomination, stuck somewhere halfway between utilitarian look&feel of Win98 and sleek look of WinXP, with all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of either.
My personal mileage with ME was that it would hum along fine, but at some point would become unstable. Once it became unstable, the best solution was to reimage it. Whatever would break did not seem to ever get better, regardless of any attempts to find or fix the issue. So the first crash, just start reimaging.
Of course, I was used to reimaging my Windows machines at the time anyway. That's something that's mostly gone away, and I think one of the better (but mostly invisible) advances in Windows.
Presumably, you mean the NT-era and off the Windows 95 descended code base, but as I recall it was exactly the opposite: the ME that was released was something of a last-minute rush job because, it was supposed to be an NT-based OS, but that wasn't ready and was effectively delayed until XP.
That didn't happen until people started using Windows XP. I only saw a few businesses using NT or Windows 2000, but I don't recall many people running those versions in their home computers.
The first two were due to their anti-competitive strategy not working for them. You can only build the moat if you've already got all the customers inside. Microsoft consistently bet on closed systems: Compuserve-like "information superhighway" rather than the Internet, ActiveX versus "DHTML" (which would become Web 2.0) and Flash.
The "bad" OSs weren't really that bad, but they were attempts to force a big change on people without too much choice, and people absolutely hate that. Note how the successors kept most of the same underlying features while dialling back the UI redesign.
6) fucked up mobile 7) bought Nokia and fucked up mobile again, although the handsets were (*edit: and are still) great.
Although you are correct, these were the worst strategy moves, I don't think we are not talking about that. This is about fiendish corporate behaviour towards friends and partners.
It's not entirely impossible that many on-premises sales are actually, or are predicted to become, a net negative compared to a similar cloud solution. Based on these policy changes, one can argue that it's not only possible, but likely that on-premises is becoming a net negative.
My interpretation, or at least one of them, is that Microsoft want to start pushing the smaller accounts entirely to the cloud by starving that channel while also gaining the option of engaging with more of the largest customers directly. The latter will only be possible once most of the MPN members prone to open critique towards MPN policies have left the program. It also seems to fit nicely into the "open source" narrative with it's implicit, or explicit focus on charging for various services rather than the software itself.
Good MPN licenses have been abused for far too long; I worked for a company that didn't gave a flying fuck about MSFT was providing mostly networking/security services but since it had a large number of employees paying for a Gold Partner wasn't only valuable to draw in business because CIO/CTO's at the time liked to see the nifty Cisco/Microsoft/Nortel/W/ETel partner on your website but the yearly costs of attaining partnership was just a tiny fraction of what they would've paid for windows, server and CAL licenses.
I used to work for a company that was an MPN partner and the changes wouldn't have affected us. I'm assuming that I've understood the changes correctly, so I could be wrong.
Maybe it's some vocal partners rather than the majority that would be affected by this?
In any case, unless they have ample evidence of abuse this is a bad move
I work for a silver partner and this literally doesn't affect us. There aren't many "good faith" configurations I can imagine that would struggle fitting into this model. I'd be all ears if there's someone affected but I imagine those businesses would be operating multiple arms, one of which is performing the functions of a Microsoft partner and the other is leveraging the free access to tools to drastically cut the costs of operation.
yeah, i imagine that they are maybe hosting software for customers with the free licences or something else, or else why would that be such a big change for some of them.
It hurts the small partners the most. I think losing the silver and gold on-prem license grants are probably a good thing, and it will be interesting to see if any locals take a material hit having to buy up the replacement licenses for their operation. Like the guy above said, I do think some subsidiary arms are just fronts for buying cheap IURs in the Gold program. But the smallest start up service providers losing the 5-seat IURs for O365 in the action pack will really hurt them and the ability of new partners to start up.
There are two types of partners in the MSFT ecosystem: those that build, and those that license. If this is a change to support the partners with product/implementation expertise, then it's a good change. But I think it's too early to tell.
Have been a MS Partner for close to 15 years - ended up concluding that internal use software licenses are really the only benefit of this program.
That said, I didnt renew this year.
Hm, cannot really understand the move from MS. Do too many licenses from partners end up in the wrong hands? I doubt the motivation is getting more licensing fees from those that are the responsible for distribution.
That said, fewer partners that try to shoehorn dubious cloud licenses wouldn't be unwelcome.
No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses.
MPN allowed their partners to use licenses for free for any "internal" use, now they are restricting it to only business development use cases.
This means that you can have an IT services company that barely sells any microsoft products, paying a small yearly fee to be a partner whilst getting considerably more than they pay out in return in the form of free licenses (for all internal business uses), technical support, training and other perks.
What Microsoft has done now is basically restrict the uses of MPN licenses only for business development and any other in good faith activities that are actually designed to promote Microsoft products to your customers.
Basically with this new change you can't have a 500+ employee company anymore that doesn't pay licenses for Windows, CAL licenses for domain, exchange, gets free sharepoint and more importantly free tech support which is often misused to solve customer problems rather than their own.
This more or less brings the MPN licenses closer to what say MSDN licenses are; you can use them to learn how stuff works, you can use them to demo the tech to clients, and for internal POC's but you can't roll into production on their back.
> No it's that for a very long time it was cheaper to become a Microsoft Partner than to pay for your own licenses.
This allows Microsoft to compete in prices with cheaper products without risking being accused of dumping. It also helps with vendor lock in by inducing higher dependency than would be achievable on pricing alone. Finally, it creates a steady flow of people trained in an artificially homogeneous ecosystem.
I don’t know about this - you have to meet sales quotas to qualify for silver and gold programs (and their IURs). The only IUR program you can buy into without having a track record of volume sales is the action pack, which is a whopping 5 seats. Right??
As a small MSP, who is a Microsoft Partner, the IUR elimination will hurt. I don’t really care too much about the support incidents (MS support has always been the last of last resorts).
It will be that much harder for new IT services companies to bootstrap themselves without this program.
I get the idea that companies can get their basic O365 licensing set up easily on their own, but once you wade into Exchange and MDM, it takes some good road miles to know how to implement things correctly. A lot of SMBs w/o IT departments will still need IT partners, certified or not.
I've heard tons of complaints about the Partner program, so it makes sense to reform it. I never had a true partner account just an MSDN account that offered free licenses for internal use.
If I'm reading the document correctly the "on-premise technical support" refers to any products not in the cloud. Microsoft will still provide support incidents to partners for cloud based products. Microsoft is screaming "GET INTO THE CLOUD" as loud as it can...
Makes sense, just like for cern and probably several other previously free riders that's being removed.
MS is going for a personal subscription based lisencing solution in the near future.
If you think office is a cash cow think what windows whould be, every company whould boy this for their employers, the employers when fired e.g without a job whould buy it so that they can log in to their machine and so on. They could easily fetch 5$ a month from about a billion people if not more. Pluss servers being maybe 100$ a moth per server per company and so on.
Allowing MS to capitalize and companies being able to easier shape their own usage.
And some whould argue... A lot of people will move to Linux (no they wont (some but not a lot) simply because for most people it looks, feels and works like something made in someone's garage.
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).
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.