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Discuto decisão de uma Ação Civil Pública que condenou a Rede Record e o Bispo Edir Macedo por danos morais coletivos em razão de vídeo que colocava pessoas homossexuais no mesmo patamar de criminosos. Discuto os limites e os abusos das liberdades de expressão e religiosa a partir de 2 casos do STF: HC. 82424 e ADO. 26.Design novo by  @AndersonHortaDesign 

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What's up church. How we doing? It's good to see all of you here. It Frederick. Good to see all of you at Nyah. Good to have all of you online. Just say this. I did one of those baptisms. That's the fastest changing I've ever done in my entire life. I it was, it was fun cuz I knew a couple of those kiddos and so I just wanted to be out there and see both of them get baptized and I cut it a little short on time, so. Alright. We're good. Everybody settle down or Sean settle down and we're ready to go. So I want you to get to Matthew chapter five. We've been there for six weeks. If you're just kind of showing up today, we've been there for six weeks and going through this series called Jesus manifesto where we've been kind of tracking through the beginning of the sermon on the Mount. And so the beginning of the sermon on the Mount, it's called to be attitudes and there are eight of them and we're in number six and number six says this, Jesus just makes a statement. He says blessed or blessed. You could say, I've got my king James going on. Blessed are the pure in spirit are pure in heart for, they will see God blessed are the pure in heart for, they will see God. It's interesting. I think no matter if you're sitting at NIWA, you're sitting right here in the room at Fred or you're online. There's nobody that kind of says, what does it mean? Like pure, pure in heart or purity. When we talk about relationships, like we talk about relational purity. I think every single person gets it now guys, interesting thing this year is my 25th anniversary with my wife, Jen. Pretty cool. Right? And it's all, all 25 years have been marital bliss. I mean, that's what, I don't know what she would say, but no marriages can be difficult. Can it, but, but I tell you this man, the commitment and being together for 25 years and the things that we've gone through and seen, and then just how sweet, you know, as you grow and you mature things just get better when you're working on things, man. It's good. But when we talk about relational purity in the context of those 25 years, I don't think anybody's confused what that looks like. Like when we sit here right now, we would say, okay, that means that Sean only has eyes for Jen. Right? We talk about the context of relational purity. It means she's the one I pursued. There's not other interests. Like my eyes, aren't wandering to other things. We just moved in this new community or a new neighborhood north side of Firestone and it's got a pool and our kids go down the pool. We don't normally go down the pool hardly at all, but I'll go down and play with the kids a little bit, whatever, but let's say we did. Let's say Jen and I went down to the pool and we just kind of hung out on a couple lawn chairs. Kids are playing in the pool. We're having a good time. We're taking in some rays and let's say an attractive young female walks by. And let's say that I did this, took the sunglasses man. What would happen in that moment? Like my wife would probably, after she slapped the snot outta me, right? She would look at me and say, what are you looking at? Because when we talk about relational purity, ma'am relational purity starts with us having eyes for one person. Right? And when, when we have wandering eyes, nothing good happens from that. Like you just know in the context of relationships, when somebody has wandering eyes just constantly and consistently, and there's always an issue of that, man, we alone relationally that can lead to all kinds of stuff. Even biblically. It talks about in relationships that wandering eyes lead to lust, wandering eyes lead to this one big word that we can talk about. We all know adultery, right? Purity and relationships means I have eyes for one. Now. It's interesting. When we talk about relational purity, we get it. But let's step back for a second. When we go into what Jesus is talking about, he says blessed of the pure and heart he's talking about spiritually there. So what does it mean to have spiritual purity? It's interesting to note that when you go to scripture and you just look throughout scripture, it's very similar. Like the language that is used for spiritual purity and spiritual impurity is the same. Basically. If you go through the new Testament, the new Testament writers say, here's what Jesus said. They repeat that. Then they add their own color to that and say relational purity is having eyes for one, having eyes for God. Relational impurity is having wandering eyes or a wandering heart. And it talks about it in the context uses the same exact words. When it gets to impurity, it says wandering hearts lead to things and it use the same exact language leads to lust for the desires of this world, leads to cheating, uses that word and it uses the big one adultery now alt tree, Matthew chapter five, verse eight, Jesus nails it out. And he says blessed to the pure heart for, they will see God blessed to the pure heart because they have eyes for God and for God only. So my question to you would be who do you have eyes for? Who do you have eyes for spiritually speaking? Where are your eyes trained to look? Because here's what you know. And it's exactly why my wife would. I only have eyes for her, but if that happened, my wife would look at me and say, what are you looking at? Because what she knows is our, our hearts have a tendency to follow what our eyes are focused on. And it's the same spiritually. You know, this, your heart has a tendency to follow what your eyes are focused on. So who do you have eyes for? Again? Jesus says blessed to the pure hearts for, they will see God when you read the Bible is seriously clear. It is abundantly clear. You cannot miss this. Jesus cares deeply about your heart. Like when we think about the thing that Jesus cares about most it is your heart. Why? Because your heart reflects your true character. Everything you say, everything, you do, everything. You think everything about you comes out of the overflow of your heart. And because of that, the Bible says you gotta guard. It proves 4 23 says, guard your hearts, bubble, all else, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it. And what is in your hearts will come out through every part of your life. And the interesting thing is Jesus cares about your heart. Here's what he says is Jesus came to change your heart, not just your conduct. You see what most of us feel like is is that the Christian life or the spiritual life is a list of a code of conduct. That if we do these things, God will bless us and God will take care of us. Here's what you need to understand is the spiritual life like purity of heart, keeping our eyes on God. It's not just a code of conduct. God cares less about your conduct. He cares more about the condition of your heart. We could say it this way. God cares less about your sin and more about the condition of your heart. And he might sit there and say, whoa, I thought God really cared about sin and hated sin. He does. But he actually cares more of the condition and the attitude and the direction of your heart than he cares about what you actually do. And there's so many evidences of that in scripture you take David, how could David be a man after God's own heart? David King, David who committed adultery and murder. He didn't just go like this. He went there and God said, you know what? David did mess up. But David confessed, he came back to God and God said, you know what? David from the beginning has always had a heart that no matter what he did wrong, he's always come back to me for some of us that might be helpful in the moment to know that God cares less about your sin. And he cares more about the condition of your heart. So