got incentive?

don't know if any of my microsoft partner peers who visit the funcave ever feel this way...

but your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy often gets distinctly overwhelmed with the barrage of various types of communication about promotions and incentives from redmond.

between the snail mails, e-mails, random phone calls, and other incidental methods...it's almost enough to put a person in the cuckoo's nest.

this is not to say that i don't appreciate said incentives.

it's just that...well...sometimes the incentive-ness of a given incentive gets completely lost in the deluge of information...which i'd assume hurts the uptake numbers on said incentive.

so...imagine my delight at finding the following one-stop-shop from good ol' microsoft, which is...ironically enough...titled:

microsoft incentives

now this is what i'm talking about...a site that:

• looks clean, simple, and uncluttered...pleasing to the eye...a tad peaceful, even
• groups incentives intelligently...so i don't have to wade through a bunch of crud that doesn't interest me, or any of my clients

and above all...

• has a complete lack of stupid acronyms that mean literally nothing to anybody outside of redmond's corporate hq

sharp-eyed folks will notice, however, that the reason for this beautiful simplicity is that...the site is customer-facing.

so...tell me something...why are the partner-facing sites not this clean?

why does it sometimes take hours of wading through the partner portal, searching fruitlessly, cursing loudly, bashing your keyboard repeatedly, and numerous mind-numbing calls to the partner resource center to find even the simplest of things?

simplicity does not equal dumb.

quite the contrary.

simplicity, in your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy's opinion, equals elegance.

and that is something the partner portal sorely needs a heaping helping of...and how!