Steve reads his Blog

Pay as you Go, Go, Go

Microsoft just announced, and released in the next breath, a new Pay as You Go model for Power Apps. This has huge implications for all organizations and also for users of our free  RapidStartCRM solution. Let's unpack what it means. Pay as you go Who doesn't like the idea of only paying for what you use? I wish it applied to more things: "I only ate half of this hamburger, so I'll just you pay half the price", "I only drove my car three days last month, so I'll just pay 10% of my car payment". "I didn't  need to see doctor last year, so I won't pay that health insurance bill." Sadly, most things don't work that way, but some do, like gas for your car, electricity in your home, and now... your critical business applications! What does this mean? This is a new option, in addition to the previous option of licenses. Before, when thinking about users for your applications, you may have pondered whether Sally would use the app often enough to justify paying for a license for her every month. Or those seasonal staffers, or volunteers who use your app sporadically. With this new model, you don't have to think about any of that anymore. You also don't have to worry about getting and assigning new licenses for newly onboarded staff. You just "Share" the app with them. Cost impacts Basically, in the background Microsoft is watching your app. When Bob signs in and uses it, "cha-ching", Bob is added to your monthly bill. If Bob did not use your app next month, he is not added to your bill for that month. Brilliant! So your monthly bill will go up and down based on how many users used your app in the month. For seasonal staff, maybe you see a cost spike in November, but the cost plummets back down in December for example. How do you get it? Well... it depends. Many organizations use Azure for various things and have an existing Azure subscription. Many do not. An Azure subscription is required as that is where the Pay as you go mechanics are located. If you do not have one, you can go here and create one with a credit card. Once you have an Azure Pay as you Go subscription established, you won't necessarily need to go back there, it is kind of a one-time step. It should take about 10 minutes. Environments The next thing you will need to do is decide which environments you want to utilize Pay as you Go for. Then connect those environments to the Azure Pay as you Go subscription. After that you can just share your apps with any users as you do today. But only pay when the apps are used by those users. Questions Yes this begs more questions than it answers, and some of those details are filtering out as I write this. But I have a feeling this will be a game-changer both for Microsoft and RapidStartCRM customers!

Hit 50K Users? Get ready for the knock-offs.

Shortly after we launched RapidStartCRM back in 2015, a couple of competitors followed us into the emerging space we identified. They are gone now, but new ones occasionally pop up. I hear "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". First Mover Advantage As the very first simple-to-use CRM solution built on Microsoft's Business Applications platform, we did have an early advantage. We brought a lot of SMB knowledge to the offering, and SMBs were eating it up. My assumption that there was a market hungry for CRM, but turned off by the complexity of Dynamics 365 or Salesforce.com, proved correct. Even Microsoft was a promotor of RapidStartCRM, seeing it as a path to capture a segment of the market they were never very good at. But the first mover advantage won't carry you forever. While we may be able to forever claim we were the first, it requires ongoing work to continue to claim we are the best. First Users Advantage Being the first to market is important, but having the first users of a new product, is much more valuable. As an SMB ourselves, we could anticipate many needs for a simple CRM, and we incorporated them into the very first version. But our ability to anticipate needs pales in comparison to actual user feedback. While largely the same application (in appearance) that we launched in 2015, there have been over 25 version updates over those years. Every one of those updates was a direct result of feedback from our growing user base. I see what you did there When we launched, there was no "AppSource", the best our potential competitors could do was watch one of our videos to try and reverse-engineer what we were doing. A few tried, some even copying and pasting our web copy. I was mostly annoyed at the sheer laziness of their efforts. It's a little different today, our app is now available to anyone via AppSource, and not surprisingly of the competitors I am aware of today, each of them had installed RapidStartCRM in advance of launching their copies. Some have at least attempted to take a slightly different approach, yet others simply came up with a catchy name and are basically trying to replicate what they think we are doing. One even pretended to be a customer and reached out with questions! Even Microsoft closely dissected and reviewed RapidStartCRM as they were developing the "Business Edition", the "never launched" predecessor to the Dynamics 365 Professional offers. The Missing Link The primary reason we have had so many updates, while our competition seldom gets past their first one, is the over 50,000 users we have on our app. You don't get that many users launching a knockoff with your fingers crossed. Sure our brand recognition for RapidStartCRM is high, but that would not mean anything if the app was not excellent, and continuously updated as new capabilities come out and features are requested, as long as both of those items fit within our mantra of "Simple-to-Use". We closely evaluate any changes, to ensure we don't trip the touchy complexity wire. This is a lesson some of our aspiring competitors should learn as they replicate our concept, but then proceed to add a bunch of crap to it. Simple isn't Easy You would think that building something simple should be easier than building something advanced... it's not. Even with Microsoft's vast resources, the Dynamics 365 Professional apps that they positioned for SMB, missed the simplicity mark by a mile. The fact that so many SMBs are using the professional apps is a testament more to Microsoft's marketing might, than the apps being appropriate for most of their SMB customers. It's funny how our roles have reversed. When they were first promoting RapidStartCRM it was with an eye towards eventually moving those new customers to Dynamics 365. Instead, many Dynamics 365 customers are moving to RapidStartCRM. Of course I knew this would happen, but I continued to smile as they told me about "their" plans for RapidStartCRM. It's about the Churn In the SaaS software business "Churn" is a critical number. Basically it means that while you successfully sold a customer on your product (Yay!)... they cancelled shortly thereafter (Boo!). While Microsoft does not publish their churn rates, I am aware that for SMB customers, over the years, the churn rate for Business Applications has been very high. Not surprising since Microsoft cannot not grasp the concept of "Simple", a natural by-product of an organization comprised of thousands of engineers. RapidStartCRM's churn rate on the other hand is near zero, the one exception being future competitors of course. Healthy Competition While anyone would want to have a monopoly in their space, it is not realistic in a free enterprise economy. I look forward to "healthy" competition, something that moves the needle forward. But for now, I guess we will have to continue being the ones who move the needle, because knockoffs don't move anything. If you are thinking about a Simple CRM, think RapidStartCRM, the first, with the most users, and still the best, Simple-to-Use CRM built on the Microsoft Power Platform.

Your organization (tenant) is over capacity

It seems like a couple of times a week I get a panicked message from a customer who saw the dreaded alert: "Your organization (tenant) is over capacity" in the Power Platform Admin Center. Sometimes they are over a little, and sometimes they are using 500% or more of their allocated capacity. Let's chat about this shall we? Capacity We still have a handful of customers on the "Old Model", the combined "Extra Storage" SKU. If I recall it was $10 USD/GB... and people complained about that. Recently Microsoft changed from the "Additional Storage" model to a "Capacity" model. In the process they split the storage buffet into three entrées: Database Capacity, File Capacity and Log Capacity. They also changed the pricing... significantly. Additional Database Capacity will cost you $40/GB/Month, additional File Capacity goes for a mere $2/GB/Month, and additional Log Capacity comes in at $10/GB/Month. Truing up can be an expensive proposition. What will happen? The first concern of customers seeing this ominous alert is that their business applications will suddenly stop functioning. Clearly this would not be good for Microsoft's business relationship with that customer. So nothing currently running will "stop". However you may notice that will not be able to create new environments, or copy or restore environments, while you are over-capacity. It is not clear if there are any other things that may be happening like throttling your speed, etc., but regardless, you are out of compliance. So while not something you need to solve immediately, you do want to solve it. If you have an urgent issue like needing to copy or restore an environment while you are over capacity, you can request a 30-day extension. Buying your way out For some customers, the least expensive option is to simply buy your way out of capacity debt. We recently had a customer with about 100 Sales Professional licenses inquire whether moving to the Enterprise Sales licenses would be an option. Not a chance, in their case the cost was almost triple, and only got them halfway there. So how much do you get? Many Dynamics 365 customers have no idea how much storage capacity they have, or how they got it. You can get a better understanding in the Power Platform Admin Center. Here is an example screenshot of a tough situation: As you can see this customer is way over their allotment. On the right side you can see how they got their allotment, including their default capacities, additional capacity via additional user licenses (not all licenses include this), and any extra Capacity they may have purchased, all of which sum up to their totals. In this case this customer has quite a few users, but most are on Dynamics 365 "Professional" licenses, which add no capacity. We estimated their cost to true up by just buying the capacity needed with a small cushion would be about $3,300/month. Wow! Alternatives There are several things you can do to help this situation. First we'll tackle the low-hanging fruit, that I can immediately see is their Log storage, which is about 700% over. Since log storage is not very expensive, their cost to get right-side up on this is not that much, about $160/month, so it is not worth having "our" team do anything. But on their own, they can delete some of their old logs, or if they need them, export them out to cold (cheap) storage. They can also look at "what" they are logging to make sure each item needs to be logged, they may have hit the ole "Check all" option when they set it up. The next item to look at is File where they are about 422% over. Again, their cost to get right-side up on this is not that much, about $300/month. On their own they can run some advanced find queries and delete unneeded email and note attachments, and just pay the difference. The cost to do more, would not have an ROI. Lastly, we come to the real problem... Database, where they are also about 435% over.  This would be expensive to buy out of @$40/GB, about $3,000/month! This is an area worth having our team dig in and see what can be done... and we did. Solutions and Addons The first thing to understand is that your "Database" holds more than just "your" data. Any solutions you have installed also consume this, including the Dynamics apps themselves. Kind of like how your 16GB iPhone only has like 12GB available before you even touch it. It might seem like there is nothing you can do about this, but if you are not using all of the advanced features of your Dynamics 365 apps, you may want to try RapidStartCRM with it's much smaller solution footprint. Speaking of solutions, and the capacity they consume, you should definitely review any addon solutions you may have installed and are not using anymore. Just delete them. For those you need, make sure you are on the latest versions, as many ISV's have made their code more efficient now that capacity is an issue. If you have some old addons, with no recent updates, you may want to consider switching them for more modern ones with similar capabilities. If you are stuck with an old addon for some reason, maybe hire a developer like us to do a code review. Again, the Capacity issue is recent, previously ISVs for addons did not really worry much about storage, so efficient code was not a priority. Normal Data Of course every time a new record, like a Contact for example, is added, all of the data entered into each of those fields is added to the database. So think about all of the records you have, not just the obvious ones like Accounts and Contacts, but also activities, etc. it creates a huge pile of data. Of that huge pile, your team is probably only engaging with a fraction of it on a daily basis. Before capacity was an issue, there was no reason not to keep 10 year-old emails, but now you have to think about it. The same goes for any "inactive" records. The first question is "Do I need this at all?", if the answer is still "yes", then the next question is "Do I need it to be in here?". Probably not. It may make sense to archive that data to cold (cheap) storage. Bonus result: your system will run faster! Transactional Data Some customers generate enormous volumes of "Transactional" data, often automatically imported via an integration. Do you need to see each of these transactions in your database, or would a summary of totals do the trick? If you do need to see it all, could it be moved to "colder" storage and accessed by your users via "Virtual Tables". Import History When you import a csv or other data file into your Dataverse environment, like via data import in Dynamics 365, that excel or other file remains behind after it has been parsed and added as records. You can free up some space by deleting these import files, just make sure you don't check to "delete all records imported" also. Indexes Here's another thing you can look at that could have an impact. If Quick Find lookups are configured for data that's frequently used, this will also create additional capacity-hungry indexes in the database. Admin-configured Quick Find values can increase the size of the indexes based on: The number of columns chosen and the data type of those columns. The volume of rows for the tables and columns. The complexity of the database structure. Because custom Quick Find lookups are created by an admin in the org, these can be user-controlled. Admins can reduce some of the storage used by these custom indexes by doing the following: Removing unneeded columns and/or tables Eliminating multiline text columns from inclusion Bulk Delete Jobs You can create bulk delete jobs for two things, first for the initial cleaning up, and second to help to keep clean. You can use bulk delete to clear out old records of all kinds initially, old emails or attachments, completed system jobs, etc. Afterwards, you can them be recurring, so they automatically clear this old data on your schedule. Unused Environments All environments consume a minimum of 1GB... even if they don't have a Dataverse database. So you should regularly review your list of environments in the Power Platform Admin Center, and remove any that are not being actively used. Even some that are being used, should be reviewed to make sure they are necessary. Be aware, that unless you have deactivated the capability, by default any user in your organization can create an environment. We frequently find environment "experiments" that were created, and abandoned by users, including users who are no longer with the organization! Note that Default, Production, and Sandbox environments are all counted for capacity, however Trial, Preview, Support, and Developer environments are not counted. Conclusion If after doing all of these things, you are still over-capacity, you may have no option but to buy more. Depending on your specific scenario, some or all of these steps may have significant to very little effect. But it's definitely worth a try. Based on the potential expense, we saw a new business opportunity and recently launched puredata.estate. Maybe we can help you.

