The good news: I got 30 minutes to interview Steve Ballmer about Microsoft's CRM strategy. The bad news: I can't talk about it here. I promised Kim Stocks (MSFT PR handler and all-around skilled woman) that the discussion would be used for an upcoming feature in CRM magazine, and I'm not the sort to break a promise if I can help it. I will say that I'm grateful for the opportunity, and that it's gratifying to know that the guy who runs things in Redmond is so interested in my little corner of the software world. The same is true regarding Brad Wilson, general manager of Dynamics CRM and a terrific guy to spend an hour with. He is the right man for the job, if knowledge and passion mean anything.
There were a lot of other good reasons to come here, almost all of them two-legged. I was able to renew my connections with a number of great people in the press and analyst community, to finally meet others I'd never shaken hands with before despite numerous calls and emails over the years, and to find some new faces. This goes for the Microsoft people and their Waggener-Edstrom PR buddies too, as well as some MSFT partners. There are good people in this business, and they care about what they're doing while still putting it in the proper perspective (which is that few outsiders know or care about what's happening here).
It's hard to overemphasize the value of personal relationships -- imagine that, coming from a guy who writes about CRM -- but that's a major part of what makes conventions and trade shows worthwhile. Without familiar faces and shared insights, the endless cycle of travel, hotels, briefings, and product demos would be unbearable. I don't even like to look at the booth babes (yes, we still have those), pleasing though they may be to the eye. Granted, there are a lot of men in the IT profession, the sort who only regularly see or touch the type of racks that hold servers. But CRM is not an IT issue; executives in sales, marketing, customer service, and the like come in all shapes, sizes, genders, and orientations. It's a little insulting that the exhibitors at Microsoft Convergence thought they needed such ... exhibitions to get our attention. (Save that stuff for the party after the show floor closes!)
There wasn't a whole lot of breaking news at Convergence, though several partners and their booth babes would say otherwise. (Thanks for the peek at your lovely cleavage, my dear, but I don't "do the CRMs," as you put it.) Even Microsoft's big announcement was an expansion of a partnership that's been in place for 20 years. Granted, the deal with EDS is big, and will probably go a long way toward establishing Microsoft as a serious CRM and business apps player, but it's not the sort of thing you hang a conference on. I guess Redmond and its supporters need to reconnect from time to time as well.
My personal reaction, though, is that while Microsoft is trying very hard to get to a place where one can say, "Those folks are CRM," the company isn't there yet. The software itself probably is -- its innate flexibility and depth of integration, combined with what the ISVs can add, make for a worthy entry on the short list of vendors to consider. But the general opinion among the pen-and-notebook set was that the passion for CRM isn't part of Microsoft culture yet. They're still coming at it as an adjunct to ERP (an idea expressed by Denis Pombriant better than I can, and I'd link you if he'd posted anything yet). The Microsoft user's customer seems like an afterthought, something outside the corporate consciousness that must be managed and handled, studied and recorded, but not let "inside." There's very little sense of connection to the customer, very little social connectivity, very little of that elusive 2.0 stuff.
Having said that, I want to make it clear that I'm not completely knocking Microsoft. The executives seem to get CRM, and the ones who don't quite get it at least want to. The tools are there for MSFT's customers, and the company has the resources to keep innovating. Dynamics is on the cusp of something big, and I genuinely want to see it make the turn.
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