It's almost a year since I wrote here. I do write a few other places (2 blogs, facebook, twitter - all accessible from http://www.MillerManor.net). I just finished my seasonal, part-time gig as a Scuba Santa at the Newport Aquarium (http://bit.ly/scubasantaslides). This is more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Now on to Response Point. 

I was an early adopter of the Microsoft Response Point small business telephone system. I am an IT Consultant focusing on the SMB space. I sell and manage networks for small businesses - the Outsourced CIO/IT Provider. When RP came along I just knew it was the perfect complement for me and others like me. With a little bit of networking knowledge I was able to provide not only the computer infrastructure for my clients but the voice/telephone infrastructure as well. I abhor cliches but this is really SYNERGY - where the sum of the parts is bigger than the individual pieces. Microsoft put a lot into the development of this product and it was really exciting to be a part of it. I was fortunate to meet and correspond with most of the players in the Response Point ecosystem. I attended several IT conferences that had Response Point as an included topic and gave several presentations on this product.

That is how it went for about the first year and a half of my participation in the Response Point product. MSFT had a lot of people working on the product and updates and enhancements were always eagerly awaited and exciting. Then came about May '09 when MSFT yanked the plug on the Response Point project. They took the development, support and marketing staff and knocked it down to a skeleton. The official word went pretty much like this:

This was translated into - MSFT has not done anything since then that is visible to the partners or consumers in the way of advancing this product. The reason I am even writing this now is because I received my quarterly Response Point Newsletter from Microsoft. This newsletter is kind of a joke and I would be embarrassed to even put this thing out if I were them. The most noticeable aspect of this newsletter is that there is no content that comes from Microsoft - it is all strictly a collection of reiterating what the OEM's that are still with the product are doing. So, the biggest statement of this newsletter is what is not said - MSFT has left the building.

My business is a service business. I benefit from good products (hardware and software) that tie in with technology and my company's services but I do not rely 100% on any particular product. My business will manage just fine without Response Point as an energized product but it was much more exciting when there appeared to be a future for Response Point. I still sell Response Point because it is a good product in its current incarnation. It does however have limitations and I know that this is a dead end.

I think that MSFT blames the market for not beating down the doors for Response Point. MSFT, as some of you may have already figured out, does not know how to market products to the SMB space. They think that engaging partners and putting a few pages on one of the most confusing web sites in the world should drive sales. I can't tell you how many times I went to that web site looking for something that I KNEW WAS THERE and absolutely failed when I tried to find it. The piece that was missing with Response Point was Microsoft's investment in a customer facing marketing campaign (not the web site) to drive consumer awareness.

This could have been great.

RIP Response Point