”Even after everything, we still have adoption problems”

One of the smartest things I have done in a while was to introduce a monthly Principals call with our customers. Our customers are all very happy with our team, so why rock the boat by injecting myself? For the same reason I might tell the waiter that my food is "fine" when it isn't. The Owner's Dilemma Every single day people go into a restaurant and have a sub-par meal. It seems the wait staff everywhere has been trained to ask leading questions, like "isn't your steak great?", with a huge smile on their face. Like many people, it's easier to just say "it's fine", rather than interfere with their smile. Instead, I just make a decision to not come back. Meanwhile, the owner asks smiley how things are going, and they reply, "Well people seem to love your food!". Which leaves the owner wondering why sales are down. Our sales are fine, but I'm not taking any chances. How's it Going? I have no interest in a "feel good" conversation with my customers. Instead, I am more like a Business Applications detective, asking hard questions, probing for the real issues. It was on one of these recent Principals calls that a customer conceded that they were having adoption problems. Ugh... the perennial bane of Business Applications. This particular customer was on Dynamics 365. In addition, they had bought basically everything that Microsoft business applications group offers, including Dynamics 365 Marketing, Customer Insights, Power B.I., oh... and a few more "Insights". They had also built out an extensive user training library. It seems like they had done everything possible to insure adoption, yet for a particular group they were struggling. Carrot, Stick or Both The usual way most organizations approach adoption is, "Use it, or else". Or else what? This seems to range from, "you'll get a reprimand (oh no!)" to "you're fired (oh shit!)", with a lot of options in between. The growth in "work from home" has not helped the adoption challenge. A few other organizations try the more "touchy/feely" approach. "If you use the system, we'll enter you in a drawing for a "NEW CAR!!!" And still other organizations use both, you either get a new car, or you get fired. (You have to say that in your best Alec Baldwin voice.) Damn Salespeople Most organizations have workable adoption from their administrative staff, and pretty good adoption from their support staff. It never fails, when I hear this concern, it is always related to the sales staff. For this particular customer they had an even bigger challenge in that their key sales staff is made up older "Rainmakers". Rainmakers Most businesses have a sales team. Within that team you have mostly average sales people, but often there will be a few that make most of your sales. The 80/20 rule applies. These are your "Rainmakers". Any other salesperson could quit and you wouldn't bat an eye, but if a Rainmaker quit... it would keep you up at night. Rainmakers are rainmakers because they are smart, and smart enough to know that they are Rainmakers... with leverage. The kind of leverage that, if they don't use your system, they know nothing will happen. They are completely unmotivated by your pleas to track their sales activities. So your forecasts are shit. Whether you are heading for your record high month, or record low month, you won't discover until the following month. Herein lies the challenge. Attempts so Far The Rainmaker challenge was not lost on this customer, and they initiated several efforts to overcome it. More training materials of course, and an ongoing effort to make their apps simpler to use. Not unimportant, but not effective either. In my experience the only way to motivate a Rainmaker is to provide them with a tool that makes them more money by using it, than not. Full Stop! Easier said than done, but all other efforts are window dressing. Some Ideas for thought Vlad, a Principal in our organization on the call, suggested playing to ego as one idea. If you know you are are a Rainmaker and won't be fired, it can definitely swell your self-importance, leading to exponential ego growth. If you have been to a car dealer, you may have seen "The Board". Usually a white board visible to all salespeople showing who is at the top in sales so far that month. While Rainmakers will always be in the top 3, being at the very top is food for their ego. Motivation and Manipulation are often the same thing. Vlad's thought was to start tracking the leaderboard, and sending periodic notices to the sales team to login to see it. While there is no silver bullet for adoption, this could motivate a segment. Day in the Life Another more abstract idea of mine was more in the line of making them more money by using the system, shifting from their Ego to their Greed. Maybe you are offended by that term, but let's be honest, the best salespeople are usually greedy egomaniacs, and most companies need them anyway. Most of them also have their "secret sauce", their unique "process" if you will. If you understand their process, you can use your system to possibly grease their wheels for them. In many cases, getting them to share their secrets may be a challenge, so some forensic analysis on their past wins may provide some clues. The goal is to give them a self-serving reason to use the system. Outlook and Memory I find that many of these Rainmakers use a combination of Outlook and their memory to manage their pipeline. Ask any of them how well that is working for them and they will all say "Great! The only way I have ever done it!". Newsflash, your memory is shit, and Outlook is a mail program that can't keep track of anything. If they had ten deals going on, they probably could not name six of them off the top of their head. The four they would remember are the ones closest to becoming money in their pockets. These may not even be the best deals financially for them, they are just the closest. It's Sales Human Nature. So my goal was not to "solve" you adoption issues in this post, but spark some ideas. I would love to hear your other Rainmaker adoption ideas in the comments below.  

We Upgraded from Dynamics 365 to RapidStart CRM

I have had my head down for a while working on the next version of RapidStart CRM. We also recently deployed RapidStart CRM for our own support operations. In the process, I came across a few items that I thought would be of interest to the users of our free app, and since they would also work for any Power App, including Dynamics 365, I thought I might discuss them. Next Version Before I get into this, I want to clarify what I mean by "Next Version" of RapidStart CRM. We have been developing this product since 2015 when we launched it a the Worldwide Partner Conference (Now called Inspire). Over the years we had made hundreds of updates and tweaks in direct response to users. We also refactored the solution a couple of years ago to run on the low cost Power Apps licenses in addition to Dynamics 365. Each update, with the exception of the refactoring, had progressively fewer changes as we honed in on our target customers' requirements. I am pleased to inform you that the next version will have the fewest tweaks yet... I mean it is damn near perfect already. So let's get back to our internal project. Forceworks Support We had been running our support operation on Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for over 10 years. Several times I had contemplated moving it to RapidStart CRM, but as a certified partner my licenses were free, so I kept putting it on the back burner. Our support operation is not very complicated. Customers buy blocks of hours which we add to their bank, and we track our activities against those blocks. We also maintain a portal where customers can login and see their bank balance as well as review all activities. We had been using a third-party portal since before Microsoft even contemplated a portal product. The portal company had been purchased by another company for other assets of value to them and the portal product came with the package.  But portals was not a priority for them. I figured it was a matter of time before they shut it down. So the time had come to move. Dynamics 365 So, as I said I get Dynamics 365 licenses at no cost. So it might seem an obvious choice just to fire up a Power Apps Portal and connect it to our existing instance. and be done. However, as years have gone by now with us supporting customers on RapidStart CRM, many of whom had moved to it from Dynamics 365, I have come to not really like Microsoft's first-party apps very much. I truly feel they are unnecessarily complicated and bloated. And while my licenses may be free, any additional database capacity is not. Our instance, even though it was not doing all that much, was consuming the lion's share of our capacity. So I made the decision to "upgrade" our support operation off of Dynamics 365 and on to our own RapidStart CRM. Also, Power Apps Portals works the same on RapidStart CRM, so there was no reason to continue with the bloated beast. And, if for some reason I was no longer getting free licenses, my cost would be about $10 vs. $95 per user... a factor in many other customers' "upgrading". Migration We could have done this upgrade/migration in a day, but I took this opportunity to make some improvements to our process. Mainly around automation, nothing we could not have done before, but this was a good time, since we were opening things up. We started with the same RapidStart CRM solution as our customers get, and installed it from AppSource on a new environment the same way any customer would. We made use of the RapidStart CRM Accounts, Contacts and Cases. We created two custom Tables, one for Case Notes, to track time and activities, and one for Support Hours, to track the customers' purchases and banks. We also created several Cloud Flows with Power Automate... things like calculating hours and various customer notifications. In addition, we added some specific charts to the RapidStart CRM dashboards for quickly getting a view of things. We also tweaked the RapidStart CRM App to hide Opportunities and a couple of other items we were not using for this need. Lastly, we mapped and migrated all of our historical data to the new environment. I didn't even pause before I hit the "delete" button on our old bloated environment we had depended on for 10 years. Portals So I mentioned that Microsoft offers a Power Apps Portal. Again, for me it would cost nothing. Depending our your requirements, it might be a good solution for you. Unfortunately, like everything the Microsoft Business Applications group produces... it is more complicated than necessary. This is even more noticeable when your requirements are simple. Our requirement was to have a place customers could log into and see their account information, purchase history, case information and case notes. I wanted it to be clean, simple and easy to maintain. Not too complicated. Our Forceworks main website runs on WordPress, like so many other small to mid-sized businesses. So my preference was a WordPress based portal. My friend, and fellow MVP, George Doubinski had the answer. The AlexaCRM WordPress integration solution. Using Alexa, we are able to display any information we want from our RapidStart CRM environment on any WordPress posts or pages. For us, it was a better solution. AlexaCRM can do much more, I am aware of customers running full eCommerce portals with it! If you let George know that you heard about his solution from this post, he promised me he would sing you a short song of your choice. Power Automate Our previous environment had used classic workflows for everything, so this was a good time to move those to Power Automate Cloud Flows. However, I am not 100% sold on Power Automate... yet. Classic workflows still exist because Microsoft has not yet reached parity with Power Automate to be able to turn them off. The "Fullness of Time" does seem to be quite full indeed. But I decided to use Cloud Flows wherever possible. It seems that every time I look for a connector in their expansive list of hundreds, it either does not exist, or does not do what I need it to. This was the case for WordPress also. The connector exists... but is essentially useless. Once again, a fellow MVP to the rescue. Heidi Nuehauser is working with Nick Hance at Reenhanced, and they have a rock-solid Power Automate connector for WordPress that can be used with either Gravity Forms or Contact 7 forms on your WordPress site. If you use the code FORCEWORKS, you can try it out for a month for free. BTW, I did not actually need the Reenhanced connector for our Support site, but while I was under the hood, I decided to update all of the forms on our main Forceworks and RapidStart CRM websites. So now all forms submitted create a record in Dataverse automagically. Results Since our Support Portal is not public (unless you want to buy some hours), I added some screenshots below for your reference. If you would be interested in a similar solution, please contact Forceworks. Account Summary Page   Cases Page Case Details Page

