Susanne covers this pretty well on her blog and its about the withdrawal of the Premium status of the Small Business Specialist Programme by Microsoft. The extra content on the Partner website was not really that extensive. There were some good IDC Reports on the SMB Market Place etc. The promise of extra stuff for Premium Partners never materialised and my view is that Microsoft realised that the effort they would have to put in to delivering this wasn’t worth the effort. I think they slowly came to this view because of the relatively poor response by Small Business Partners to the SBS Ignite Events. Apparently, people had cried out for Microsoft to come to their neck of the woods so that we would all feel loved and cherished. And what did we do? We spurned them and stayed away in our droves, and complained that there wasn’t enough technical content. So, like a rejected lover they’ve retaliated. I don’t blame them because they’ve got to put their effort in to things which are going to help them fulfill their business aims. Hey, that’s life!

Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 is where they are going to focus and NOT SBS 2003! We’ve got to realise this and start to focus our businesses in that direction. The things that are going to drive the future business applications are going to be running on Vista and Office 2007 and so SBS 2003 only becomes the enabler or the glue. The technologies underlying this such as .NET 3.0 is where it’s at! Businesses will buy in to these technologies once the applications are there to wow them! These’ll come and we have to be ready to support them. The change will happen because Microsoft cannot afford it not to happen and it will throw everything at it including the kitchen sink. Steve Ballmer will shout and screech louder until were all flipping our screens around in 3D!