not just who are your eyes trained to look back, but where is your heart? What is your heart connecting with when it's spiritually? Now it's interesting when Jesus talks about this idea of caring less about your sin and more about the condition of your heart, he actually uses a word. There's, there's a word later in the passage that we've just talked about. He actually uses the word adultery and here's an interesting thought Jesus would not be okay. Like it wouldn't be okay with him. If there was just, let's say in our tri towns area, in the Nyah area, Longmont area, let's say on the front range, if there were no acts of adultery and we're like, that would be good, man. Not some of you like I've seen that in my family. That would be really good. Jesus would not be satisfied with that. And he says it in Matthew chapter five versus 27, 28, he says, you've heard it said you shall not commit adultery. So he's acknowledging that's 10 commandments, right? But what's the 10 commandments. It's a code of conduct. What's the B attitudes. It's deeper issues of the heart in talking about character. He says, you've heard it said you should not commit adultery. But I say to you raise the bar that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in their heart because Jesus knows that our heart goes to what our eyes are focused on. So what's in our heart will come out through our actions ultimately. So Jesus says I'm not waiting all the way down to line to the symptoms of what's already into your heart. When they come out, I'm concerned with your heart right now because your heart is gonna do some things. If there is negative in there, if there's sinful in there, it's gonna come out through your life and it will hurt you. And Jesus says, man, I am the only one that can help you get past that and experience a different life. Man, Jesus is deeply concerned with our heart for Samuels Samuels 16 seven says, man, looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the hearts. Man, Jesus did not come into our world just to try to fix a few bad habits. Jesus came into our world to fix some broken hearts and to give us new hearts that could change the world we live in. So what Jesus mean, bless her to the pure heart for, they will see God. What does he mean by a pure heart? Now we talked about eyes only for God, but let's, let's go a little bit deeper. What's Jesus actually talking about. It's interesting in James chapter four, James is the brother of Jesus. If you didn't know that and James chapter four versus four through 10, we'll just kind of go through it. He uses some of the same language. So just listen with me and we're gonna read it. You don't have to go there cause I'm gonna read it in a different version. We're gonna read it in the message, which is a paraphrase. It's not actually a translation, but it's a paraphrase. And it's right down the lines of what Jesus is saying right here. Here's how he says it. James four, four through six, he says, you're cheating God. And that that's pretty pointed. He says, you're cheating. God. If all you want your own way, flirting with the world, every chance you get, you end up enemies of God and his way. And do you suppose that God doesn't care? The proverb has it. He's a fiercely jealous lover. I mean, just notice the language we've already talked about. He said, GE Jesus, God is like, he is after you. He can't keep his eyes off of you. You're the only thing in his sights. He's pursuing you. He loves you. He wants what's best for you. He is a fiercely jealous lover. And what's he jealous of is you going toward other competing things because he knows it's not best. What happens is we go through those things and we do those things. And we end up on the backside going, dang, that wasn't best. God's saying, I'm trying to save you from that. He says, he's a fiercely jealous lover. And what he gives in love is far better than anything else you will ever find message. Version says, you're cheating God. The new international version, which we usually use says you adulterous people and he's talking to church people. If you're sitting here today and you never committed your life to Christ, man, you just, you can listen, but this isn't pointed toward you because you haven't made that commitment to him. You're not in that relationship with him. And I think you should be. And I think the best comes out of that. And we tell you how to do that. But, but he's talking to Christians and he says, you adulterous people. And he's not talking about people who are breaking their marriage vows. He's talking about everyone whose heart is divided from commitment to the world and commitment to God. People who have wandering eyes that they're going after all of these other things that are leading them away from God. Only one thing can have our focus. And James is talking about this idea of a pure heart, same thing as Jesus. And what's interesting about it is he takes a little bit different take when James talks about purity of heart, he's talking about the issue and the idea of wholeness. So think the word integrity for a second. We know how we would describe integrity, but let me give you some history. The word integrity actually comes from the word integer. Like if you won't go all the back to like your math days, like way back, like I can't even remember those days, but you wanna go all the way back to school, age stuff. And you think about math, man. You know what an integer is or an integer it's, it's a whole number, right? It means some of you just like, oh yeah, I forgot that. Right? It's a whole number. It's it's not a decimal. It's not a fraction. It's the idea of something not being part, but being the whole, you see, that's where we get our word integrity. Now what's interesting is you don't, let's take it a step further. You don't just get the word integrity from that word. You also get the word integration. Now think about this. Let's just track this for a second. You and I, we know what segregation is. Segregation is when you take people or things and you divide them by their differences. And we know from history, that's not good. What integration is is no matter what our differences are, no matter what the parts of the whole, no matter if we have different ideas, different thoughts, different backgrounds, different skin colors, different gifts, different. We don't segregate those things. Integration is bringing all those things together in one huge human family, right? And we would say that's best because we learn from each other. And at the core of who we are, we're all the same. We are created in the image of God. That's integration. So think about it this way. A lot of people, they segregate their lives. Think it of it like a pie. They take their life and they segregate it into different slices of the pie. And that's what James is talking about right here. He's saying, we just say, you know, here's my church friends and here's my work friends and here's my school friends and here's my party friends and here's my family life. And here's my work life. And here's my sports life. And here's my hobby life. And here's my secret life. Don't want anybody to know about. And we segregate all those different parts as what happens in most people's lives is as they flow through those different parts of the pie, they're different in each of those places. Like, I'll be honest. Like there's probably today. There's some of you sitting here and feeling a little bit because you know, you walk in and you say hi to the church family. Like, Hey, what's up? How's it going guys? Everything's good. And going, and you're heading out tomorrow or Friday night. And if somebody sees you with those friends, not that you shouldn't have those friends, but it's a different action and attitude and language and everything else between this place and that place, somebody that stand up and we worship. And then we sleep around on Monday. And what James is saying is, dude, that's cheating on God. He's saying integrity is not the parts of the pie. That's not integration. He's saying integrity is the filling that goes through the whole pie. Like your life. That's