Steve has another Chat with Toby Bowers

I have had my head down working on some big things, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Toby Bowers, the Leader of the Microsoft Bizapps ISV Program. I managed to catch him in his car, and got a great update on some new things happening in the ISV arena. Enjoy! Transcript Below: Toby: Hi, this is Toby. Steve: Hey Toby, Steve Mordue, how's it going? Toby: Hey, Steve. I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? Steve: Not too bad. I catch you at a decent time? Toby: You've caught me at a fine time. I'm actually in the car at the moment. I'm just taking my team out for a little celebratory launch after our big Inspire event and also our Ready event earlier this week. So it's actually a good time. Let me just pull over so we can have a chat. Steve: It's Been a pretty frantic couple of weeks for you guys. Toby: Frantic, but good. Yeah. Yeah. We had a great showing at Inspire. We made some exciting announcements across the business applications business, but especially around our ISV program, ISV Connect, as you and I have chatted about before. So, it's been good. Steve: Well that's [crosstalk 00:00:50]- Toby: How about you [crosstalk 00:00:51]. Steve: [crosstalk 00:00:51] the reason for my call is to try and catch up on ISV Connect. We talked some time ago about some things that you kind of had just inherited this role from Googs who moved on and were kind of getting your feet wet. Now you've had a close to a year in this position, right? Toby: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I remember our initial chat and I think in fact I'm guilty, Steve, because we agreed to speak a little bit more often, but it's been an interesting year this past year, as we all know, but yeah, it's been almost a full year of execution since we last spoke and I even remember Steve, the nice article you wrote with some suggestions for me as I sort of took over. Toby: Yeah, I'd love to actually go back to that. We can talk about a little bit about some of the enhancements and announcements that we made last week. Steve: Yeah. I mean last week, I think for a lot of the ISV's that they weren't thrilled with some things as the program got launched, they were starting to kind of get their arms around it. But some of these announcements that I was hearing and hopefully we can talk about today, anything of course isn't NDA, I think should make the ISV community pretty happy. It's making me pretty happy. And really kind of throw some gas on that fire. Toby: Yeah. Well, absolutely. I'd love to reinforce it. I know, I know you get a lot of people listening to your impromptu calls here. So why don't I do this? Let me maybe just set a little bit of context, just kind of where we left off Steve, and then I can hit on the high notes of what we announced and then we can dive into any particular areas. That sound all right? Steve: Yeah. You are pulled over, right? Toby: I am pulled over now, yes. Steve: Okay. Toby: You got my full attention. Steve: All right sure, kind of hit some of the highlights. Toby: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, for those who don't know, we originally set out with the ISV Connect program a couple of years ago to attract ISV's to our platform, building and extending upon it. That platform being both Dynamics 365 and the power platform with a specific focus on partners who had great industry or vertical IP to enhance the portfolio and delivering better value to our joint customers. So through the program itself, it's a revenue share program and we reinvest back in the ecosystem in the form of platform benefits, go to market benefits, co-selling with our field. Toby: So when I sort of took over Steve, I wanted to sort of get a full year of execution in place. And in that first year we were pretty happy with the numbers. We have over 700 ISV's enrolled in the program. Now we use AppSource as sort of the cornerstone of the program. We have, we have 1400 apps or more certified in AppSource. But after that first year, I really with the team wanted to understand how things were landing, and I think your feedback was good Steve. We did a bunch of research. We do partner satisfaction surveys. I of course talked to a lot of partners in my travels. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:59] in a year's time, you can kind of get a pretty good gauge on what was working well? What could work better? What wasn't working well? What do we need to just abandon? What do we need to step on? And I kind of got the feeling that was this readjustment that we just saw was kind of bringing some of those things to light. Toby: That's exactly right Steve. I mean, it's such a diverse ecosystem of emerging partners to large mature partners across a pretty vast portfolio. So, it was a diverse set of feedback, but you're spot on. We wanted to give it a little bit of time, but then check in and listen and make some adjustments. So that's what we did, based on a lot of the feedback we got. Toby: I'd sort of summarize what we changed in three big areas Steve, the first is that the business model itself, the fee structure, and we talked about this last time, but not only having an investible model where you can reinvest, but actually investing in the ecosystem, especially as it's growing like this business is growing. Toby: The second thing was a lot of feedback around the go to market, whether it was the marketing benefits, the co-selling with our field, really just getting that value proposition right Steve, and really delivering on the promise we made. We needed to balance that equation a little bit and equalize the effort. Toby: And then the third piece is really around the platform itself. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but just the platform, the tooling, dev test environments, app sources, and marketplace itself. Toby: So those were the three key areas that we sort of listened and got a lot of good feedback around. So with that in mind, what we actually announced at the event is that first of all, back on the business model we're significantly reducing the rev share fees down from 10 and 20%, which you might recall, we had a standard tier and a premium tier. So we were bringing those fees down from 10 and 20% to 3%, just a flat 3% going forward. Steve: That's across the board? Toby: That's across the board. And in fact, it was part of a broader announcement we made as Microsoft, Steve, where we're also bringing our commercial marketplace fees, so that's both Azure Marketplace and app sources. We get transact capabilities down to that same flat 3%. Steve: So what's the motivation behind that? I mean, what is it that they're hoping that will accomplish for Microsoft? Toby: Yeah, it's interesting. If you catch any of the sessions, even starting with Satya, he really talks about Microsoft wanting to be the platform for platform creators. And then if you parlay that into what Nick Parker said and Charlotte Marconi around being the best platform for partners to do business on, it really just came down to helping the partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. Toby: So it's not a P&L, a profit center for Microsoft. It's a way to deliver benefits. We think it's pretty differentiated in the market compared to some of our peers. And it was sort of interesting to see, because we were planning on bringing the fees down for ISV Connect specifically, and then we started to align across the organization and just thought, gosh, we should just do this in a very consistent way across the entire Microsoft Cloud with that one flat 3%. Steve: So the math equation had to work out something like, if we dropped this to 3%, that's going to grow that side of the business significantly, which is going to increase platform sales, right? There has to be an up for the down. And I guess maybe... I mean, not that the platform wasn't already growing by leaps and bounds, but somebody must've been thinking this thing can grow a lot faster if we get rid of some of these hurdles. Toby: You're exactly right. I mean, it's kind of what we've talked about in the past. Just the value that an ISV ecosystem brings to Microsoft with that, whether it's the industry relevance, industry specific IP, or just a growing ecosystem in general. I don't know if you'd caught what we just did, our earnings earlier this week, but Dynamics 365 is growing 43% year over year, we doubled our power apps customer base. And so to your point, the business is growing, the platform is growing, and we want the ecosystem to grow and we want to attract as many partners to do that as possible. Steve: So, I mean, you can't reduce fees and increase the benefit, you have to have taken some things away or maybe gotten rid of some things that weren't being utilized, or how did that kind of offset? Toby: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, so we are investing deliberately to build this out and kind of putting our money where our mouth is, but we did, you're spot on. We learned a lot around the benefits, the go to market benefits in particular, the second key thing we announced is that we are reducing just down to one tier at that flat 3%. So no more 10% and 20% or a standard and a premium tier. And we're reducing the thresholds within that one tier for partners to unlock those go to market benefits and those marketing benefits. And then what I heard, especially from partners, again, to my point around, you've got some mature partners and some emerging partners, it's not a one size fits all. And so we've got an option sort of an, a lA carte, option for partners to choose marketing benefits that make the most sense for their business. So we just tried to simplify things and streamline things a little bit. Steve: You know, I talked to a lot of partners. We're, kind of unique in that our application is free. So, the revenue shared didn't really come into play for what we were doing because there wasn't a fee for our app or any recurring services with it. But you know, a lot of these ISV's their business is significantly different. They've got revenue generating applications that run on top of your platform. Many of them that kind of told me in confidence that they just weren't paying the fees. They were getting the notice from Microsoft saying, "Hey, please do us a favor and tell us how much money you've made and what you owe us." And many of them were just kind of ignoring that. Steve: I guess if we're getting down into a 3% range, it'd probably make it a little easier for some people to be more honest about things too you think? Toby: Yeah. Well, yeah we hope so. Again, that was kind of my point around balancing the equation and making sure that we're delivering on the promise that we set out with the program itself. And I talked to a lot of partners as well, and there's definitely benefit being realized, whether it's from a marketing perspective or co-selling with our field, again, based on what's important to their business, but you're right, we do think by reducing it to this level and also just getting better at delivering the benefits in a consistent way, we'll have more partners participating in the program. Toby: The one thing I would say, Steve, that I was just going to close off on with this sort of consistency across Microsoft is we also realized that's our value proposition. If we can not only have a similar model with the 3% marketplace fee and ISV Connect fees across Microsoft, but a similar model to the way we deliver those benefits, to the way we engage with technical resources or engage from a co-selling perspective across Azure Teams and 365 Dynamics Power Platform, that's kind of how we differentiate ourselves versus, the rest of the players out in the market. Toby: So we made a bunch of enhancements and announcements across the business Azure teams, ISV Connect obviously, and you'll see us continue to sort of work towards a much more consistent approach from a Microsoft Cloud perspective, because obviously we'd love it if partners were integrating with Teams. We have over 250 million monthly active users with Teams now driving dynamics integrations all the way through to CDM and Dataverse and integration into Azure Synapse. Those are the partners we want to work with and the type of partners we want to support and go to market with. Steve: Well, I'll tell you, I think the 3% has probably eliminated a hurdle for a partner, certainly I remember at the time a lot of partners complaining about the 10 and 20 saying things like, "If it was like three." Okay, well it's three now, so shut up and move forward. Toby: Yeah. We've had a lot of- Steve: And it's interesting, because it's kind of the way we sell is I guess for an industry ISV who built something specifically for Dynamics 365, maybe they approach things a little different. Our approach is more, we really try and sell the potential of the platform because we've got a simple CRM. So we're up against a lot of competing simple CRMs. And when you open one of their CRMs and open, rapid start, for example, they look very similar and do very similar things. So for us, we really have to sell the value proposition of, hey, behind that little CRM that you're using from Acme Cloud CRM company is really nothing. You've got the extent of what you can do with that right there in front of you and there's nothing more that can be done, and we really lean in hard on the potential for things like integration with Teams, with things like integration with Azure. Steve: Obviously the integration with Microsoft 365, all of the pieces that are available in the power platform that we haven't enabled in our app that are there to be enabled, you like the forums and some of the AI stuff, it definitely seems to be a huge differentiator in that sales conversation. Toby: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear that's really what we're trying to get right and stitch together the teams if they exist across Microsoft and iron those out. I think your company is a great example of that Steve, and I know you talked to a bunch of our partners and sort of as an independent third party, we had a few partners join us at inspire. Icertis has been a longstanding partner of ours. They're a similar story from, from Azure Dynamics Teams really across the board, and getting more and more focused on industry solutions with their particular IP. Toby: And then we had more emerging partners like Karma, Frank at Karma talked to us about some of the benefits we're building into the platform, specifically license management, and now he's taken advantage of that. And we have big partners like Sycor, that's been working with us for a long time on the Azure side of the business and is doing some really interesting things now on the dynamic side and sees value in that co-sell motion. Toby: So I think that value prop is what we're trying to land, and then we're seeing lots of different types of partners take advantage of it in different ways, which is great to see. Steve: Yeah, it's not often that you see both a cost of participation come down and the value of the benefits go up. And when we talk about benefits, and before, you and I have talked about some of these go to market benefits, there's a segment of ISV's that could make use of those probably mostly new ISV's that don't really understand that system. Steve: But for a lot of the ISV's, they really didn't see value there, but in the meantime they're maintaining their own licensing systems and their own transaction systems and things like that, which as an ISV, that's just like a tax. You're building your solution to solve a particular problem, but you can't just stop after you built this wonderful solution, you got to protect it, you got to monetize it. So those things ended up being just kind of attacks. Steve: And, every ISV out there has had to kind of build their own system for licensing and transacting. And you guys coming through now recently here would be with the licensing capability we were in that pilot, and that thing's got some great potential, a couple of things left for them to do on that to get that really where it's going to solve a lot of problems that ISV's have had, even with their own licensing. Steve: Because with your own external licensing system, you can only do so much, but working with one that's on the platform, that's essentially the same one you guys are utilizing, is going to be huge for ISV's, and then we'll get to transactability, that's just going to close another piece that ISV's have had to deal with, especially when you talk about those startup ISV's, they know an industry and they can build an app, but when it comes to licensing and transacting, and if they can just tick a button and plug right into a couple of those things, that's going to lower the bar to entry and make it a lot easier for some of those folks to get in I think. Toby: Yeah, I hope that you're right Steve, in fact, I didn't know you were working with Julian Payor and the team on piloting the license management stuff. It's great to hear your feedback. That was kind of the whole intent with the journey. If I rewind a bit with AppSource itself, you'll recall we had to do quite a bit of work on the overall user experience for AppSource. We worked hard with the engineering team to improve that, improve discoverability and search capabilities and just sort of the plumbing underneath. And then the next step was, was licensed management, which we've just GA'd working again with the engineering team, and then from there, to your point, the value proposition, a lot of ISV's put all this together and then you add transactability and the ability to actually sell your stuff on our marketplace