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Microsoft really, really wants small businesses to start buying Vista instead of XP. For the next three months, they’re offering “Windows Vista Small Business Assurance,” which gives free support and “one-on-one coaching” from “specially-trained support agents.”

Support is available 10 AM to 7 PM Pacific time, or 1 PM to 10 PM Eastern. (In case you’re wondering, that’s 10:30 PM to 7:30 AM in Mumbai, so THAT doesn’t explain it! Could it be that they’re actually providing this support from the West Coast?)

More details on the program available here and here. Now here’s the question: Is there anything in the description of the benefits of Vista that makes you want to upgrade your PC from XP? Or that makes you want to introduce a new PC running Vista into a business where everyone else is using XP?

What’s that? Some of the new features in Vista sound interesting? Did you know that you can add lots of Vista features to XP?

I suppose I like the idea of having my clients call someone other than me when they can’t figure out how to do in Vista what they’ve been doing for years in XP, so I don’t knock Microsoft for trying the free support idea. But it’s certainly not enough to make me start recommending it. As long as I can still get XP preinstalled with free upgrade rights to Vista, that’s what I’ll be buying. (Yeah, yeah, I know … I’m not really getting upgrade rights to Vista, I’m getting downgrade rights to XP. Same difference.)

By the way …

Although Eric Ligman proudly announced the program on his blog, he obviously didn’t write the copy for the WVSBA FAQ. The FAQ includes a question about the difference between WVSBA and Microsoft’s Software Assurance program. The FAQ’s answer is that “the Software Assurance program is an ongoing licensing agreement for larger enterprise organizations.” Really? Try telling Eric that small businesses don’t need Software Assurance.

Great public radio interview this week with Felix Dennis.

Some choice quotes:

One of the sacrifices that anybody makes who is determined to have more money than their neighbor is time…. And it’s not only them that’s doing the sacrificing…. Your spouse is going to sacrifice, your children are going to sacrifice, and so are your friends. That’s one of the downsides of this insane quest.

I don’t know anybody that’s made a hell of a lot of money from a standing start that doesn’t go through this madness [of spending too much money on unwise purchases].

If you want to be rich, you absolutely cannot do it unless you’re a jerk…. You really have to be pretty unpleasant.

I can show you how to get rich … but I can’t show you how to be happy…. I know a hell of a lot of people who are insanely rich, and I don’t know one of them who hasn’t had problems with their family…. They spend so much of their time making money, and it becomes a drug. It isn’t the money that’s the drug. It’s the making of the money.

There’s only so much pie to go around. There can only be so many rich people in any community of humans. If there’s only so much pie to go around and you’re going to take a lot more of it than anyone else, then you’re going to have to take that pie away from people. That’s effectively what you’re doing. You never read this in any of these new-age self-improvement books. They don’t want to mess with these kind of topics. But the truth is that you’re taking it away from someone else. It’s all right going on about how you’re manufacturing wealth — well in a way, you are. But you’re also stealing it from other people. To be like that, that means you have to be a pretty selfish person. You have to be driven…. Just a desire to be rich … is useless…. It has to be absolute compulsion…. If you’re a driven person, you’re often not very nice to be around.

Team spirit is the glue that binds losers together.

Admittedly, Dennis defines “rich” as having a net worth of over $30 million. He does allow that it’s possible “to end up with a few million bucks and still be a decent human being.” But the idea of an inverse relationship between net worth and niceness rings true to me.

Toward the end of the interview, Rosabeth Moss Kanter presents a somewhat more optimistic counterpoint, and she and Dennis engage in a rather heated debate.

If you have any thoughts of becoming a gazillionaire, you must give this a listen.

I narrowly averted a serious problem on a client’s server today. I got an alert from the server that the C: drive was down to about 50 MB of free space (and falling). That’s very bad.

It turned out that the problem was caused by an expanding log file created by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. I’ve updated my WSS-on-SBS instructions to acknowledge the problem and point people toward the fix, but I don’t have step-by-step instructions for fixing (or better yet, preventing) the problem quite yet.

If there’s another WSS-on-SBS’er who’s already got a fix for this and who wouldn’t mind contributing to the instructions so I don’t have to write them up from scratch, I’d love to hear from you.

Microsoft’s Kevin Beares and I have been engaged in a squabble about the SBS Community Survey. (See his blog entry and all the associated links and comments.)

