Sunday, March 19, 2006

okey...it's holstered...but my hand's still at my hip...

regular visitors to the funcave know that a couple of weeks ago, the official soldering iron of justice got set to flambe for a while.

the reason?

one of my clients was contacted by someone claiming to be from microsoft, who then proceeded to:
  • ask them probing questions about their network
  • press them for details about quoted project cost amounts from us
  • offer to have another consultant quote that same work for them
yours truly was able to validate fairly quickly...from the partner resource desk...that the contact did, in fact, originate from microsoft.

based on the questions that were asked, the contact seemed to be using information that had been included in an entry submission for this client to the recent tech makeover promotion targeting small business, which is still active.

needless to say, the initial report submitted here at the funcave...which was subsequently picked up here and here...got the attention of the mothership pretty quickly.

your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy would like to point out that the reaction was both swift and professional from some very high-placed folks in both the us partner program and the us small biz group (thanks to margo and eric, respectively) and particularly from shelley, the program manager for the tech makeover promotion.

from the moment we first spoke on the phone to the time at which shelley had the info on the exact campaign and had initiated contact with that campaign's team was less than 4 hours.

the upshot to all this which is...

your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy has been about 95% satisfied that the client contact did not originate from anyone associated with the tech makeover promotion.

for someone as paranoid as yours truly...that's as close to 100% as it'll get.

what hasn't changed, however...no matter what group it originated from...

contact with one of my clients was initiated by microsoft, unbeknownst to me.

that has been 100% verified as fact...by multiple sources.

as such...

you can bet money that any initiative/promo/whatever in the future which would involve your friendly neighborhood happyfunboy submitting any information about any of his clients/prospects/whatever to the mothership...

anything like that will get a big pass here at the funcave.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just did a follow-up post about this on my blog. As a certified partner I really tend to be pro-Microsoft, but if this "incident" becomes a trend, it represents a huge threat to the partner program.

7:55 AM  

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