to what's now more than 4 million monthly shoppers, going to that destination is it is definitely a point of value that I've heard positive feedback from ISV's on. Toby: So that's why we really invested there. I know it's taking us a little bit of time to get there, but that was another key announcement. We announced license management later in the fiscal year. We'll have translatability and AppSource for our customer engagement apps, for power apps, and then we'll continue to roll out a roadmap from there. Toby: And then the other piece I forgot to mention Steve, we made some noise about as well, was these new sandbox environments. And I know you've given me this feedback before, but you know, sort of in the broader internal use rights world, the value in having sandbox environments for our partners to do dev tests and do customer demos around, I heard loud and clear from you and from other partners. And so that's the other thing we announced. We have these new discounted skews, which are basically just at cost skews across the business for those dev test environments. And then for partners who are participating in ISV Connect and hitting those new lower reduced rev share thresholds, we'll provide those licenses for free. Toby: So we think that's going to be a great new benefit for partners as well, more on that technical and platform side of things. Steve: Yeah. Particularly for the ISV's, because ISV's don't necessarily see a lot of value or need to get Microsoft competencies. Competencies are definitely, as a program that was designed for resellers to demonstrate their competence. But a lot of ISV's don't want to have a need for that. And that's where [inaudible 00:19:22] had historically kind of been tied was to those competencies. Steve: So is there any talk about any sort of... I mean, they did do that kind of short-lived ISV competency, which was primarily around, hey, if you've got an app in AppSource you qualify. Here's some IUR. Steve: So this new program will replace that, but are they going to be revisiting any sort ISV competencies or need? Toby: Yeah, well I won't say too much as far as future plans are concerned, but what I can say Steve is that we did this for biz apps, we did it for ISV Connect because that's our program and we got feedback and we think there's value in that. Toby: I did mention that going forward we'll have a more consistent approach across Microsoft Cloud. There's lots of different benefits out there. Azure Credits, we announced some new things around Teams. And so we just need to, as one Microsoft, provide that to our partners in a consistent delivery through these benefits so that we can support that kind of value proposition we talked about earlier. So look for more from us in that area. You're spot on, on the competency side. And I wouldn't even say resellers, I'd say more SI, system integrators services partners. Steve: Yeah. Toby: The key difference there is, we want those guys to be able to differentiate their organization. As a company, you can say, "I've got 15 certified individuals in this role-based certification. And I've got this many credits to my business that make me a gold partner at an organization level"- Steve: Which is something a customer looking at SI would be looking for. Toby: Right. Steve: But when you're looking at an ISV solution, they're really just looking at the functionality. Toby: It's the app, right? You would want to badge in app versus badge and organization. And so that's the key difference there. And I think we've kind of figured that out and again, you'll see us do more in that space going forward. Steve: Yeah. I just want to mention, just go back for a second to make sure everybody is aware that the transactability and the licensing are optional. These are things that you can take advantage of if you spend a ton of money on your own systems, nobody's going to expect you to rip and replace. These are really designed for... I mean when I think of a partner like myself, if I can get out of the license management and have transactability just be automatic, where all I really have to do is focus on building my IP, getting it in AppSource, hopefully promoting it properly, but then the licensing becomes automatic and the transactability becomes automatic, and I'm just getting money coming into my account. Of course, you guys are scraping your 3%, which I don't begrudge because your given me those tools. That just makes things a lot easier. Toby: That's right. And you're right, it's not mandatory. It's again what makes sense for the partner. And so, you can do business with us and ISV Connect outside of the marketplace and work with us on the new 3%, get those benefits, or you can transact in the marketplace, it's that same 3%. And it's a different benefit. You get that whole commerce system, you get that whole billing engine. You don't have to worry about that. And there's a lot of ISV's out there that see value in that. So yeah, you're spot on. Steve: Yeah. I remember Goose had kind of recharacterized the revenue share after the kind of flap up from some of the ISV's about the benefits and stuff and he recharacterized it as a cost for the use of the platform that you're building on top of a platform that Microsoft has built, Microsoft maintains, Microsoft advances. So look at that as a cost for that. And I think you still kind of need to look at that as a cost for that. It's not 3% for licensing and transactability, it's a cost for maintaining the platform, there's these pieces you can take advantage of or not. But if you're not taking advantage of license management, transactability, it doesn't mean you don't have to pay the fee. You're paying the fee for something else. Toby: Yeah. Steve: I'm trying to head off some things I know I may hear from some folks [inaudible 00:23:24] licensing. No, no, no. Toby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right, Steve, and again, to zoom back out again, I mean, it's not about the 3%, it's about attracting partners to build on the broader Microsoft Cloud and supporting their business in a way that works for them. And you're right, there is a cost of doing that, but we want to invest, and I think we just sent a message hopefully to the market that we want to be aggressive in this space, we think we're well positioned, we've got a great value proposition with this broader Microsoft Cloud thing that we're just seeing incredible growth across the business. Toby: And I guess most importantly, we're listening back to that, after a full year, really sort of staying in tune to feedback from partners like yourself, that [inaudible 00:24:07] at large to make sure that we're doing the right thing and delivering, that's kind of what was most important to me. Steve: So those discounted skews for ISV's, in order to qualify for that, what do they need to do? They need to join ISV Connect? Toby: Yeah. So the discounted licenses, which are again, just basically at cost for us, are available to anyone who's enrolled in ISV Connect. All you need to do is enroll in the program, but then if you hit the new reduced rev share threshold that sort of unlocks additional benefits, then we'll give those licenses to you for free. And I can't here in the car, remember all the details of the numbers and stuff like that, I think, and you probably have it. I think aka.ms.bizapp.ISV connect, I think that's a link to our website that has all the benefit details and stuff, but that's basically the way it works. Steve: Are those available today? Toby: They are. There's a whole bunch of them available today and there's more coming. I know that the sales service, field service, marketing, I think the customer insights products, maybe commerce, I might be forgetting a few others and then there's more coming down the pike shortly. Steve: All right. So a good reason for people to go back to revisit ISV Connect site if they haven't in a while. Toby: I would love that. Yeah, I think so. If we can get people to go back and like you said, revisit, just get educated, hopefully get re-engaged and then keep the feedback coming. That's a great outcome. Steve: So I've had a few ISV's asking me about what's the future of ISV Embed, and maybe you can speak to that because that one's kind of a little vague, I think, for a lot of folks right now. Toby: Yeah. It's a great question Steve, that's kind of next, next on our list. And again, today I can't share a lot of specifics, but this is a good topic for us to come back to probably in our regular chats. Toby: As you know, Cloud Embed is a model that supports kind of like an OEM like model where a partner's just packaging their IP directly on the underlying license and selling it together through our ISV Cloud Embed program, which leverages our CSP vehicle as a way to transact. And so we've had it out there for a couple of years. And I may have mentioned before that we're sort of modernizing a whole bunch of our commerce capabilities and new business models and so we're working on a few different options still to support that embed scenario where things like co-selling with our field or certain other marketing benefits aren't the most important thing for a particular ISV in a particular scenario, they don't want to have to mess with reselling the underlying dynamics license. They're not resellers. They just want to sell their IP. Steve: Yeah. Toby: So we're working on some stuff there, especially, on both the core dynamics business and the power platform business. So we can stay in touch and I can come back to you for some feedback once we have more to share. Steve: Yeah. That, I mean, that program worked for a particular kind of an ISV. Toby: Yeah. Steve: A lot of the ISV's that have add on solutions that are not SI's, there's a partner already involved with a customer and they just want to sell their add on solution. Steve: Yeah. Licenses have probably already been sold by that partner. They don't want or need to get involved in that management of that sort of stuff. They just want to sell their IP. And then there's some ISV's that the customer is actually buying, which I think we're starting to see now. And I think I told you this before, one of the things that Salesforce had going for them with their ISV's was there were a lot of very robust ISV's that did a lot of direct marketing to customers about their solution and less so about the fact that it ran on Salesforce. Steve: Salesforce is this platform in the background, but this is what we're selling is this ISV solution, and in that scenario they own the customer because the customer wasn't buying Salesforce, they really were buying the solution to their problem for this ISV, and we hadn't seen as much of that on the dynamic side for a long time. It was definitely, you start with dynamics and then you add on ISV features and capabilities. But I think we're starting to see more of that, that holistic ISV solution that a customer is buying the solution that happens to run on the power platform or on dynamics. Toby: Totally. That's the scenario we see mutual opportunity in. That example, you said where the ISV owns the partner or the customer, the relationship with the customer, frankly that helps us reach more customers as Microsoft. And then if we provide that ISV still the underlying technology and the right business model to support their business, then that's goodness on both sides. So, that's exactly [crosstalk 00:29:10]. Steve: So that's the one where ISV Embed probably makes the most sense, , that type of partner. So we're starting to see more of them. Toby: That's great. That's great. Well, I always appreciate the feedback if you have any. So I'd love you to go through these new things in a bit more detail, and then send me your feedback and we can continue to keep the lines of communication open as always. Steve: I'm not letting you off just yet. I'm keeping you for a couple more. Toby: Oh man, I've got my team waiting, I'm hungry Steve. Steve: I just want to ask, "What is the most exciting thing you're seeing in the space coming soon that people should really be paying attention to?" I know we've got some things happening that aren't so much related to ISV, like the power platform pricing coming down, but what are some of the things that you're seeing in your group, or maybe some things that are already out there that you're feeling like ISV's are not understanding what this is obviously or they'd be all over it? Toby: Hmm. That's a great question. I'd say probably two things. One is, again, one of the big announcements we made at Inspire that wasn't necessarily related to ISV's or ISV Connect specifically, but what we announced with Teams where Teams users will now be able to sort of view and collaborate on Dynamics 365 records from directly within Teams. Toby: So this concept of collaborative apps you'll see, and that's at no additional cost. Obviously that concept you'll see us continue to do more around to bring that again, pretty large install base of Teams users that are out there, 250-million now, together with Dynamics, we think is sort of unique to our value proposition. So there was [crosstalk 00:30:58]- Steve: So this is somebody you think ISV's out there should definitely go do a little bit of investigating into the Team story? Toby: Yes, yes. Teams on the front end, it's such a large install base that we can take advantage of as partners. And then on the backend, I mentioned that again, power platform, Dataverse, leveraging our data services like Azure Synapse Analytics, again, stitching that all the way from the front end of the backend. We as Microsoft, we're really focused on that combined Microsoft Cloud story. And I think the partners that are recognizing that and investing in that with their own IP are the ones we're going to engage with and hopefully generate some good opportunity around. Toby: The second one, in that vein Steve, the second one I was going to say is just what we continue to do with our industry clouds. So we have cloud for healthcare out there at the moment, we've got financial services, manufacturing, retail, we announced the cloud for sustainability, we've got not-for-profit. So, these things continue to roll off the conveyor belt, but it's such a great opportunity. I was sort of surprised with how much interest we had from the ISV ecosystem around these industry clouds. Obviously as we build more industry IP, we need to sort of adjust our relationship with our partners who serve those industries, but there's still so much space to add, specific IP to that industry and work with some of those very credible industry partners that we were sort of talking about just a moment ago is a big place that we're going to invest going forward. So, that's an area I'd encourage people to keep a close eye on. Steve: Are you satisfied with the level of ISV engagement with the accelerators? Are they still kind of too many of them on the sidelines kicking or poking it with a stick or have we got enough of them actually coming in now that you're happy with that velocity? Or are you feeling like there's a bunch more that need to get in there? Toby: I think, first of all, we've evolved a bit from that original industry accelerator approach to now just real industry IP that we're building first party in these verticals that I mentioned. Obviously there's great partners out there that can work with us with those solutions to, like I said, have their IP built on that broader Microsoft Cloud. Industry clouds are just a great example of a Microsoft Cloud solution, frankly. And so to your question of, do we have enough partners there? You want to obviously get it right when you launch an offering like that with the right, frankly, small number of partners to complete the solution and have it be good and relevant and useful for customers, but the more the merrier around that investment. Toby: And so it's early days, Steve, we only have one industry cloud in market GA'd at the moment, but as I said, there's a lot more coming. So we want to make sure we're building the ecosystem around it pretty aggressively. Steve: Yeah. I mean, we've got partners of all sizes, so we got some big healthcare ISV's I'm sure engaged in some of the heavy lifting, but healthcare is an awfully big market, awfully big field, and there is spot, point solutions kind of across the healthcare organization that need to be filled by probably a smaller ISV's. So it seems like there's stuff across that whole thing. Toby: Yeah. Totally. There's plenty of opportunity and plenty of space around that. And even from a geographic perspective, I mean, different parts of the world have different regulatory requirements and are different, and so there's yeah, to your point, and that's what I was trying to articulate earlier. I think there's still just a massive opportunity for partners to work with us around those new offerings. Steve: Well, I know you've got to get to your thing. You've told me twice in the call, I appreciate you pulling the car over to chat with me to catch up. I just wanted to get some of this stuff out to the listeners about some of these changes that just occurred. Steve: And I'm definitely going to go through, like you said, and study it a little more closely and I'll reach out to you directly with some feedback and some thoughts and see if we keep this thing moving. Toby: Awesome. Well, Hey, I'm so glad you caught me, Steve. It's always a pleasure to catch up and have a chat, and yeah, please do go through it in some detail. Again, your feedback is important. Whole ecosystems feedback is super important to me, so I appreciate it. And yeah, it was great to catch up. Steve: All right man, talk to you soon. Toby: All right. Take care, Steve.