what we're supposed. You wanna talk about purity of heart. It's keeping our eyes focused on one thing and making sure that one things fills every parts of the pie for us. Then when you're hanging with your church friends and you're hanging with your work friends and you're hanging with your family and you're hanging with your sports buddies or, or your ladies now, whatever it might be, there is a similarity to all of those things that invades it. And we can say, yes, my eyes are still on God. And for some of us, we kind of sit back and we're like, no, I, I don't know if that would really be true. And what James is saying is, man, we've got to integrate God into every part of our life. And that is purity of heart. And that is something beautiful. So big question is like, how do we do that? Like how do we create purity heart? Can I just stop for a second and say this? You can't. You're like great, Sean. That was really helpful today. really appreciate that. No, you just need to understand. I need to understand. We all need to understand that purity of heart is not something you achieve. It is something you receive. Let me say that again. Purity of heart is not something you achieve. It is something that you receive. Like we know the story of scripture. What Jesus did is he came here to a world of people who'd segregated. Their life messed up their life. That sin was as they had taken their eyes off of God, we've wondered. And each and every one of us, we have sinned for all of sin and fall short of the glory of God, Roman chapters three verse 23 says it. And there had to be something paid for that impurity because what impurity does is it distance us from God, just like sitting there. If I were to do this, man, my wife, her heart is gonna go P it's the same thing with God. Sin separates us from God. But what Jesus did on the cross is he came and he, because he could not keep his eyes off of you. He pursued you. You're the one thing he kept his eyes on. And he said, I love these people so much that I'm gonna come. And I'm the only perfect one. The only one with purity of heart. And he came and he allowed that pure heart and life and soul and body to be crucified on a cross. And what he says is for you and me, is that because he was the one who was perfect enough to pay that penalty. Then he was the one that was able to give, to give that freedom to anyone who asked man, guys, purity of heart. There's so much good. And we're gonna talk about it in a second, but there's so much good impurity of heart. It clears our, our, the spiritual blindness away from us. It brings us closer to God. It feels good. It is good. It leads us toward good. And the only way you receive that is by asking Jesus Christ to be your Lord and savior and people who ask Jesus Christ to be their Lord and savior have placed their belief in him. They've said, I want to change my life. They have confessed him as their savior. And just like you saw today, man, they pledge their life to him as they get baptized. And it's the picture of the death, the burial and the resurrection of Jesus. And you should do that. And you're like, is that easy? All I gotta do is say, I need him and Jesus, would you be my savior? And would you forgive me and, and pray and ask him to be a part of my life and then step into those waters. And because of your faith receive forgiveness in the holy spirit, it's that easy? Here's the deal. Tomorrow's the fourth. We're gonna celebrate independence. You know what? You oughta celebrate the 24th of July when we're at Anderson farms and doing Rocky at the farm. Talk about that a little bit later, but we're gonna have a baptism service that day, man. You just show up and you'll be ready and you should come forward that day because God's saying, Hey, I'm ready to start a new journey and I'm ready to purify your heart and make some changes in you. Now purity of heart cannot be achieved. There's nothing you can do to create purity in your life, but it can be pursued. Like for us, we, we have to, you need to understand like Jesus gives it to us. And then it begins this journey of pursuing deeper purity and deeper understanding of him. And so you might say right now, Sean, what do I do? Well, first you accept him is your savior. Second thing you do is simply this. It is the idea of James talks about in verse seven through 10, he says this. He says, so let God work. His will in you yell aloud no to the devil and watch him make himself scarce. Say a quiet yes to God. And he will be there in no time. Quit dabbling in sin, Abilene, sin, purify your inner life. Quit playing the field hit bottom, cry your eyes out. The fun of games are over. Get serious, get really serious. Get down on your knees. Excuse me, before the master. It's the only way that you'll get back on your feet. So what James is talking about in the NIV, it just says it. Plainly James is talking about the beginning of really pursuing purity is the word confession getting down on knees admitting before God crying out to God and saying, yes, this is in my life. It is the beginning of this idea of confession. Augustine famous church. Historians said it this way. He says the confession of bad works is the beginning of good works. Amen. I love that. The confession of bad works is the beginning of good works. Confession is the idea it's it's like this confession is like detoxification for your spirit. Like that's what God's saying. He said, there's stuff in there. There's impurities in there. And even though I have forgiven the consequences of your sin, there's stuff that you're allowing to be in your life that we need to get out. And there is something freeing about this idea, a confession first John, one nine says if we confess our sins to God, he will keep his promise and do what is right. He will forgive our sins and purify us from all our wrongdoing. Now, now catch this. The word confession is the same idea. It's it's, it's actually made of two Greek words. So the word confession in English is made of two Greek words. One that means to speak. And the other means to see. So what the idea of confession is is that we speak the same about our sin, that God sees about our sin. We speak the same about our sin as God speaks about our sin. Cuz a lot of times what we do is man, we try to just give, like, we try to give excuses about it and here's what happened or I wouldn't have, or, or we try to bargain with God and say, God, man, if, if you'll just forgive this thing I'll never do it again. We try to do all those different things. And what God's saying is would you just look at this thing though? Same way I look at it, sin a sin. It's not a FAPA it's not a mess up it's sin. And if we will look at our sin and say, God, it is this, I lied, I cheated. I was disingenuous. I've been angry. And I've had an issue with anger. I keep going along with the crowd at school and following them. I did this. I did, man. If we just, you know what, God's not up there doing, he's not on someone. Yep. What he's doing, he's saying, okay, let's take that one. Let's set aside. Let's take that one. Let's set it aside because you know what Jesus paid for that on the cross. But what's good for your heart is when you admit it to me. And what I can do is I come in and I begin cleaning up your heart. And you know, this is true because you've done this before. Sometimes when you have something with somebody and you've done and you just finally, you just have to get it out and you just say it to 'em and say, I'm sorry, I did this. And they're like, oh man, thanks for telling me. And you just feel this weight off your shoulders. Now sometimes you do that with people and they say, you did what God never does that. God never does that. He's like, I already know. And I already paid and what's good for your heart is to get out off of your chest, man. You really want to get close to God and you really want to start the purification process in your life. Here's what I would encourage you to do is I'd encourage you just to admit it. I'd encourage you to sit down with a pad and paper this week and in your prayer time, just pray and say, God, just show me the