More on partnering with Microsoft

Don Dodge has a good post on "How to partner with Microsoft." and I'd like to expand on it a little

I was on a panel last week at the IBD Dealmaker Forum. The panel topic was "Till death us do part -- building mutually beneficially partnerships." the other panelists were :

• Leslie Givens, Program Director, ISV & Developer Relations, IBM Software Group


• Tom Hale, SVP, Knowledge Worker Solutions Business Unit, Adobe Systems


• David Tennenhouse, CEO, A9.com

These panels make you think "what do I really believe about thsi topic and how can I put it succinctly?" So, here's how I'd expand the points Don and many others have made on this subject.

Join our partner program. It's inexpensive, non-intrusive, and it's loaded with benefits from free software, through networking and events, to access to new product direction.

Show off our stuff. Stay on top of our product plans, and exploit our newest software if it will add value for your customers. Hey, we are continually building new products and features and the partners we love are the ones who exploit those new features and light them up. That doesn't mean you have to bet the farm on a new release of, say, Office, but it makes sense to pick one or two of the new features and really show them off. Want to get on stage with Bill Gates? Want the Microsft product guys to shout your name from rooftops? That's the way to do it.

Show us the money. This sounds crass, but nothing gets our sales and product teams cranked up more than seeing how you make our products deliver value for customers. Want to get a sales team on your side? Publish those case studies, and let us know how your product drove a desktop upgrade at Company X, or a SQL Server deployment at Company Y.

You may be asking yourself "do they pay this guy to state the obvious?" The answer is "yes, they do," possibly because the obvious isn't obvious enough. Just this week, a VC contacted us to get an opinion on a company (let's call them X) looking for funding. The company had a great product and had made a big sale at Global 50 company. Unfortunately, some of the features overlapped what we have announced for the next release of Office -- Office 2007. Our partners have been getting code drops and detailed product plans on Office 2007 for a year or more, but X hadn't joined our partner programs and hadn't realised the overlap.

This doesn't mean companies shouldn't compete with us or should slavishly support producst or features that don't  matter to them. And we'll help company X, of course. But it's way tougher now for us to evangelize the unique features of X, because we have to spend time explaining why someobvious features of X overlap what's in Office 2007. This seems to me a huge opportunity wasted.