Steve has a Chat with Ryan Cunningham

So I noticed Ryan Cunningham, Product Lead for the Power Apps side of the Power Platform for Microsoft, suddenly come available in Teams. So of course, I ambushed him, and we had a great conversation about Power Apps and the whole Microsoft Business Applications group. Enjoy! Transcript below: Ryan Cunningham: Hello. This is Ryan. Steve Mordue: Hey, Ryan. Steve Mordue. How's it going? Ryan Cunningham: Oh, Steve Mordue. How you doing? Does this mean I'm in trouble? Steve Mordue: No, you are not in trouble, but you are about to be a guest on my Steve has a Chat podcast if you have time and are up for it. Ryan Cunningham: You mean like right now? Steve Mordue: Like right now. Already recording. Ryan Cunningham: Hey, okay. Let me check my calendar. There's nothing I'd rather do right now than being an impromptu guest on a Steve show. Steve Mordue: Well, we'll try and make sure you don't regret that decision. Ryan Cunningham: I regret a lot of decisions, Steve. But it wouldn't be the first. Steve Mordue: So let me ask you first, how long have you been with Microsoft? Ryan Cunningham: I just crossed five years. Steve Mordue: Five years. Ryan Cunningham: Just this past fall. Steve Mordue: I used to be a Salesforce consultant. We were Salesforce consultants for about 10 years and we moved over to Microsoft when they first moved CRM online back in 2011. So about 10 years ago. Ryan Cunningham: Sure, yeah. Steve Mordue: And I remember there being a few bumps making that transition going from on-premise to online, but then it kind of leveled out into what I kind of called the lazy river ride. It was predictable, it didn't move very quickly. There was no urgency and then James took over and he brought in all you young guys. It's been like a rocket roller coaster ride ever since. You ever got one of those really big roller coaster rides where you start praying for it to end, but you know it's not going to. It's just going to keep looping around and you can't get off. I almost feel like for a lot of us partners that have been around at least since it was lazy river, man, my head is rocking from all of the stuff you guys are doing. Ryan Cunningham: We don't do lazy rivers very well, Steve. Steve Mordue: Not anymore. Ryan Cunningham: Not anymore. Steve Mordue: Not anymore. Ryan Cunningham: At least class three rapids around here. Steve Mordue: How is it like on the inside for that kind of pace and ideation and everything that's going on internally? Ryan Cunningham: It's a great question. It certainly has not been constant here either. And again my experience in this community is not as long as yours. I joined at about five years ago and specifically joined the Power Apps team long before Power Apps was really a thing. I joined the team when Project Siena was for those that are familiar with that term, the sort of precursor to Power Apps was kind of in an early beta phase and there were grand ambitions of expanding out who could build software, but not a lot of... How do we say it coming out? Not a ton of product truth yet behind that. Steve Mordue: So I was in the audience, I think for one of your very first presentations before a big group of this product. You looked a little deer in the headlights at the time. Ryan Cunningham: I still feel that way sometimes. But if you take that over the course of the last five years where that idea has solidified, that product has gotten more mature. Certainly there's still more work to do, but we've gone from literally zero humans using at least standalone Power Apps to millions around the world and really also in the same breath gone from very long tail, very simple use cases to this grand merger with the Dynamics platform and customers building and trusting frankly much more sophisticated workloads to the platform. Ryan Cunningham: The world has changed a lot for us internally in how we approach this problem as you go through that product maturity life cycle. In the early stage, it's really about can we make anyone successful here? Now, it is much more about how do we scale and how do we focus on enterprise trust and developer productivity and really turn millions into hundreds of millions and that's... Steve Mordue: Oh, we got a little stall there. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Did I lose you for a second? Steve Mordue: Just for a second. I kind of sometimes think of Microsoft kind of like the Japanese manufacturing economy where they saw ideas that we would come up with and then they would put all their resources to make it better, faster, cheaper whereas a lot of the things we're doing in the power platform are not things that weren't being done before by others, it's just that someone on the team somewhere recognize hey, there's this movement going on out here with some of these smaller players and I think it's got some legs, so let's let's drop all of the arsenal that we have available as Microsoft onto this idea because clearly, we weren't the first low code platform right, but suddenly we're bringing everything Microsoft has to bear on this idea and to see it blow up like that. Steve Mordue: You can say that for almost everything that we've got going on, the bots, the flow, all of these sorts of things. We weren't the first, but then we came in and just put all this horsepower into an idea. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. And it so much is about execution and executing at the right time and doing it for the right people. I think part of the reason why we internally work quickly and don't want to be on the lazy river is also because I think we tried to approach it with this fundamental... This is going to sound weird, but distrust of our own instincts to say, "Look, we have a thesis that people are going to want to build software faster. We have a thesis that they're going to want to do that beyond just forms over data." That's going to take many different forms, but in the nitty-gritty details of who's actually going to find the most value in individual features and individual assembly of those features, there's a lot of margin for error. Ryan Cunningham: And the sooner you get real software into the hands of real humans and they can use it and react to it and give you feedback actively about it, but also just give you feedback through their usage or non-usage of it, then the sooner you have real data to adjust and change and do the next thing. Steve Mordue: So it's not really like build it and they will come, it's more like build something and let's see who comes. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. Steve Mordue: And then build some more. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. Develop a relationship with those people who have come and then make sure that you're building it in a way that they're going to get really excited about it and then extend to others. So we really prioritize when we have enough of a hypothesis to head in a direction get there as soon as possible in the world and then work really closely and quickly once you've landed there to make it great and learn, and be willing to be wrong and be willing to change. Steve Mordue: Don't worry. I pointed out when you [crosstalk 00:07:43]. It's a lot of moving parts. I know you came in through the Power Apps door but have since kind of got your fingers into the whole pieces of platform it feels like. There's a lot of moving parts going on. Whenever you have that many moving parts, there's going to be bumps and issues along the way. So I can imagine that's just a continuous thing that somebody's building something over here. Somebody over here. Maybe they didn't coordinate as well as they should have and it gets discovered later and then I imagine these little fire drills going on internally [inaudible 00:08:20]. Steve Mordue: Left hand wasn't talking to the right hand enough. Let's get that stuff going on. Is that part of your role is to referee those sorts of things or identify them? Ryan Cunningham: I guess you could say that. And that's also part of growing a product and a team across a really wide surface area. How do we put in place the right listening mechanisms to customers, to data and reviews internally so that we can catch those things sooner and react to them more quickly. Because in many ways the ambition here is to span a really wide area of software and do it with a platform that has value and relevance to a number of different people in that spectrum, which is fundamentally really hard. Ryan Cunningham: It's one thing to build a focused experience for one very focused narrow niche of people, it's another... That alone is hard. It's another to build a set of tools that a lot of different people can use. But I think that was actually part of our... If you rewind several years ago and look at what we did between the Power Apps software project which started independently and the Dynamics platform and bringing them together, we really realized at the limit these things converge. At the limit, making it easier for non-traditional software people, citizen developers, amateurs, makers, whatever you want to call them and making it faster for professionals to build apps, those two ends have to meet each other at some point for this to really scale. So let's rip that band-aid off. Steve Mordue: How close do you think we are? How close do you think we are to getting to that ideal point? I mean, I think there's still... Even when I look at the citizen developer stories, a citizen can go so far and obviously we'd like them to go as far as they're able to go, to comfortably go and pro dev takes over. I have to assume there's a continuous motion inside to keep trying to move that line. Let's simplify some of these formulas that may be required that are just whatever those stopping blocks where you see a citizen is able to get this far, it hits a wall. Can we get them to the next wall? How much is going on in that process? Ryan Cunningham: It's a great question and it is really one of the central things that keeps driving a lot of what we do. I mean, we also look at a professional's experience through that journey, right? You look at not enlightened professionals such as yourselves, but all of the other software people out in the world who are very skeptical of platforms and who have an instinct to start from scratch and write everything themselves and go through some- Steve Mordue: Some of that could be financially motivated also. Ryan Cunningham: Oh, sure. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Ryan Cunningham: Right? But I think realizing that two trends are really converging here. To your point earlier, low code is not new, but we've had low code in two very different camps. This is the company that shipped Excel 35 years ago, 36 years ago. We certainly know low code for true amateurs and there's always been this world of people without a software development background working around the boundaries of the software they're given with tools to solve problems and that goes straight to- Steve Mordue: To Access wizards. Ryan Cunningham: Absolutely. Excel macros, VBA, Access, InfoPath and a number of other products outside of Microsoft. That's an enduring tradition. Then on the other side, what we've been doing is professional software people for the last 40 years is just adding layers of abstraction and tooling and not repeating ourselves and borrowing from other people to more efficiently assemble solutions as well. You can look at a platform like what XRM was unofficially and Dataverse and Power Apps on top of it now is just a natural extension of making professionals more efficient by not doing everything from scratch. Ryan Cunningham: Now, that's where those two trends converge and you're absolutely right to answer your question. We focus on okay, we made a number of people successful at that. There's a plenty of existence proof in our community and in our growth numbers and in our customer stories of people coming at the product from both of those directions and getting really successful and having a lot to show for it. Now of course behind the scenes, we're still, I would say very hungry. We're still at a couple orders of magnitude less than the addressable market of software consuming humans of what we could be serving even for all the astronomical growth we've seen in the platform over the last couple years. Ryan Cunningham: I mean, so it is absolutely about how do we take people coming in the front door. I'm a Teams user. I have some Excel skills. I happen to stumble on this Power Apps thing. How far do I get on my first try? What brings me back? How do I go from a user who expresses intent to a user who has a moment of success, to a user who then has an app that's used in production. And even from that point to somebody who keeps coming back to keep putting apps in production. Ryan Cunningham: Then similarly as a professional, how do I expand my tool set from Azure and Visual Studio and how do I have good experiences in my first try with a platform. How do I get to a point where I put something out there that humans are using in the world and I feel good about it. We really closely look at retention. We look at funnels through those early experiences. We look at satisfaction. All those annoying prompts of how likely are you to recommend Power Apps to a friend or colleague. Those are really valuable data points for us in addition to just the general growth rates overall because of indicators of the likelihood to be successful and grow in the future. Steve Mordue: I know we definitely have had success with enterprise organizations in particular where IT has embraced this and shepherded the process and built in their own systems like at the whole chevron way that they go about making power apps developers out of their employees and they've got a very specific process. I guess the other side of the equation is a smaller company that doesn't have those kind of resources. It's just Bob who's always been handy with spreadsheets. Suddenly he's trying to figure his way around. It seems like that's the one where we can't give that guy too much help. Steve Mordue: In enterprise they're going to have their system. Maybe have classes internally. They send their people to and stuff like that. It's a smaller organizations where he's left to the documents he can find and what he can understand. I think one of the things that Microsoft has always been a little bit of a challenge with Microsoft and documentation in particular is that they assume a certain level of understanding, in particular Microsoft and there's lots of folks that are coming to the platform that have zero understanding of Microsoft or history or know anything. Even acronyms or none of it. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Steve Mordue: It's almost like you can't make the documentation too dumbed down to get to that success. Well, how big is the team up to? Now, the last number I heard, and this has been a while ago, it was like 7,000. It was a pretty, pretty good sized team for the bag. How big is it now? Ryan Cunningham: That's a good question. I'm not trying to dodge you. I suppose I could look it up. I don't know for sure what James is... That whole business applications group org size is, but that's actually probably a decent estimate now that's not too inaccurate. Now, that's spread across a really wide surface area. All of the first party Dynamics apps have dedicated teams working on them. There are a number of other orgs within that organization focused on things like advancing AI and whatnot and then there's the core platform team, the Charles Lamanna team which I'm a part of which we structure into a core team focused on the backend, on Dataverse. A core team focused on each of the front-end products, so Power Apps, that's my team, Power Automate, Power Virtual agents. Then we also have a dedicated group in the platform org around admin and pro developers, and those experiences. Steve Mordue: I think when he came in, there was closer to a thousand on the team. So I mean the team has exponentially grown because you can't keep a lazy river going. Ryan Cunningham: Nope. Steve Mordue: You got to have speed when you got that many people on the payroll all working on something. So I also recall a time and I know it's still there, where there was a maniacal focus by the business applications group on the competitors particularly Salesforce at the time. I know that Salesforce is still in the radar. It does feel like we've kind of moved from really being focused on one primary competitor as we've launched all of these different applications into other competitive spaces where now you guys have hundreds of competitors that are all out there. How much do you guys focus on what the competition is doing internally and how you guys gauge what directions to go? Ryan Cunningham: It's really important to be aware of what people are doing in the marketplace. And we do spend a lot of time making sure that we have an intimate and hands-on not just academic understanding of what a lot of different software companies are producing out there. Steve Mordue: So you guys have licenses for everything. Ryan Cunningham: Well, where we can and it gets complicated because Microsoft also partners with many companies. Some companies we have agreements with about who will or won't use what software and we've got a lot of great lawyers to help us navigate that whole [inaudible 00:18:23]. I think the point is look, we're adding software to a world that already has a lot of software in it. It's important to look left and right and be aware of what else is out there because none of this stuff gets consumed in a vacuum by customers. You go to any moderately large customer organization, there's already a CRM system or seven in place. There's already an ERP system or eight in place and there's already a bunch of individual systems around that for point things and that's just the world we live in. Steve Mordue: And if they're exploring something, they're seldom exploring one thing. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly, right? And often if they're exploring especially a platform. There's a lot of existing things and a lot of the conversations become about how does this work in an existing ecosystem and how does it work? How can it potentially consolidate some of those things? We had Ecolab at a recent digital event talking about some of their Power Apps and Dynamics implementations. The average field employee at Ecolab had something like 27 different individual tools that they had to use to get their job done and it was a mix of... I mean, they had dynamics and they had Salesforce, and they had an ERP system, and they had a whole bunch of individual custom homegrown things and this experience was just really terrible for somebody out there on a tablet or a phone trying to inspect your water filter at your company. Ryan Cunningham: Starting to bring in Power Apps as a front door to some of those other systems without replacing them and just even making the wayfinding better is key. So look, it's important for us to be aware of what the world is doing. I would say it's never as simple as pure competitor or not in that picture because look, if you're a company like Microsoft, a lot of the names you rattled off or alluded to are also Azure customers and they're partners with them in other places. We're fundamentally a platform company I think is what it comes down to. Ryan Cunningham: The world is better when people can choose what they want to choose and are able to interoperate with those things at scale. Now obviously, there's incentive for us to have them using our stuff in that mix which is why we care a lot about it, but there's really not... Especially if you look at the body of what we offer even just in the platform, there isn't a clean head-to-head competitor right now for all of it. There are certainly competitors for each piece and I think being aware that those customers have choices and that we want them to genuinely choose the best and we want to be the best, that means we have to be aware of what best is and what customers define as best is just as important as what the guy down the street is offering. I think that the business applications group has the advantage of the enormous coattails of Office 365, now Microsoft 365. Steve Mordue: Sure. I don't know how many calls I get from a brand new customer who the primary reason they're looking at this platform is because they're already using Microsoft 365. And this idea that we want everything to work together and talk together. I think those coattails are an example of coattails that some of the other companies just don't have. You look at Salesforce for example. They don't have this productivity suite with millions and millions of users. So their story is going to be... We can integrate story and I just see more and more... I think we have to give such a credit for this because for many years Microsoft had a mixed reputation with IT. Steve Mordue: There are lots of people that hated them and all sorts of different things and such. It kind of seemed to have changed the attitude of the company to where IT who used to be like we're using on-premise exchange that's the only Microsoft thing we're going to touch. Now, they've brought in Microsoft 365. Now from an IT standpoint, it's you know what, I don't want to make my life any more difficult than it needs to be. What's the most logical choice for business applications when we're already stood up on all of this stuff and it's an enormous advantage and a huge coattail for the whole business applications group to ride in on. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. I mean, this is why we focus so much on the platform working well in Teams for example. We've put a lot of effort into that this past year. I mean, part of that is the world turned upside down and changed and everybody started working in Teams. The other part of that is it's a huge advantage for a customer to be able to program and customize the collaboration environment whatever that is. Again, there's a long history of that within Office with SharePoint and InfoPath and stuff like that, but being able to look at that in a modern world and say, "I already have every employee working every day inside the team's environment. If I can start to put line of business applications in that environment, it's much easier for those employees to discover and it's much easier for them to then work around and collaborate around when those experiences require some form of collaboration." Ryan Cunningham: There are major Microsoft customers, Fortune 500 customers with tens and hundreds of thousands of users in their tenant that have more than half of those users using a Power App and Teams every month. You see IT departments using it. Those are not necessarily bottom-up Citizen Developer apps. You see IT departments really seeing that as a way to sort of re-imagine maybe what we might have called an intranet site 10 years ago sort of imagine an employee-facing app in the place where employees are already working. Steve Mordue: Sometimes, I actually feel a little guilty that one of our biggest growth years was a result of a virus and certainly the same could be said of Teams. I mean Teams was doing fine, but a virus really catapulted Teams to the position that it is. You feel a little guilty, but then again it is what it is and somebody has to feel that that need and it does create some massive opportunity. Ryan Cunningham: For me, especially rewinding to March and April, and May, I mean this was really a pressure test of our whole promise. The whole shtick and spiel of saying you can develop apps faster, you can do it quickly, you don't have to go through all the time and expense of software development, you can put it where people want to use it. Got a lot less nice to have in March of 2020 went from a lot of people from, "Oh, that sounds cool. I'll check that out someday." Steve Mordue: Someday. Ryan Cunningham: This is interesting to this is the only game in town. There were moments where I don't... I hear what you're saying. It is difficult to go feel like you're thumping your chest about business success in a year where a lot of people have had a really hard time and I really want to be sensitive to that. At the same time, the platform has really directly and indirectly helped a lot of people with those struggles. A whole number of both through the healthcare response to COVID, solutions that were implemented almost literally overnight in some cases for major state governments around the US and national governments abroad to first roll out large-scale testing programs on portals with CDS or Dataverse behind it and then roll out economic assistance programs on the same platform. Ryan Cunningham: Now rolling out return to work solutions on the same platform. Those are things where the traditional model of start up a waterfall development process, go write a giant requirements document, triple bit it, go through... You don't have the luxury of the Gantt chart in this world and you have to be able to move fast. And those are places where that is the platform we've been building for is that environment where we got to move fast. We have to do it non-traditionally and we have to do it with a lot less effort. Ryan Cunningham: This last year has really forced us to hone in on that value prop and prove that it's real, and frankly adjust a lot to make it more real for people who are trying to get that value. So I would say we have learned a lot in the course of this pandemic. A lot of people have. But we've also been able to do some good for the world in the same breath. Steve Mordue: It definitely was interesting timing because if you guys probably had to pick a time for a super crunch test of our platform maybe you don't like to see it in another year out or something. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, sure. Steve Mordue: You can't cage these things, but it kind of hit when you guys still had some wiring to finish and I would imagine that the pressure on the team... It's one thing to we got to be out to market quickly because of competition. It's another thing because something like this has come. It has to bring a huge amount of pressure the team. We need to take Teams to the next level. We need to take build your own apps the next level and suddenly we've got an entire workforce that is now working from home that never planned to be working from home that is completely ill-equipped for that entire motion and these people need this stuff fast. Ryan Cunningham: Not to mention an entire generation of students who are now learning remotely, many of them in every age group from my first grader up to colleges and in universities. It's affected everybody. But you're right. I mean, the platform has been stretched at every level and it's not just the power platform. You're right. It's also very much Teams. I saw a really interesting internal presentation from an engineering leader in the Teams org comparing, "Look, here's what our load and traffic pattern looked like in January of 2021 and then to scale superimposing that on what it looked like in March." Not to say that, "Hey, look at all this great growth," it was really to say, "Look at what it took to go scale a planet scale service that dramatically that quickly." That was not a pleasant experience for the engineers having to work on that. That was [crosstalk 00:28:54]- Steve Mordue: A lot of late nights. Ryan Cunningham: ... 24/7 as any other response. No software is perfect. We like to gripe about everything and I share my set of barbs with stuff, but man, I have a ton of respect for the Teams engineering group and how well they have handled that just massive overnight change. Steve Mordue: So as we're recording this, vaccines for the virus are rolling out and I assume at some point in the coming months, it'll be behind us. In the meantime, it was around long enough to push lots of people to work from home longer than maybe their company owners thought would have to happen, but now they've gotten used to that. They've made accommodation. They've made it work. What do you think is going to happen when this particular crisis has passed and there's the ability to go back to normal? What do you think is going to happen with all these folks? Are we going to see a mass return to offices? Are we going to see people say, "This is working"? What are you guys thinking? Ryan Cunningham: I mean, it's a good question. I don't know that I can speak for all of Microsoft on this one, but I think at least in our own team- Steve Mordue: What do you think? Ryan Cunningham: I mean look, our team is already very globally distributed. We have the majority of our engineers and core products, PMs working in the Pacific time zone, but we have a significant group in Paris. We have a significant group in Bangalore. We have individual pockets. We have people in Fargo, North Dakota. We have a team in- Steve Mordue: Israel? Ryan Cunningham: We certainly have team in Israel. We have teams in parts of Europe. We have a team in Toronto. If nothing else, I think the core of [inaudible 00:30:49] sound based team has developed a lot more empathy for the experience of the very significant portion of our group that works around the world. I'm very experienced joining Teams. And I really hope that that continues if nothing else even if we all end up back in offices at a more regular level. Ryan Cunningham: We've learned at digital events and conferences and stuff. Certainly, it is not the same as being in the room with people catching up and networking, finding those discovery and unplanned moments with humans. And I do believe that we will go back to getting in rooms together both as employees, but also as colleagues. I really hope that we get to do that again soon. However, some of the digital events that we've pulled off as unelegant as some of them have come together also very rapidly having to figure out how to completely reimagine conferences like Ignite virtually in just a few months, those themselves were gargantuan tactics. In some cases there were orders of magnitude more participation in those events than when you had to get on a plane and fly to Orlando to get the benefit really. So there's- Steve Mordue: If I'm Microsoft, I don't know how eager I am to go back to in-person events given the success of like you say, I mean, so many more people able to attend. Microsoft's goal in having an event isn't for us all to hang out and have beers, it's to disseminate product information to his broader audience as possible and as deep a format as possible. Sitting in a session room, watching some guy present a slide deck, maybe it's a little more interactive, but not enough more interactive to justify the 30 people behind me versus 3,000 people that could be behind me in a video meeting. Steve Mordue: So from Microsoft's standpoint, you would think that, "Hey, great news. We don't have to go back to doing live events," which are, I think, they got to be a huge expense, a huge logistical challenge, all that sort of stuff. So the only reason to go back- Ryan Cunningham: I mean, I imagine- Steve Mordue: ... would be camaraderie or something. Ryan Cunningham: Like all things moderation. I'm sure we will... I hope we will reconvene at least some live events and I'm sure we will. I think we've learned that there's probably a bias before this year, this past year that the digital portion of a live event would be much less valuable. I mean, even already, I don't want to overplay that hand. Even already, we would frequently get more total usage over a lifespan of content consumed digitally when it was produced at the live event than at the live event itself. Ryan Cunningham: You could take a keynote at Ignite. There's 3,000, 10,000 people in the room, whatever, but then you go take the three months following the streaming of that online would accumulate far more visitors and end users than originally. That was already known. But being able to extend that from the keynote stage out to every session and being able to figure out how to produce that type of an event in a very decentralized way is, I think we've learned a lot through that process. Ryan Cunningham: Back to your question about people going to offices and the team working in places, I think there's a lot of reasons why a lot of people really value that type of working whether... There's people on my team who live alone and are really, really craving social interaction with other humans that are ready to come back. But there's also people on my team and self included with young kids in the house and a lot to manage and really craving return to normalcy and in that type of life environment. Ryan Cunningham: So I think work from home, I think we've all learned that we can do it and some people have learned that it's even better for them, but I think there's a lot of people who will still value working in a physical location and I hope we'll return to a good chunk of that as well. Steve Mordue: Yeah. It does get kind of lonely for a lot of folks especially those social people that need to be around people, need the water cooler or need to go to lunch. Ryan Cunningham: Yep. Steve Mordue: That's the best part of what they're doing. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Let me ask you about... Maybe I'll get a little self-serving here now. Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Steve Mordue: You're familiar with our RapidStart CRM? Ryan Cunningham: Yep. Steve Mordue: And I'm just curious about what the team internally thinks about motions like the one we're doing and others are looking at where we've... And I know you'll be a little biased because you're more on the platform side as is Charles. Charles is less concerned about the first party group. They got their own problems to deal with, but we're basically making a business out of building simpler versions of what the first party Teams have built for an audience that isn't prepared for that level of complexity. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: And we've built it to run on the $10 pass, and we recently made it free. I'm just curious what the talk in the halls is about ISVs like us that are basically building products that are attacking directly. I mean, I'm attacking directly the sales professional for sure and even enterprise for a lot of customers because you've given us enough in the platform that I can build quite a bit for a lot of customers before I'd have to really go to those first party. What's the talk in the halls about that kind of motions? Ryan Cunningham: Well, luckily we don't have any halls anymore, Steve. We're all working from home. Steve Mordue: That's true. Ryan Cunningham: Otherwise we're- Steve Mordue: In the video halls. Ryan Cunningham: [crosstalk 00:36:36] Steve Mordue in every elevator lobby. Look, I will say a couple things on that. I don't want to speak for Charles, but from a platform perspective and certainly from my perspective too. Yes, our day job is focused on building a platform. Our biggest customer of the first party apps running on that platform still by revenue at least. We have a lot of incentive as a Microsoft shareholder and as a member of the business applications group and seeing the first party apps be successful. In fact, a lot of our effort and our engineering effort goes into helping those first-party apps be successful and stay successful and get modern and get fast and get mobile in addition to or in some cases around building the core platform itself. Steve Mordue: James has said not that long ago that make no mistake, those are what pay the rent. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, absolutely. Look, Power Apps is driving an incredible amount of growth from a both a usage and a revenue perspective. But yeah, I mean there's an established greater than a decade business in CRM at scale that customers are driving themselves trusting billions of dollars of business too and paying Microsoft a lot of money for that privilege, right? So we take that very seriously and we are directly incented to protect that business whatever that means. Ryan Cunningham: Now, that said to rewind earlier in the conversation, we're a platform company at heart right and it's not just that Steve Mordue can go out there and build a CRM system on the Dataverse and Power Apps platform. I mean, we have multiple Power Apps competitors building on the Azure platform. They're Azure, and that's great as a shareholder and as a software person. The best solution should win and that's never going to be a one-size-fits-all answer for every customer. To your point, there are some customers that are going to be best served by a certain piece of software and Microsoft as a builder of generic things is not going to get into every niche, it's not going to get into every vertical. Ryan Cunningham: We want an ecosystem of people to build on the platform and extend things and even build fully standalone things for those niches, because we won't get there ourselves and we know that there are more of them out there where expertise needs to go. For Microsoft to really have a Microsoft product offering at scale, it needs to have a really big business behind. It's a really big business behind it. There's plenty of opportunity in the market at other multiples that is very profitable for software vendors and very advantageous for customers that are businesses that Microsoft will not directly enter. Ryan Cunningham: So I think in those worlds if the platform doesn't work for that, then what's the point of having a platform. It needs to work for that and we need to make RapidStart successful just like we need to make the first party Dynamics app successful. I believe those two things are not at odds with each other and they should live in a co-existing world. Ryan Cunningham: From a customer perspective even as a platform person, a lot of people will come in and say, "Should I use this off-the-shelf piece of software or should I build it myself in Power Apps?" My first answer to them is always if the off-the-shelf thing does what you needed to do or even does 80% of what you needed to do, it's usually worth buying. And even if the price tag feels more expensive, because what you're buying there is a team of people behind that app who not only put all the effort into making it, but are going to keep putting effort into making it better. Ryan Cunningham: And whether that's Steve's team or whether that's Muhammad Alam's team that is almost less relevant. The concept is I'm going to buy a piece of software that people have already figured out a lot of the hard parts for this use case and they're going to keep making it better. Now the ability to extend it is really important in business applications because selling shoes is very different than selling wind turbines even if it all involves selling stuff. [crosstalk 00:40:55] Steve Mordue: It's one of the reasons we ended up going free. When I first came up with that idea for RapidStart, we launched it in 2015 and it sat on top of CRM online the single SKU at the time to just really make the whole thing simpler because there was that need for something to be simpler. I had this dream that I was just going to sell that. People would buy it, pay me every month and leave me the hell alone. That was what I had imagined. But everybody, everybody wants to tweak and fiddle and make it unique. We actually look back last year at our revenue with 10 times more revenue on the services of helping customers customize our app that we did on the recurring revenue. Steve Mordue: That's the reason we decided, "Well, let's just make the app free and lean into the services as much," because I really didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that business at all. Now, I'm being you know pulled in or the godfather won't let me out of the services business. But you're right, everybody needs something unique. So we really recast them as accelerators as opposed to here's something you just buy and use. But it's the same even with the first party apps. Nobody installs a first party app and just uses it. Steve Mordue: They've all got to be molded to fit the business, and I think that that's the nice thing about the platform whether it's on first party or just on Power Apps is you've got all the tools to... And that's actually one of the challenges we run into, I'm sure you guys do too where they look at some app and they say, "Oh, that's not exactly what I need," and then they move on, without realizing that, you know what, that can be exactly what you need and frankly, with the tools available that we have today, not that expensive, not anything like it used to be. Ryan Cunningham: Supposed than what I need and I can make it to work. Steve Mordue: Yeah, and a fraction of what it used to cost to do those kind of services. Ryan Cunningham: Part of making