Kevin asked me to stop debating the survey’s methodological merits, which I will happily do at this point. He also posed the following questions:

How about telling me what you think the SBS product team could do to improve your experience in the community? Do you think we should move to using Web Forums? Do you think we should have two entry points to the same discussion? In other words, you can either access the same conversations via a newsgroup client or a web forum UI via Internet Explorer (Or whatever Web Browser you prefer).

Let me take the second part first, because I think that’s an easy one. The answer is: What are you talking about? I can ALREADY access the same conversations via a newsgroup client or a web forum UI via Internet Explorer!

Newsgroup client:

Web browser:

Am I missing the point of your question? Were there other types of conversations and discussions you had in mind? If so, please be specific.

If I am missing the point, perhaps it’s because I don’t really understand your first question about how the “SBS Product Team” could improve my “experience in the community.” I have put these terms in quotes here because I don’t know what you mean by them; therefore, I have a hard time responding to your question.

“SBS Product Team”: Who are you and what do you do? Is the product team limited to developers, or does it also include marketing, documentation, support, licensing, research, channel and partner assistance, and so forth? What is under your control, and what isn’t? How do you relate to the other people at Microsoft who are not on the SBS Product Team — the Eric Ligmans, Paige Boesens, and Marie McFaddens of the world? (Although maybe Marie is actually on the Team … I really have no idea.) I can’t start making suggestions about what you should do until you give me some realistic parameters.

“Experience in the community”: This one’s tough because we have to define both “experience” and “community.” If my mayor or police chief asked what they could do to improve my experience in the community where I live, I’d have a pretty good idea of what they were talking about. But this is a lot more ambiguous. Kevin said that

The Windows SBS Community is whatever you define as the SBS Community. I am not in the position to define what our community is. So, no it is not limited to the SBS Community Resources listed in the survey. So, this is not a generally accepted definition or an attempt at a definition. It is what I have defined along with numerous other Community Lead across Microsoft as Categories of Community Resources that could at least be bucketed, rated, and commented on.

And Kevin also said that

My major focus is to get the product team engaged with the community…. Sometimes, we conclude that the community finds little value in [a particular Microsoft] resource, but because it is just that we have not given it enough attention and that they are upset that we have not spent more time keeping the resource up to date.

So I am really perplexed about what/who the community is, and whether the SBS Product Team is a part of it or not. The second quotation seems to put the SBS Product Team outside the community, because of how Kevin uses “we” and “they.” But the first quotation, as well as the survey, implies that “the community” comprises a set of on-line and telephone-based resources, many of them produced by Microsoft. I’m confused as to (a) whether the community is a set of people or things and (b) whether Microsoft’s role is to be the community or to provide information to the community.

Once we figure out who or what the community is, then we can move on to define what my experience in (or of) the community is and talk about how it might be improved. At this point I’m not sure if I should be making suggestions like “allow me to create a custom RSS feed of search results for specified keywords across all microsoft.public and microsoft.private SBS-related newsgroups” or like “create an SBS Community Facebook group” or “pay for pizza at our monthly user group meetings.”

I look forward to continuing our conversation and encourage others to join in.

Update, 6/23/08: Kevin doesn’t think I’m taking his questions seriously, and he has declined to pursue this conversation further. I’m sorry you feel that way, Kevin, because I really would like to provide helpful and constructive feedback. But without a better sense of what you really want to know, I can’t do that. Sorry if I’m being a complete dunce and missing something obvious here, but I am honestly at a loss as to what you’re trying to get at. Perhaps someone else can clue me in.

A few other solo IT consultants have asked me how I get my clients; that is, what marketing strategies work best for me. Currently, 100% of my new business is generated through referrals. Referral sources include current and former clients, other IT consultants, friends, and people I’ve met through professional networking. My business has matured considerably over the years, and I am now taking on only two or three new clients a year.

I currently have 27 clients that I work with on a regular basis. They range in size from a single computer to about 35 PCs, with an average of around 10. Here’s a summary of how and when I started working with them:

It may not jump out at you from looking at the table, but I want to stress that the most critical source of revenue for me is repeat business. The importance of doing a good job and maintaining a good relationship with your existing clients cannot be overstated.

In terms of acquiring new clients, referrals from other IT consultants have been tremendously important to me. (For more on working with other consultants, see my “Ten Commandments.”) They’ve referred business to me either because they’re getting out of the IT support business and/or the Boston area, or because the client is not a good fit for them (usually the client is too small).