things that are taking my eyes off of you. Where are my eyes wondering? And then when he gives you something, write it down. So don't mean it's gonna be really quick. You're gonna have a list, right? You're gonna, but here's what I want you to do. I want you to write first John one nine over each one or over the whole list. The idea that simply says that when I confess my sin, he is faithful and just, and he forgives me of all unrighteousness. The confession of bad works is the beginning of good works. Now it's not just, that's not the only thing we can do. When we begin to unload things. When we begin to detoxify our body, what do we do? Normally with our bodies, we begin to re purify it. We begin to put healthy things into our body, right? So confession is the first step to really pursuing purity. But then the second step is that we begin filling up with what is good. We replace the bad with good things and what happens. And what's interesting about that is how good we actually feel. And then what begins to come out of our life because of what good is coming into our life. Like our eyes, follow our heart, follows what our eyes are focused on. When you begin focusing on God, what begins to come out of your life becomes the things of God. Luke chapter six, verse 45 says a good man brings good things outta the good stored up in their heart. And an evil man brings evil out of the evil, stored up in their heart for out of the mouth for the mouth, speaks what the heart is full of. Man, here's a good health principle. You are what you eat. You are what you eat. If you eat a dozen donuts a day, you're gonna turn into a big donut, right? Amounts, just life. On the other hand, spiritually speaking, if you fill up with God, what you will become is you will become a more purified version of what he created you to be. And people will begin to notice. And man, when we live in that place where eyes wander from God, we always feel it. And it comes around and, and in the moment the pleasure might be, feel good. But the aftermath, we all know the aftermath feels horrible. A couple months ago. I, I, I shared this a little bit, but a couple months ago, my daughter, she challenged me. She said, dad, father's day is two months away. And she said, I wanna do this. I think you should do this with me. Let's go. No desserts, no sugary stuff, no extra stuff. Let's just do this for two months in rock and roll. And I was all good. And I was in because six days a week, I eat really good because my wife and our house like the rules are we eat good. And so I just follow. But on Sunday, Sunday around my house for dad is called Sunday fun. Nobody tells me what to eat. Like I watched a show that I want, you can judge me, whatever. I got my show at the end of the night, it's like a long day crazy day. You're gonna judge me. I watch walking dead. That's my show. You're like, oh my gosh, I cannot go to his church. He watched walking dead. No I do. I do. And I sit there and you, my wife will walk out and she will just look at me and shake her head because I will have a pile of candy bar rappers, guys. It's not one candy bar rapper. It's like a pile of candy bar rappers. I'm like, I'm just catching up from the week. My wife, my daughter asked me, she said, dad, can we do this? Can we just go all the way through? You know? And to two months. And I was like, yes. And every Sunday I, it was just killing me. But the crazy thing is I was feeling good. I will walk into work on Monday going, oh man, on Mondays, I'm walking in. I'm like, it's a Monday. Let's go. Let's get after this thing. And I was feeling great. Father's day got there guys. I have never eaten so many calories in my entire life. I pounded, like, I think for my like body type and whatever, it's like, you know, 3000 calories, a little under you know, a day is good for that. And if you're active I'm I swear it had to be like 7,000 calories. I pounded so many things either was brownies. And you know what I felt, I felt horrible in the moment. I was like, these turtle brownies my wife makes, or on my birthday, she makes that father's day. She makes that it was awesome. Six hours later, I'm dying. And it's the same thing, what we run through. And, and we're like half the time in life. We're like, yep. Sunday is God's day, but is Friday fun day and a Saturday fun day. And then we come back around, we try to clean up and God's saying, no, no, no, here's the deal. If you're following me, I know what's best for you. And I've got things that I wanna feed you in scripture and in worship. And in all those things in Christian community, biblical fellowship with other people, I wanna feed you that stuff. And here's what happens when we engage with that on a regular basis, we feel great. There's those moments where we step back in and we go back into our old ways and we feed ourselves that just things that are not good and it feels terrible guys, what God is calling us to do. He says, you will never be sinless, but you can sin less. We can security in our life with God, James chapter four verse eight says draw near to God and he will draw near to you. It's what he talks about. He says, you begin to put godly things into your body and what will happen in your life is good. Things will begin to come out and it will feel good. And other people will notice the changes and say, that looks good. And I want some of that. And what's going on with you. And some of you will say, yeah, you got all that Christian. Some of some people have friends will say you got all that Christian stuff and whatever, but in the inside they're going, they got something I'm not ready for it yet, but it looks good. And I think God wants that for us. Scripture goes on and just talks about this idea of the blessed or the pure and heart. But it says the eyes, the lamp of the body, if your eyes are good and your whole body will be full of light, like there is a light that comes into our body through the good things of God. That just feels so good. Do you realize that there's a promise that's associated with every one of the be attitudes like God says, Hey, blessed to the pure in heart. So we pursue purity. We, we give our lives to Christ. We confess our sins. We start putting good things of God into our life. But he says this, when that happens, there's a blessing that happens that bless her to the pure and heart for they will. What, see God. And what's he talking about there? What he's talking about is that they may not see God. Literally what he's saying is they're gonna see God active in their daily life because the good things they're putting in and the good things that are coming out, there's still gonna be things that rock our world, but we're gonna start to see how God's working in those things. And he takes difficulty and he makes them good. And we just watch how God's available and there for us and pursuing us and only having eyes for us. I've told this story before, when I was 19 years old, I had a torn retina tore about 50% off the back of my eye. I went into surgery. I had surgery. There was a lot of trauma to my eye, even after the surgery I get out. And I remember taking the patch off my eye and man, guys, I could barely see. There was so much trauma in my eye was bloodshot. There was people look at my eye and like, whoa, there was so much blood. And on the inside, from my perspective, you could see it from the outside. But from the inside, all I could see was this big red liquidy glob that was going on. They put this big bubble in my eye to hold the outside of my eye up so they could laser back the down the retina. And when that thing started to dissipate, it became like a thousand bubbles in there. and so all I could see was just this big red glob of bubbles and all of that. And you know what happened over time, it began to dissipate and the redness began to go away and then the bubbles went away and then I could begin to see, but it was blurry. And then I went to the doctor and they gave me prescription for contacts. And then they gave me glasses and I put those glasses on for the first time. And I was like, there is a whole nother world out there, spiritually