this stuff easier to adopt is about having apps that are much... At least much closer to what a customer needs out of the box. They don't have to do a bunch of customization upfront. I think something that we have been on the journey from, if you go rewind 10 years in CRM to now is make it less of a giant monolith make individual modules much more ready to consume. We've done a lot of work around that. But even within Power Apps, a lot of people get started by grabbing a template and implementing it and starting to use it fairly stock and then realizing, "Hey, I want to put my logo on it and then I want to change this form and then I want to change the field. And then I want a thing to kick off." Ryan Cunningham: Making the customization incremental as opposed to putting a really large tax and price tag before it's useful is one of the tactics we pursue to make it easier to get more people started. But that said, there will always be the need to tailor and customize software in a business application space. I think one of the trends we are seeing is this blurring of lines between... We like to pretend classically that there are ISVs who produce software and put it in the world and then never touch it. Ryan Cunningham: Then there are system integrators who do the dirty work of services to make it work. Those lines get really blurry in the modern world where from a classic services provider standpoint when I'm building and customizing on a platform, it's actually much easier to then start to templatize and repeat my solutions so I'm not just doing labor every single time. Ryan Cunningham: And to your point from a software maker perspective for customers who want to constantly customize it, it gets more viable to go the other direction depending on what your business model is. We see a lot of people living in that world. We even see customers themselves, energy companies, healthcare companies building stuff, financial services companies building stuff for themselves on the platform and starting to commercialize it to other people in their industry because it's on a platform that's transferable and that's something that classically you didn't see with line of business software. Ryan Cunningham: It was built in a vacuum custom and very tailored for one customer and then it sort of lived in that silo for a long time. But the ability to make those assets transferable is a huge advantage in this world. Steve Mordue: Back when they really first started pushing the Citizen Developer motion, I think I wrote a post about the end of SI business. This is it. We're all dead now. They won't need us anymore. The sky is falling, Chicken Little. But now as we've seen this thing roll out, because it is less expensive to get deployed, there are people building apps and using apps that would never have considered it before. Steve Mordue: So while I would say it's probably true that our average customer SI project has lost a zero in value, there's 10 times as many of them. So it's evened itself out. We've got many more customers available now than when the only way you could become a customer was if you had really deep pockets and a lot of patience. So we just opened up the number of potential customers by 10 times even though the deployment of each has gone down some. I'm not disappointed. Ryan Cunningham: And I think that trend is holding. I mean, I think you see even some of the big services companies like the big four and stuff like that actually seeing some very similar trends where they're building real practices on power platform whereas a couple years ago, they didn't see it as something for their business model, maybe even a threat to their business model. Now, they're realizing, "Look, I can drive real revenue out of this just the size and dollar amount and number of projects is a different mix that it was before." Ryan Cunningham: In some cases, those tend towards strategic consulting engagements. It becomes, let me think about helping a... For a large global organization to wrap their head around how do I use Citizen Development in my company? How do I keep it secure? How do I monitor it? Where do I let a business unit roll their own thing versus where do I bring in a team of professionals to build and maintain a solution? Ryan Cunningham: Even just that decision-making process and the center of excellence and governance practices that go around it, that's a major engagement that a lot of customers need help with right now because they're not organized for that today or resourced for it today. And then you look at getting into each of those individual projects. Certainly today, even in a future where apps are 10 times as easy to build as they are today, if I'm going to go roll out a mission mission-critical solution for managing customer data and critical decisions, I need software-minded people to help me think about how to keep that compliant, about how to build it in a way that humans are going to want to use it. Ryan Cunningham: Just because we put a tool like Photoshop out there in the world, does not instantly make everybody a photographer and a digital artist. There's still that mindset and expertise that's going to be really necessary. So for a lot of a lot of services organizations right now, I think they're realizing that there is a lot of value both in the execution of individual apps and projects, but then also in helping customers adapt to this new world where a lot of people can build software and you have to make decisions about who builds what and how you maintain it. [crosstalk 00:48:15] Steve Mordue: I think definitely one of the areas that's been blown up completely is the old ROI story because you used to be looking at a significant investment to deploy something of time and money, and the return on that investment was quite some time. That was what was going to limit the growth of any business application platform out there was... And now, that's produced almost nothing. Steve Mordue: So literally, Bob can go build something that starts generating revenue or saving money in an afternoon. The ROI, it's not even a question anymore about a half a day of Bob's time to go and streamline this process and save us five hours a day with his four-hour effort. Ryan Cunningham: True. Steve Mordue: And that didn't exist before. That just did not exist within the dynamics application before platform, before Power Apps, before Canvas apps. It's completely changed the entire game. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Before I let you go, what of the things as you look across the landscape right now and maybe the things that are coming up that have been discussed that people are aware of, what excites you the most? What do you think is... Two things. What are you the most excited about? And the other one is what do you think more customers would be excited about if they understood it better or realized that that's the most underutilized high value thing that people are just missing? Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Those are big questions. I think there's a lot that I get excited about. For people that know me, it's not hard to get excited. Steve Mordue: Yeah. You're excited about that lamp in the background, I know. Ryan Cunningham: Exactly. It's a great lamp. It's not. It's a crappy lamp from Ikea. Look, I think for me certainly there's a ton of work in our feature backlog that's really cool and really exciting and there's a lot of work particularly around bringing intelligence to the authoring experience that I'm pretty excited about. To the earlier conversation we're having about make it easier for people to be successful and maybe not have to deal with that formula bar, there's a lot of cool stuff that we're starting to apply. Ryan Cunningham: We've brought AI builder to end user apps, but actually bringing that to the maker experience of being just... And not in magical unicorn pixie dust ways, but just in really practical ways suggesting ways for people to do things, suggesting things to do next, making it possible to write logic in natural language as opposed to having to know all the ins and outs of the formula for example. There's some really cool stuff cooking there that I think will start to continue to open up orders of magnitude of humans who can be successful. Steve Mordue: Move that bar farther down the path. Ryan Cunningham: Absolutely, right? Classically, sometimes we think about those as tools just for true amateurs. But if you go look at even all the productivity that a product like visual studio has brought to professional developers, it's in stuff like Typeahead and linting and all that. It's really about bringing micro intelligence to those micro interactions that a person who's living in this tool for eight hours a day, all day long is going to need to be really productive. Ryan Cunningham: So we're really thinking about that both ways. So those things are exciting. I think if you zoom out a little bit though beyond the individual level of feature work, I would say, what's most exciting to me and what I hope is getting more exciting to more customers is less about any one individual feature or product and more about what's possible when you start to combine them at scale. Ryan Cunningham: I think that's where, if you look at organizations that have really gone all in on Citizen Development and low code for professionals as well and start to work together, you see this new way of working where you have professionals and amateurs and IT people and business people knowing each other and working side by side in a place where they traditionally were opposed to each other. Or at least just not aware of each other. And that's where you get not just one cool app with one cool feature, but literally thousands of applications inside of organizations that are just creating a crazy amount of value and you start to change you start to change the lives of people in those organizations. Ryan Cunningham: Both the people that are able to implement that stuff, but also you just make the jobs better for the people who get to use stuff that was built by their company and was built much faster. That's ultimately super exciting to me is to start to see this making a real change in the way that humans are working and doing it through a mix of apps and bots and automations, and Teams experiences. Ryan Cunningham: It's when those things sort of work together in concert that I think they get most exciting. So I'm thrilled to see that happening. I'm really excited about this end-to-end stack of what customers have done with Azure resources through power platform, in Teams and how that has created a meaningful dent and how a company works. I'm super excited about all the work we're doing to make that smoother to actually implement and manage and deploy, but I really hope customers see beyond the one use case, see beyond the one app or see beyond the one product and see what's possible when I start to change the economics of how software is rolled out in my company. And by economics, I mean not just- Steve Mordue: It is a discovery process. Ryan Cunningham: ... who participates. Right, yeah. Steve Mordue: It is a discovery process. They stumble upon something. They start using something and if they're successful with it, then they start discovering these other pieces around it that are available around it to extend on it. I don't think the technology itself right now that we have is a blocker to growth. I think the biggest challenge with growth right now probably relies more on the complexity of the licensing side. I mean, there's a lot of customers- Ryan Cunningham: I mean, I think there's good parts of it. Steve Mordue: ... that can't even get started because they don't understand what they even need or how to buy especially in the Power Apps store where they've got some seated Power Apps capabilities, they don't know what word seated even means or that they have it, and then they're seeing all these cool Power Apps things and they can't figure out how do I get from here to there? Why can't I do this and that? I think that probably is a bigger blocker to potential growth than the technology itself. Ryan Cunningham: Maybe. I would say certainly- Steve Mordue: Have you read the licensing guide? Ryan Cunningham: It's my favorite James Joyce story. Steve Mordue: I'll bet. Well, most customers haven't and wouldn't. Ryan Cunningham: Well, I guess what I would maybe zoom out from that, I would say... You're right. The technology itself can solve a lot of problems for a lot of different people and we have existence proof of that. Getting an organization at scale to discover it to see it in that light and then to have an organizational culture embrace it. Certainly licensing is a part of that, but it's also about who in IT is responsible for it? How do we govern it? Where do we roll it out? Who is footing the bill when I do understand how to pay for it? Ryan Cunningham: At the end of the day, licensing is actually very simple which I know is a controversial opinion. You get a measure of it in Office. For extending Office, you pay for Enterprise data sources. There's two ways to pay. You pay per app or you pay unlimited, full stop. That's the license. Now, we do not do ourselves many favors when we have classically rolled that out. And I absolutely take your point that we have made the communication of that complex. Ryan Cunningham: And for a lot of customers, this is not a commodity expectation. We're at a point right now where everybody needs an email account and a productivity suite and Word processing and every seller needs a CRM license and those things are not necessarily controversial, it just becomes about what's the best price from the best vendor. Because they're mature products in mature markets. Ryan Cunningham: Low code is at a very different state of market maturity. So for a lot of people it's about not just understanding how our pricing is structured, but understanding organizationally for them how do they conceptualize ROI? How does the market offer these products and how do I evaluate that potential expense against the value I'm going to get out of it? I think in addition to making things like the licensing guide easier to read for people who do not have PhDs, I think it's also really about helping the market get more mature and seeing... We really genuinely believe this will become an expectation of organizations. Ryan Cunningham: If you go fast forward another couple years, if I can't rapidly innovate internally and I am dependent on a team of professionals to start from scratch every single time that I that I need a problem solved, that's going to be a major competitive disadvantage for organizations. And on the flip side, being able to have every information worker be able to do at least basic tasks extending their software and solving their own problems is increasingly going to be an expectation. Ryan Cunningham: We're not there yet from a market maturity standpoint. Not everybody sees it that way, but we've certainly seen enough proof of organizations already evolving to that point that we know that that's coming. So I think being able to get to that place is a journey for a lot of companies. It's then really the next phase for us of bringing the world to where we know it can be. Steve Mordue: I mean, you just look at some of the things in the past like the first Obamacare website debacle with all the millions of dollars they spent to basically build a website and then look at what it would have taken for somebody to pop that up on portals today. I mean, there's no compare. I mean, we've actually lost projects in the past because the people thought we didn't understand the scope because we were like 10% of what the other companies... So we clearly misunderstood the scope and they just misunderstood the value of a platform and what that does to a development cost and time cycle and everything. Ryan Cunningham: There are government entities that rolled out COVID testing solutions on Power Platform in literally weeks to tens of millions of citizens and had that go off without any major hiccup. You're right. We get back to that pressure test. It's like getting that to go to scale and to help more people see it that way and be able to expect that from their software. That's really the next mountain to climb. Steve Mordue: I think the two challenges we've had around licensing are that Power Apps versus Power Apps. We've got these two products that really are our different products that share the same name and that puts some confusion in customers where they think they already have Power Apps. Ryan Cunningham: Have it right. Steve Mordue: They don't understand why they have to go buy Power Apps or they have Power Apps. And the other one is the passes, the per user or the per app passes. Those are assigned in a different way than all the other licenses they have been using internally for years. It's the only thing that's assigned that way. So it's a different process and they're looking at how do I do this? I've assigned licenses all the time. I don't understand how to do this. Steve Mordue: Those are two spots if you could personally take as a favor to me, go clean up the pathways [crosstalk 00:59:39] on those to make that as smooth as possible for people to understand, that would be that would be awesome. Ryan Cunningham: And that feedback is well heard across the market. I mean, we are at the pace that we were trying to do some work on the first problem to clarify really Power Apps for Office from our apps for stand-alone. And then separately the per app concept is a really powerful concept and actually a lot of organizations have embraced it. I don't know if I'm allowed to say this. there's more monthly active usage of apps on a per app license today and this has been true for many months than there were on either the older two licensed models, right? Steve Mordue: Sure. Ryan Cunningham: I mean it hunts for a lot of people when they can realize, "Oh, hey. This is a way for me to apply the value of the platform to a use case without having to go have this broader discussion about committing the entire organization to an unlimited number of apps." Steve Mordue: And just a difference of cost Ryan Cunningham: It's a different concept for people. Steve Mordue: And just a difference of cost. At $40, I can afford to have 10 people use this. Ryan Cunningham: Right. Steve Mordue: At $10, well I can afford to have 40 people use this. So suddenly, strictly related to cost, you're going to see that usage explode on those lower cost licenses because those are people now using an app that weren't going to be able to use it before. They weren't going to justify the expense for that level, that tier if you will. You start getting into 10 bucks, I mean that's pretty much anybody in the organization you could justify 10 bucks for. Now suddenly, everybody has an app. Ryan Cunningham: Yup. We've seen a number of customers already even though this has been in market only about a year. Start there and then very quickly realize, actually we want unlimited [inaudible 01:01:25] people through the transition is a phase as well. Steve Mordue: This is something that you take in account as a builder of apps also if you're wanting to try and build for that, you build your apps understanding the licensing structure and you design for it. So listen, Ryan, I appreciate you taking this time out of your, obviously not busy afternoon. Ryan Cunningham: [inaudible 01:01:50] Steve Mordue: A rare not busy afternoon for you, I'm sure. I'm feeling very lucky to have caught you when I did. Ryan Cunningham: Sure. Steve Mordue: Any closing thoughts? Ryan Cunningham: Hey, keep doing what you're doing, Steve both being a rock in the community and also pushing us on the platform to make it better. I think ultimately we see this as a thing we're doing together and I mean that really genuinely. We don't sit in an ivory tower. [inaudible 01:02:18] When we do, we make plenty of blunders, but I think this thing we are building is bigger than lines of code. It's a mindset and I think the more that the community embraces it, the faster we go. So I really appreciate you and everybody that is hopefully going to listen to this someday and participate. Steve Mordue: There'll be thousands listening. There usually are. So don't worry. Ryan Cunningham: Yeah, 100%. Thanks for the call, Steve. Steve Mordue: All right. Cool, man. Talk to you later. Ryan Cunningham: Be well, peace.    

