Viewpoint: Custer meets Big Chief Sitting Bill
Resellers may face a future dilemma as Microsoft realigns in a bid for omnipresence
North Dakota and Seattle are on roughly the same lines of latitude. Whether this means Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has Indian blood in him though is another matter entirely. In was in Dakota that Colonel Custer believed he could surround Sitting Bull and a few Indians, only to find his troops sprouting so many arrows that they might have been mistaken for pin cushions.
Is it possible that 120 years later, the Battle of Little Bighorn may be refought in Seattle? If it is, Vars had better decide if they?re siding with the overwhelming forces of Sitting Bull, or chucking their lot in with the hapless cavalry.
What we are talking here is not so much Wintel-type alliances versus the IBM-cum-Java camp, but more about how digital convergence could leave Microsoft in such a commanding position in a newly transformed world that even Custer would consider dancing around Chief Bill?s totem pole. Whereas the IT and telecom markets have previously been discreet entities with their own dealer networks, convergence is now reshaping the industry so rapidly that Vars which fail to recognise and realign themselves to the change could soon be chewing dust.
It is no coincidence that Microsoft is busy forming alliances with, if not swallowing wholesale, once rival companies in areas like CTI, call centre provision and remote workflow. Gates himself let slip last month how he was repositioning Microsoft in anticipation of the internet becoming the ?primary delivery vehicle? for software products in the near future. But that?s only half the story. As any dealer knows, once software installation is complete there is the aftermath of calls, with demands for technical help, upgrades, diagnostics, training and so on ? in fact a whole gamut of lucrative opportunities for post-sales service, which can increasingly be dealt with remotely. Hence Gates? enthusiasm to expand Microsoft?s scope, especially as the demand for core Windows technology plateaus.
Some of the latest alliances are with UK-quoted outfits such as Royalblue, which specialises in call centre packages aimed at larger businesses, though Gates is also on record as saying that he believes this market sector could reach $3 billion-plus by 2000 if the technology is extended to medium-sized businesses ? doubtless a la Microsoft.
Gazing further into the crystal ball, it is easy to envisage a world where the bulk of international businesses use Microsoft browsers to source their IT needs, download (Microsoft) applications using Microsoft data transfer protocols, have after-sales calls routed by software developed by guess who and, receive diagnostic help from a global support centre run by ? well, no prizes.
If, as a dealer, you find this vision unsettling, equally disturbing is the rumour that Gates is setting up a software development and customer support facility in India, doubtless irrespective of the lower wage paid for programmers there. The outsourcing of programming to expertise-rich places like Delhi and Moscow has grown apace in recent years, held back only by language, bandwidth and development platform. But international customer support centres can overcome the first obstacle, and improvements in global data-switching networks make it almost as easy to develop and test an application remotely as it is to phone the local curry house and order a chicken madras.
Equally, if a call centre can be demonstrated to function internationally as a technical hotline, why not sell the expertise to, say, the banking or insurance industries to help with general customer enquiries, especially as the digital revolution unfolds. It does, however, beg the ultimate question of whether Gates, once he has sucked the technical expertise out of his partners, will still want to use their services.
If Gates ? like Sitting Bull ? were able to surround all his rivals, including friendly Indian tribes, it would give him an industry omnipotence that, with the trade barrier-breaking internet, could make him geographically unassailable. All that would be left is taxation, and whether telecom- delivered services are subject to an individual country?s import levies, or that of the host country. Defining corporate tax liability, especially for an operation in cyberspace, could also prove interesting. President Clinton ? enthusiastically backed by Gates ? wants to see the internet a free trade zone, describing it as the ?Wild West? of the planet?s economy. Meanwhile, others may say it?s no safe place for the likes of Custer. Or resellers for that matter.