speaking, what purity does for us. It clears the blinders that sin puts in front of our eyes. It clears the spiritual blinders that that keep us from being able to see God and puts in this prescription where we begin to be able to look around and say, I see God there. I saw God there today. I saw 'em there yesterday. I know I'm gonna see them there tomorrow. I am seeing things I've never seen before. And my question to you is when's the last time you saw God, Because If you're not seeing them Sienna, you might teach to just question your heart a little bit, because God's not hiding from you. The deal is this God in our lives, he says, I will never leave you. I will never forsake you. I will always be with you. He is right here by your side, in the pure times, in the IUR times in all of it. And he's saying I've got something better for you. And if you would just clear your spiritual eyes, if you would just pursue purity, you'll find out I'm there. And when you find out I'm there and we partner together, man, there's nothing we can't beat together. When's the last time you saw God. If you're not seeing him, it may be a heart problem. It may not be a God problem. I think we get it with our minds. That's why we show up here today. But the problem is, is a lot of times we get it with our minds, but we don't take it to the depth of our heart. So we show up here and there when we need and we get on our knees when we need Inter Bennett says that it's the longest journey you ever taken. Your lifetime is the 18 inches between your head and your heart. Every person in here, every person over there, every person out there online, you know that that's why you're watching, but do you know it here? And when you find it here, man, you will find God and you will find a whole different world. Let's pray father, for those of us today that just need to confess some things. Maybe it's just a little too big, even for us, just to even just sit down and know how to even say it to you, father. I pray that they'll hit our prayer teams up front at each campus after no there's no judgment. We've all been there. We've all prayed those prayers and ask for help, praying in those prayers. And I pray they would for the person online father, I pray that they just get down on their knees and just ask for forgiveness for some things. And the father for us, I pray. We pursue purity. And when we pursue purity, Lord, I pray. You would show yourself to us. I pray that we'd see you, father. I pray that we would pursue as a church. Just putting the good things of you and of this place into our lives on a consistent basis. I pray, we'd even check on in on somebody that we know is struggling and, and needs this. But's not here, but it's a part of our family. They're just not, I pray. We'd reach out to them. And the father I pray is we as a, a community of believers would go out and we will live pure lives, integrated lives in every area of our life. And that people would see it, that they would want it. And more people would come to you and experience the goodness of following you. God, we love you. We are so grateful for your grace. It's in Jesus name that we pray. Amen.

Will God answer your prayer if you don't end with, "In Jesus' name, Amen?" Learn what praying in the name of Jesus really means. I taught this week on the call of Abraham and the development of God's missionary call through the nation of Israel as they were responsible to communicate the truth of God to the cultures around them. They were given that great commission. The great commission didn't start in Matthew 28. It started with Abraham in Genesis 12 —the first three verses there —Abraham, chosen by God to raise up a nation who would then be God's priests to the world so that they would be a blessing to all of the nations. They had a unique role in the great monotheistic religion. The Jews were supposed to reflect morality to the world. Israel was to witness to the name of God. When they talked about the name of God and witnessing to God's name, that does not mean that they were to let everybody know what they called God, "Yahweh." Their goal wasn't to cover the countryside with evangelists who just let everybody know what the right word for God was. It meant something different. ☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ https://linktr.ee/jacksonlibon --------------------------------------------------- #realtalk #face #instagram #SDF #SYNDICAT #DESPUTES #amour #take #couple #dance #dancers #vogue #voguedqnce #garden #tiktok #psychology #beyou #near #love #foryou #money #ForYouPizza #fyp #irobot #theend #pups #TikToker #couplegoals #famille #relation #doudou #youtube #twitter #tiktokers #love #reeĺs #shorts #instagood #follow #like #ouy #oyu #babyshark #lilnasx #girl #happybirthday #movie #nbayoungboy #deviance #autotrader #trading #khan #academy #carter #carguru #ancestry #accords #abc #news #bts #cbs #huru #bluebook #socialmedia #whatsapp #music #google #photography #memes #marketing #india #followforfollowback #likeforlikes #a #insta #fashion #k #trending #digitalmarketing #covid #o #snapchat #socialmediamarketing¹

Martin Suchrow stellt iur.reform vor – und ruft alle Juristinnen und Juristen zur Teilnahme auf. Iur.reform hat die Literatur über Vorschläge für eine neue juristische Ausbildung der letzten 20 Jahre ausgewertet. Aus den unterschiedlichen Vorschlägen konnte die Initiative 44 Reformvorschläge herausarbeiten. Zu diesen Vorschlägen hat das Projekt auch die Pro- und Contra-Argumente der Autor:innen gesammelt, d.h. die gesamte Diskussion ist nachvollziehbar. Damit schafft iur.reform einen gemeinsam geführten Diskurs mit belastbaren Ergebnissen zur umfassenden Abstimmung. Wie viele der Studierenden/Lehrenden/Praktiker:innen wollen welche Änderung der juristischen Ausbildung? Martin stellt das Projekt vor. Und ruft alle zur Abstimmung auf unter https://iurreform.de Mit Martin könnt ihr auf LinkedIn oder unter martin@iurreform.dein Kontakt treten. Er freut sich auf eure Anregungen. Aber vorher bitte unter iurreform.de abstimmen!

We say God is omniscient, meaning one who knows all things.  The word omniscient is nowhere in the bible but the inference of God knowing all things in prevalent from Genesis to Revelation.  Psalm 147:5  Great is our Lord,abundant in strength; His understanding is infinite. 1 John 3:20 “for God is greater than our heart and knows all things”There is no doubt lingering in regards to  God's level of knowledge, however, the impact or the influence of His knowledge and our humanity rears up many valid questions.I was recently asked if God knows everything then why pray, why does He ask questions, is our destiny already predetermined and last but not least if God knows everything does that negate our free will?This morning I prayed as asked by the Holy Spirit to guide me to explain this in the simplest way possible.First let's talk about how intimidating it is when we truly embrace that  God knows our every thought. Iur angry thoughts, lustful thoughts, vengeful ideas, secret greed, and hidden coveting. God also knows our secret longings, hopeful desires, and private dreams. And He understands. Sometimes we are harder on ourselves than God is. Psalm 103:14 tell us that He knows we are frail humans made from dirt and born with a sin nature.  However, at the same time we can also be too easy and carefree and not hold ourselves accountable regarding our thoughts. The bible tells us so a man thinketh so is he, which tells us our thoughts ought not be set on the things outside of the will and ways of God,In Colossians 1:21 it speaks of our minds alienating us and making us enemies of God.  You know our ancestors used to say don't go anywhere you don't want to take God, because he is always with you, well this morning I am telling you don't fix your minds on things and thoughts you don't want to have an open conversation with God about. Let's talk about the  core issue that remains on the table.  If God knows in advance how we will act, then most perceive that this means we cannot act other than in accordance with God's foreknowledge, so then we  cannot possibly have free-will.  Not so!