$10 bills for $3 each, for a limited time!

Today, Microsoft business Applications group is announcing a special offer for Power Apps Per App Passes. It felt pretty significant, so I thought I would write a short post on it. The Offer Starting today, you can buy Power Apps Per App Passes for $3 each. The catch? Minimum 200 users... but still.. that is a pretty big deal for mid-sized and above companies. For example, combined with our free RapidStartCRM, that gives you an enterprise grade CRM for 200 users for $600/month!!! In addition to this offer, the Power Apps Per User plan is $12, instead of $40, but that has a 5K user minimum, so really for enterprise only. Let's do some math Wah, I don't have 200 users!  Well, $600 (the minimum) would also be equal to 60 users at the regular price. So any number of users over 60 starts saving money. For example 100 users ends up costing $6/user, 150 users ends up costing $4/user, etc. But, if you have less than 60 users, there is no advantage, so SMB is basically out of luck. Availability The Power App Per App pass promotion is available through Volume Licensing or CSP. The Power Apps Per User promotion is only available through Volume Licensing. Neither offer is available via Direct at this time. What happens when it ends? If purchased via CSP, the offer is good for one year, after that you should expect to go back to the $10 price, unless Microsoft decides to extend this (a possibility). Via Volume Licensing you can keep these prices for up to 5 years!!! This is just a short post, because I was excited about this. Contact your partner and ask them about it!

Microsoft marching masses to peak of Mt. Stupid

I recently became aware of an interesting concept in psychology called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and Citizen Developers came to my mind. What the hell am I talking about now? Read on to find out. The Dunning-Kruger Effect Essentially the Dunning-Kruger effect is one's own perception of their reality. Often displayed as the following image: For those of you who are listening to this, instead of reading it, I will describe the image. On the vertical axis is confidence level, from low to high. On the horizontal axis is Competence level, from "Know Nothing" to "Guru". It seems that many people, who know nothing, can have high confidence of their knowledge in spite of that fact that they... well... know nothing. In the Dunning-Kruger model this places these people at the peak of "Mt. Stupid". I am very familiar with that particular peak have spent my early 20's there. Following the peak of Mt. Stupid, is the Valley of Despair, where one realizes that they actually know... well... nothing, and their confidence plummets. From there, they travel the "Slope of Enlightenment" back up, slowly, until they reach the "Plateau of Sustainability", or actual Guru level. This assumes they remain on the "Slope of Enlightenment" long enough. Citizen Developers Almost every other day, I am on the phone with Citizen Developers at various stages of this model. Like all of the low-code platforms, the Power Platform's primary goal is to "enable" Citizen Developers. Unfortunately, all of the Low-Code platforms, including the Power Platform, present themselves in such a way as to give a person who "Knows Nothing" very high "Confidence". Thus, marching them Pied Piper style to the peak of Mt. Stupid. I have spoken to Citizens with this high confidence, aka "Cocky", and after about 30 minutes of conversation. aka "Enlightenment", have unintentionally knocked them off the peak and into that valley. Well... not the really cocky ones. Riding the Slope I have been involved with Business Applications for over 20 years and still feel firmly on the "Slope of Enlightenment". Whenever a platform, in my case Microsoft, adds a slew of new capabilities, that "Plateau of Enlightenment" just moves farther out. The best that the most knowledgeable and experienced of us can hope for, is to remain on the Slope... indefinitely. When a "Citizen Developer" thinks they are as capable as one who has been on the Slope for 5-10 or 20 years, they are clearly straddling the peak of Mt. Stupid. While I am not easily impressed by your Power App, I am professional enough to not laugh out loud at your feeble effort, since I understand, sitting on the Peak, you are quite proud of your accomplishment. Circumventing the Peak In my experience, this idea will be harder for men than for women, because it requires reading directions. But if you want to bypass the Peak, start at the Valley. Since you would not have gone to the Peak in the first place, the Valley is not one of despair, but rather the beginning of your journey on the Slope. If you want to do this right, and many say they do, but actually don't, then you need to invest the time. Do not fall for the over-confidence building marketing messaging from any low-code platform. Why? 25% 25% is about the percentage of our practice's work that is allocated to fixing things built by Mt. Stupid flag planters. I am reminded of a buddy of mine when I was a teenager. He thought he was a great mechanic, but every time he rebuilt something, like an engine, there was this odd pile of parts leftover. When asked about them he would say something like, "I'm not sure what those are, but they are definitely not needed". As I recall, his vehicles were always on blocks, and I never saw him drive one. A Fork in the Road What many Citizens miss are the forks in the road. Some are obvious, and still the wrong one is taken, and many are not so obvious. Where this matters is down that road, when the clear realization that the wrong fork was taken becomes apparent. I'm not sure if any statistics exist, but I would assume the number of efforts that went the wrong way, and were then either abandoned in frustration, or taken all the way back to the fork, is quite high. The biggest thing that Mt. Stupid does not provide, is a clear view into the future. However, after a while on the Slope, the future becomes quite predictable. Back to the Slope The Slope of Enlightenment is vast, and as I said, even those of us with decades on it, are still climbing. So where does a Citizen even start? I can tell you where we start. First, before building anything, we create the data-model. Apps are pretty easy to change, but the data model will eventually expose any wrong forks taken, and these tend to be the most complex to reverse. Second is typically the UI, getting the data onto forms in a usable way... this is harder than it sounds if you take into account user friendliness vs. function. Lastly is automation, which seems to be the thing too many Citizens are way too eager to get to. If this post sounds like I am bitch-slapping Citizens.... I'm not. I am fully cognizant of the movement, and it is actually not even a new movement. We still spend time unwinding Access databases built by tech savvy, but not business savvy Citizens of those days. I'm just suggesting that scaling Mt. Stupid does not give the same satisfaction as scaling Mt. Everest.  

The beatings will continue until morale improves

James Phillips, the head of engineering for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, that we all either use, or make a living on, recently tweeted "The name changes will continue until morale improves". It was a joke people!!! Relax My inbox blew up with people asking me what "morale" issue James was referring to. Jimbo was paraphrasing an old quote that I used for the title of this post. In fact, Jimmy is not even responsible for naming as far as I know,  that merry-go-round is operated by Alysa Taylor's team. I think JP was acknowledging the angst of name changes in a humorous way. So.... relax... morale is fine. But for some, there are legitimate concerns with certain motions other than naming. ISVs on Edge Despite James' public insistence that Microsoft wants to be a platform company, his product engineering teams are continuing to crawl up-the-stack. It was not that long ago, that the position expressed by Microsoft was, we will never go vertical, that is for our partners and ISVs. It feels to me like the recently launched "Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare" is pretty darn vertical. I also assume this is the first of more "Industry Clouds" to come. Microsoft's message to ISVs? "There's plenty of opportunity for ISVs here".  I'm not convinced yet. Keeping up with the Jones' This is most likely a Microsoft reaction to similar motions by Salesforce. I do understand the competitive forces in the marketplace, and reacting to them is necessary. But one of the reasons I moved from a Salesforce Consultant to become a Microsoft Partner 10 years ago, was the "Partner First' ecosystem. "Partner First', or 'Partner Led" have never been part of SFDC's lexicon. At the moment, I am struggling to reconcile Satya's words with some of these motions. You will eat it, and you will like it Historically, Microsoft provided the platform, and some relatively generic applications, that were then extended by SIs and ISVs to meet the specific requirements of verticals, including healthcare. It has been the meat of a business application partner's business. It feels to me that these Industry Clouds scrape much of the meat off partners' plates, and onto Microsoft's. It feels like we are left with mostly vegetables... and I never liked vegetables. Get on, or get out of the way None of us can say that Microsoft has not been crystal clear in their guidance to Partners and ISVs in the last few years: Get Vertical! Seeing the huge vertical opportunity, maybe Microsoft just got tired of waiting for us all to come around. So "Partner Led" becomes "Partners Follow", I can't say that I blame them, I'm not a particularly patient person either. Looking at a vast unmet opportunity, and sitting on your hands waiting for partners to see and act on it, would probably drive me to eventually elbow past the stagnant herd also. Seeds were planted I hate to say "I told you so"... but I did. I saw this coming with the initial launch of the first "Industry Accelerators", free data models with "example apps". Again, not enough of us bought into the accelerators, so "Industry Clouds" built by Microsoft on top of them, was an obvious next step. "Example Apps" evolved into finished, supported and SKUed applications from Microsoft. Impact on ISVs and SIs? It's too early to tell what the impact will be from these motions. Clearly if you had built extensive healthcare IP, there will be an impact, you may even find yourself competing with Microsoft in some cases. If you were thinking about building IP for Healthcare, you may have to focus on the vegetables now. For SIs, what you may have charged historically to build out a healthcare solution, will likely be less for extending a pre-built "Industry Cloud" solution. Who wins! This motion will be a win for the customers of course, by potentially lowering development costs, and having more direct support from Microsoft for Microsoft-built stuff. But I really feel that Microsoft will be the biggest winner. I have written before that Partners are simultaneously Microsoft's biggest asset, and biggest liability. While opening every partner presentation with the obligatory "Thank You Partners!" slide, there have been distinct moves to reduce their dependency on partners from Microsoft's first stepping into the cloud. "Citizen Developers" for one obvious example. I'll conclude this post by saying that, no business model is immune from disruption, and that includes Partners.