The long and winding road to Cougar

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And so anyway, I was chatting to a bunch of SBS partners up in Brisbane the other night when the topic of "authentic marketing" came up - a la Seth Godin.

The question which prompted this topic (quite rightly asked) was: "Why should my existing SBS customers upgrade to Cougar?"

Now on the one hand, as the local product manager I'm privy to information that I couldn't share at the dinner table about the upcoming version & so could only talk about the features/benefits that had been publicly announced - ie, it will be 64bit, include Windows Server 2008, come in a range of exciting new colours etc - everything confirmed & discussed in Charlie's TS2 blog.

On the other hand however, even if just concentrating on the publicly announced features, it was a challenge to quickly & clearly articulate the benefits for customers who have been quite happy on SBS 2003 R2 for the past couple of years. Yes, I know with the upcoming announcements (watch this space) that all will become apparent, & yes we still have a long way to go before launch, & yet the desire to speak authentically about why customers should upgrade means that we (everyone involved in marketing, selling & supporting SBS) still have a bit of work to do in order to get ready for Cougar.

With this in mind, I'm going to be asking myself some likely questions over the coming months & would love your feedback, as your customers may well be thinking the same thing come launch:

  • Why Cougar & why now?
  • Why, specifically, are you recommending this over what was installed just 2 years ago?
  • What cost savings will I reap by going down this path?
  • What other customers in a similar situation have done this & what did they experience?

Believe me when I say these are the same questions that I'm working with Corporate on to get concrete answers to so that by launch, as Seth says, we can all be "spreading ideas that you believe in, sharing ideas you're passionate about... and doing it with authenticity."

Robbie

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    February 20th: Microsoft has taken the wraps off the shiny new SBS 2008 as part of the newly announced