I have had my head down working on some big things, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Toby Bowers, the Leader of the Microsoft Bizapps ISV Program. I managed to catch him in his car, and got a great update on some new things happening in the ISV arena. Enjoy! Transcript Below: Toby: Hi, this is Toby. Steve: Hey Toby, Steve Mordue, how's it going? Toby: Hey, Steve. I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? Steve: Not too bad. I catch you at a decent time? Toby: You've caught me at a fine time. I'm actually in the car at the moment. I'm just taking my team out for a little celebratory launch after our big Inspire event and also our Ready event earlier this week. So it's actually a good time. Let me just pull over so we can have a chat. Steve: It's Been a pretty frantic couple of weeks for you guys. Toby: Frantic, but good. Yeah. Yeah. We had a great showing at Inspire. We made some exciting announcements across the business applications business, but especially around our ISV program, ISV Connect, as you and I have chatted about before. So, it's been good. Steve: Well that's [crosstalk 00:00:50]- Toby: How about you [crosstalk 00:00:51]. Steve: [crosstalk 00:00:51] the reason for my call is to try and catch up on ISV Connect. We talked some time ago about some things that you kind of had just inherited this role from Googs who moved on and were kind of getting your feet wet. Now you've had a close to a year in this position, right? Toby: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I remember our initial chat and I think in fact I'm guilty, Steve, because we agreed to speak a little bit more often, but it's been an interesting year this past year, as we all know, but yeah, it's been almost a full year of execution since we last spoke and I even remember Steve, the nice article you wrote with some suggestions for me as I sort of took over. Toby: Yeah, I'd love to actually go back to that. We can talk about a little bit about some of the enhancements and announcements that we made last week. Steve: Yeah. I mean last week, I think for a lot of the ISV's that they weren't thrilled with some things as the program got launched, they were starting to kind of get their arms around it. But some of these announcements that I was hearing and hopefully we can talk about today, anything of course isn't NDA, I think should make the ISV community pretty happy. It's making me pretty happy. And really kind of throw some gas on that fire. Toby: Yeah. Well, absolutely. I'd love to reinforce it. I know, I know you get a lot of people listening to your impromptu calls here. So why don't I do this? Let me maybe just set a little bit of context, just kind of where we left off Steve, and then I can hit on the high notes of what we announced and then we can dive into any particular areas. That sound all right? Steve: Yeah. You are pulled over, right? Toby: I am pulled over now, yes. Steve: Okay. Toby: You got my full attention. Steve: All right sure, kind of hit some of the highlights. Toby: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, for those who don't know, we originally set out with the ISV Connect program a couple of years ago to attract ISV's to our platform, building and extending upon it. That platform being both Dynamics 365 and the power platform with a specific focus on partners who had great industry or vertical IP to enhance the portfolio and delivering better value to our joint customers. So through the program itself, it's a revenue share program and we reinvest back in the ecosystem in the form of platform benefits, go to market benefits, co-selling with our field. Toby: So when I sort of took over Steve, I wanted to sort of get a full year of execution in place. And in that first year we were pretty happy with the numbers. We have over 700 ISV's enrolled in the program. Now we use AppSource as sort of the cornerstone of the program. We have, we have 1400 apps or more certified in AppSource. But after that first year, I really with the team wanted to understand how things were landing, and I think your feedback was good Steve. We did a bunch of research. We do partner satisfaction surveys. I of course talked to a lot of partners in my travels. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:59] in a year's time, you can kind of get a pretty good gauge on what was working well? What could work better? What wasn't working well? What do we need to just abandon? What do we need to step on? And I kind of got the feeling that was this readjustment that we just saw was kind of bringing some of those things to light. Toby: That's exactly right Steve. I mean, it's such a diverse ecosystem of emerging partners to large mature partners across a pretty vast portfolio. So, it was a diverse set of feedback, but you're spot on. We wanted to give it a little bit of time, but then check in and listen and make some adjustments. So that's what we did, based on a lot of the feedback we got. Toby: I'd sort of summarize what we changed in three big areas Steve, the first is that the business model itself, the fee structure, and we talked about this last time, but not only having an investible model where you can reinvest, but actually investing in the ecosystem, especially as it's growing like this business is growing. Toby: The second thing was a lot of feedback around the go to market, whether it was the marketing benefits, the co-selling with our field, really just getting that value proposition right Steve, and really delivering on the promise we made. We needed to balance that equation a little bit and equalize the effort. Toby: And then the third piece is really around the platform itself. And again, we've talked about this in the past, but just the platform, the tooling, dev test environments, app sources, and marketplace itself. Toby: So those were the three key areas that we sort of listened and got a lot of good feedback around. So with that in mind, what we actually announced at the event is that first of all, back on the business model we're significantly reducing the rev share fees down from 10 and 20%, which you might recall, we had a standard tier and a premium tier. So we were bringing those fees down from 10 and 20% to 3%, just a flat 3% going forward. Steve: That's across the board? Toby: That's across the board. And in fact, it was part of a broader announcement we made as Microsoft, Steve, where we're also bringing our commercial marketplace fees, so that's both Azure Marketplace and app sources. We get transact capabilities down to that same flat 3%. Steve: So what's the motivation behind that? I mean, what is it that they're hoping that will accomplish for Microsoft? Toby: Yeah, it's interesting. If you catch any of the sessions, even starting with Satya, he really talks about Microsoft wanting to be the platform for platform creators. And then if you parlay that into what Nick Parker said and Charlotte Marconi around being the best platform for partners to do business on, it really just came down to helping the partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. Toby: So it's not a P&L, a profit center for Microsoft. It's a way to deliver benefits. We think it's pretty differentiated in the market compared to some of our peers. And it was sort of interesting to see, because we were planning on bringing the fees down for ISV Connect specifically, and then we started to align across the organization and just thought, gosh, we should just do this in a very consistent way across the entire Microsoft Cloud with that one flat 3%. Steve: So the math equation had to work out something like, if we dropped this to 3%, that's going to grow that side of the business significantly, which is going to increase platform sales, right? There has to be an up for the down. And I guess maybe... I mean, not that the platform wasn't already growing by leaps and bounds, but somebody must've been thinking this thing can grow a lot faster if we get rid of some of these hurdles. Toby: You're exactly right. I mean, it's kind of what we've talked about in the past. Just the value