Marketing Memos

I don’t often beat on Microsoft or their executives. After all, they are a strong marketing organization and good people to do business with once you suppress your gag reflex to the smell of sulfur leaking out from under Steve Balmer’s office door.

But when I see a Microsoft executive spinning out of control, then I ample reason for rhetorical target practice.

Bill Hilf, Microsoft’s Windows Server GM, said something in an interview with Info Week that defied historical evidence, rational thought, and deepened even my suspicions about Microsoft’s marketing integrity (yes, I know, they have none). To wit:

When people buy commercial software, really what they’re buying is a guarantee … there’s someone you can call up, and if things go really bad someone’s liable if something doesn’t work. … One of the challenges of open source and really the challenge with the open source business model is: it’s hard to replicate that ecosystem of accountability and that guarantee.

Perhaps we can forgive Bill an innocent mistake, given that he is relatively new on the Microsoft campus and has not experienced the recurring wrath from customers, torches and pitchforks in hand, who resent the non-guarantees they have received. Some instances over the ages from various news reports:

• Users of PhotoDraw were abandoned, and all the intellectual property they have created cannot be migrated to another graphics editing program because of the undocumented and proprietary file format.
• Longtime FrontPage experts who have relied on Linux server extensions cannot get version 2003 capabilities unless they switch to Windows hosting.
• Vista users cannot (out of the box) restore backups made on XP using the ever popular ntbackup utility, and even the work-around causes massive headaches.

So if we forgive Bill this one lapse of insight, then perhaps we must forgive the other, wherein he crookedly claims that the Open Source model does not provide an ecosystem of accountability. His claim is odd to my ear … I have yet to hear of a Linux user who cannot edit old graphics files, use new features on existing architectures, or restore their backups.

Hilf’s assertion centers around the hot-line — who are you going to call when something doesn’t work. But he ignores the more pertinent notion that the degree of support you need is inversely proportionate to the problems causes by the product. Phrased less politely, people need to buy Microsoft support because Microsoft gives them more problems with which to contend.

There are two marketing angles in my missive, and both affect brand acceptance:

Performance: Detroit made crappy cars in the 1970’s, and Japan stole the hearts of American drivers by not. In the long term, people adopt solutions that perform. When Microsoft makes a bad product or provides limited support, people seek alternatives such as Open Source. Today, Linux has the brand cache of Toyota, while Microsoft’s brand resembles that of the Ford Pinto.

Credibility: When Microsoft allows an senior manager to utter nonsense in public — verbiage that rapidly shows a lack of understanding about their market, their customer motivations, and reality in general — then Microsoft’s credibility suffers. Credibility is a foundational element to all brands, and after Hilf’s interview, they have less than ever.

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