The “Prospect” referral listed above is one of my favorite stories. In 2003 I had a sales call with a small client in a large office building in downtown Boston. The meeting went well, but I didn’t get the job because the business owner decided to hire someone he had known personally for years. But a few weeks later I got a call from another business on the same floor of the office building. It turned out that the office managers from the neighboring businesses happened to strike up a conversation about their IT management needs one day in the ladies’ room. The office manager I’d met had kept my card, and one thing led to another. The other office manager — the one who actually hired me — left the client a few years ago, but my relationship with the firm is still going strong.

Since 2000, I’ve done business at least once with about 150 additional clients. Some of these were “one-offs” and some relationships lasted for years. I can’t possibly reconstruct the referral source analysis for all of these, but I know that consultant referrals, client referrals, and networking have always been important. In the early years, there were two additional sources of revenue:

• Direct solicitation. When I started SCHRAG, I happened to live in a condo in Boston that was within walking distance of dozens of small businesses. I made up a little sales kit and went door to door introducing myself as a neighbor. One client hired me on the spot. I only remember one occasion on which I got a grim stare and a finger pointed toward the “No Soliciting” sign on the wall. I also got hold of a mailing list of local businesses and did a small direct mailing, which led to at least one sale.
• Web searches. I remember that one client found me through my listing on the web site of the Independent Computer Consultants Association. I believe that one or two might have come across my own web site through search engines.

I don’t know if that information is helpful to anyone, but I hope it at least answers the question.

The recording of yesterday’s conference call with Karl Palachuk is now available.

As Karl promised, one of the topics we discussed was my “Ten Commandments” for solo IT consultants. I’ve now posted those commandments, with commentary, on The Schlog.

Problem: The SSL certificate for mail.myclient.com expired. The certificate had been purchased from GoDaddy and was installed on the server by a former network admin. No one had any idea whose GoDaddy account had been used originally, and GoDaddy couldn’t tell us for security reasons. So there was no easy way to renew the certificate. We thought that trying to renew the certificate using a different GoDaddy account might lead to problems, so we decided to purchase and install a brand new certificate.

Unexpected difficulty: I tried to follow the excellent instructions for installing a public 3rd-party SSL certificate on IIS on SBS 2003 at the Official SBS Blog. But in step 5 of those instructions, you are told to “select a Host Header value for this Web site that does not conflict with existing sites.” In the example they provide, they set the Host Header equal to the FQDN of the server: mail.contoso.com. In my case, though, the Host Header “mail.myclient.com” did conflict with an existing site — the one with the expired SSL certificate. So I got an error message when I tried to create the site (step 6).

Solution: The name of the temporary web site and its Host Header value do not need to match the FQDN of the server. I ended up creating a web site called Temp Cert Request with a Host Header of tempcertrequest.myclient.com. I used that web site to generate the CSR request, making sure to put mail.myclient.com in as the common name in the wizard (step 11). I used “2008 mail.myclient.com” as the Friendly Name (step 9) just to make sure I knew which certificate was which.

Thanks to Andy Harper and David Houston for assuring me that I didn’t need to worry about matching Host Header with FQDN.

Michael Vizard has an interesting commentary on the choice we IT consultants face between offering our “own” services and offering similar services from well-known, brand-name providers. It’s not all that different from the choice we faced years ago, between selling “white-box” PCs and recommending or reselling Dell, HP, IBM, and so on.

There are still a few IT consultants building and selling their own brand of PCs, but they’re getting rarer and rarer. My guess is that the Software-as-a-Service market will follow a similar direction. I’ve already stopped pretending that I provide any custom-built managed services. All I do is:

• help my clients figure out what services they need;
• identify which major manufacturers can provide those services most cost-effectively (on a client-by-client basis);
• make sure those services get installed and configured properly; and
• help monitor the performance of those services (to the extent that the manufacturers don’t do the monitoring themselves)

The value I add is not the underlying service itself (backup, anti-malware, system monitoring, etc.) but rather the trained hand-holding that my clients require to get the services in place.

I’m not sure if this approach will be my downfall or my salvation. Could be either, but will probably be neither.

Well, not exactly. But if you’re running a one-person IT consulting business, it should be a reasonably valuable way to spend an hour of your time. Tune in on June 18th at 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time, and in the meantime, buy some books from our sponsor.

Microsoft is conducting a survey of people who use Small Business Server about their experiences with the Windows SBS Community. I have some serious problems with the survey and I’ve expressed them here. I’ve gotten some heat for my criticism here (and maybe here — I’m not sure exactly what Vlad is getting at.)

Feel free to take your own shot at me via comments on this post or in responses to Kevin’s or Susan’s blog. Or, if the spirit so moves you, feel free to agree with me as well.