that an ISV ecosystem brings to Microsoft with that, whether it's the industry relevance, industry specific IP, or just a growing ecosystem in general. I don't know if you'd caught what we just did, our earnings earlier this week, but Dynamics 365 is growing 43% year over year, we doubled our power apps customer base. And so to your point, the business is growing, the platform is growing, and we want the ecosystem to grow and we want to attract as many partners to do that as possible. Steve: So, I mean, you can't reduce fees and increase the benefit, you have to have taken some things away or maybe gotten rid of some things that weren't being utilized, or how did that kind of offset? Toby: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, so we are investing deliberately to build this out and kind of putting our money where our mouth is, but we did, you're spot on. We learned a lot around the benefits, the go to market benefits in particular, the second key thing we announced is that we are reducing just down to one tier at that flat 3%. So no more 10% and 20% or a standard and a premium tier. And we're reducing the thresholds within that one tier for partners to unlock those go to market benefits and those marketing benefits. And then what I heard, especially from partners, again, to my point around, you've got some mature partners and some emerging partners, it's not a one size fits all. And so we've got an option sort of an, a lA carte, option for partners to choose marketing benefits that make the most sense for their business. So we just tried to simplify things and streamline things a little bit. Steve: You know, I talked to a lot of partners. We're, kind of unique in that our application is free. So, the revenue shared didn't really come into play for what we were doing because there wasn't a fee for our app or any recurring services with it. But you know, a lot of these ISV's their business is significantly different. They've got revenue generating applications that run on top of your platform. Many of them that kind of told me in confidence that they just weren't paying the fees. They were getting the notice from Microsoft saying, "Hey, please do us a favor and tell us how much money you've made and what you owe us." And many of them were just kind of ignoring that. Steve: I guess if we're getting down into a 3% range, it'd probably make it a little easier for some people to be more honest about things too you think? Toby: Yeah. Well, yeah we hope so. Again, that was kind of my point around balancing the equation and making sure that we're delivering on the promise that we set out with the program itself. And I talked to a lot of partners as well, and there's definitely benefit being realized, whether it's from a marketing perspective or co-selling with our field, again, based on what's important to their business, but you're right, we do think by reducing it to this level and also just getting better at delivering the benefits in a consistent way, we'll have more partners participating in the program. Toby: The one thing I would say, Steve, that I was just going to close off on with this sort of consistency across Microsoft is we also realized that's our value proposition. If we can not only have a similar model with the 3% marketplace fee and ISV Connect fees across Microsoft, but a similar model to the way we deliver those benefits, to the way we engage with technical resources or engage from a co-selling perspective across Azure Teams and 365 Dynamics Power Platform, that's kind of how we differentiate ourselves versus, the rest of the players out in the market. Toby: So we made a bunch of enhancements and announcements across the business Azure teams, ISV Connect obviously, and you'll see us continue to sort of work towards a much more consistent approach from a Microsoft Cloud perspective, because obviously we'd love it if partners were integrating with Teams. We have over 250 million monthly active users with Teams now driving dynamics integrations all the way through to CDM and Dataverse and integration into Azure Synapse. Those are the partners we want to work with and the type of partners we want to support and go to market with. Steve: Well, I'll tell you, I think the 3% has probably eliminated a hurdle for a partner, certainly I remember at the time a lot of partners complaining about the 10 and 20 saying things like, "If it was like three." Okay, well it's three now, so shut up and move forward. Toby: Yeah. We've had a lot of- Steve: And it's interesting, because it's kind of the way we sell is I guess for an industry ISV who built something specifically for Dynamics 365, maybe they approach things a little different. Our approach is more, we really try and sell the potential of the platform because we've got a simple CRM. So we're up against a lot of competing simple CRMs. And when you open one of their CRMs and open, rapid start, for example, they look very similar and do very similar things. So for us, we really have to sell the value proposition of, hey, behind that little CRM that you're using from Acme Cloud CRM company is really nothing. You've got the extent of what you can do with that right there in front of you and there's nothing more that can be done, and we really lean in hard on the potential for things like integration with Teams, with things like integration with Azure. Steve: Obviously the integration with Microsoft 365, all of the pieces that are available in the power platform that we haven't enabled in our app that are there to be enabled, you like the forums and some of the AI stuff, it definitely seems to be a huge differentiator in that sales conversation. Toby: Yeah. Well, that's great to hear that's really what we're trying to get right and stitch together the teams if they exist across Microsoft and iron those out. I think your company is a great example of that Steve, and I know you talked to a bunch of our partners and sort of as an independent third party, we had a few partners join us at inspire. Icertis has been a longstanding partner of ours. They're a similar story from, from Azure Dynamics Teams really across the board, and getting more and more focused on industry solutions with their particular IP. Toby: And then we had more emerging partners like Karma, Frank at Karma talked to us about some of the benefits we're building into the platform, specifically license management, and now he's taken advantage of that. And we have big partners like Sycor, that's been working with us for a long time on the Azure side of the business and is doing some really interesting things now on the dynamic side and sees value in that co-sell motion. Toby: So I think that value prop is what we're trying to land, and then we're seeing lots of different types of partners take advantage of it in different ways, which is great to see. Steve: Yeah, it's not often that you see both a cost of participation come down and the value of the benefits go up. And when we talk about benefits, and before, you and I have talked about some of these go to market benefits, there's a segment of ISV's that could make use of those probably mostly new ISV's that don't really understand that system. Steve: But for a lot of the ISV's, they really didn't see value there, but in the meantime they're maintaining their own licensing systems and their own transaction systems and things like that, which as an ISV, that's just like a tax. You're building your solution to solve a particular problem, but you can't just stop after you built this wonderful solution, you got to protect it, you got to monetize it. So those things ended up being just kind of attacks. Steve: And, every ISV out there has had to kind of build their own system for licensing and transacting. And you guys coming through now recently here would be with the licensing capability we were in that pilot, and that thing's got some great potential, a couple of things left for them to do on that to get that really where it's going to solve a lot of problems that ISV's have had, even with their own licensing. Steve: Because with your own external licensing system, you can only do so much, but working with one that's on the platform, that's essentially the same one you guys are utilizing, is going to be huge for ISV's, and then we'll get to transactability, that's just going to close another piece that ISV's have had to deal with, especially when you talk about those startup ISV's, they know an industry and they can build an app, but when it comes to licensing and transacting, and if they can just tick a button and plug right into a couple of those things, that's going to lower the bar to entry and make it a lot easier for some of those folks to get in I think. Toby: Yeah, I hope that you're right Steve, in fact, I didn't know you were working with Julian Payor and the team on piloting the license management stuff. It's great to hear your feedback. That was kind of the whole intent with the journey. If I rewind a bit with AppSource itself, you'll recall we had to do quite a bit of work on the overall user experience for AppSource. We worked hard with the engineering team to improve that, improve discoverability and search capabilities and just sort of the plumbing underneath. And then the next step was, was licensed management, which we've just GA'd working again with the engineering team, and then from there, to your point, the value proposition, a lot of ISV's put all this together and then you add transactability and the ability to actually sell your stuff on our marketplace to what's now more than 4 million monthly shoppers, going to that destination is it is definitely a point of value that I've heard positive feedback from ISV's on. Toby: So that's why we really invested there. I know it's taking us a little bit of time to get there, but that was another key announcement. We announced license management later in the fiscal year. We'll have translatability and AppSource for our customer engagement apps, for power apps, and then we'll continue to roll out a roadmap from there. Toby: And then the other piece I forgot to mention Steve, we made some noise about as well, was these new sandbox environments. And I know you've given me this feedback before, but you know, sort of in the broader internal use rights world, the value in having sandbox environments for our partners to do dev tests and do customer demos around, I heard loud and clear from you and from other partners. And so that's the other thing we announced. We have these new discounted skews, which are basically just at cost skews across the business for those dev test environments. And then for partners who are participating in ISV Connect and hitting those new lower reduced rev share thresholds, we'll provide those licenses for free. Toby: So we think that's going to be a great new benefit for partners as well, more on that technical and platform side of things. Steve: Yeah. Particularly for the ISV's, because ISV's don't necessarily see a lot of value or need to get Microsoft competencies. Competencies are definitely, as a program that was designed for resellers to demonstrate their competence. But a lot of ISV's don't want to have a need for that. And that's where [inaudible 00:19:22] had historically kind of been tied was to those competencies. Steve: So is there any talk about any sort of... I mean, they did do that kind of short-lived ISV competency, which was primarily around, hey, if you've got an app in AppSource you qualify. Here's some IUR. Steve: So this new program will replace that, but are they going to be revisiting any sort ISV competencies or need? Toby: Yeah, well I won't say too much as far as future plans are concerned, but what I can say Steve is that we did this for biz apps, we did it for ISV Connect because that's our program and we got feedback and we think there's value in that. Toby: I did mention that going forward we'll have a more consistent approach across Microsoft Cloud. There's lots of different benefits out there. Azure Credits, we announced some new things around Teams. And so we just need to, as one Microsoft, provide that to our partners in a consistent delivery through these benefits so that we can support that kind of value proposition we talked about earlier. So look for more from us in that area. You're spot on, on the competency side. And I wouldn't even say resellers, I'd say more SI, system integrators services partners. Steve: Yeah. Toby: The key difference there is, we want those guys to be able to differentiate their organization. As a company, you can say, "I've got 15 certified individuals in this role-based certification. And I've got this many credits to my business that make me a gold partner at an organization level"- Steve: Which is something a customer looking at SI would be looking for. Toby: Right. Steve: But when you're looking at an ISV solution, they're really just looking at the functionality. Toby: It's the app, right? You would want to badge in app versus badge and organization. And so that's the key difference there. And I think we've kind of figured that out and again, you'll see us do more in that space going forward. Steve: Yeah. I just want to mention, just go back for a second to make sure everybody is aware that the transactability and the licensing are optional. These are things that you can take advantage of if you spend a ton of money on your own systems, nobody's going to expect you to rip and replace. These are really designed for... I mean when I think of a partner like myself, if I can get out of the license management and have transactability just be automatic, where all I really have to do is focus on building my IP, getting it in AppSource, hopefully promoting it properly, but then the licensing becomes automatic and the transactability becomes automatic, and I'm just getting money coming into my account. Of course, you guys are scraping your 3%, which I don't begrudge because your given me those tools. That just makes things a lot easier. Toby: That's right. And you're right, it's not mandatory. It's again what makes sense for the partner. And so, you can do business with us and ISV Connect outside of the marketplace and work with us on the new 3%, get those benefits, or you can transact in the marketplace, it's that same 3%. And it's a different benefit. You get that whole commerce system, you get that whole billing engine. You don't have to worry about that. And there's a lot of ISV's out there that see value in that. So yeah, you're spot on. Steve: Yeah. I remember Goose had kind of recharacterized the revenue share after the kind of flap up from some of the ISV's about the benefits and stuff and he recharacterized it as a cost for the use of the platform that you're building on top of a platform that Microsoft has built, Microsoft maintains, Microsoft advances. So look at that as a cost for that. And I think you still kind of need to look at that as a cost for that. It's not 3% for licensing and transactability, it's a cost for maintaining the platform, there's these pieces you can take advantage of or not. But if you're not taking advantage of license management, transactability, it doesn't mean you don't have to pay the fee. You're paying the fee for something else. Toby: Yeah. Steve: I'm trying to head off some things I know I may hear from some folks [inaudible 00:23:24] licensing. No, no, no. Toby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right, Steve, and again, to zoom back out again, I mean, it's not about the 3%, it's about attracting partners to build on the broader Microsoft Cloud and supporting their business in a way that works for them. And you're right, there is a cost of doing that, but we want to invest, and I think we just sent a message hopefully to the market that we want to be aggressive in this space, we think we're well positioned, we've got a great value proposition with this broader Microsoft Cloud thing that we're just seeing incredible growth across the business. Toby: And I guess most importantly, we're listening back to that, after a full year, really sort of staying in tune to feedback from partners like yourself, that [inaudible 00:24:07] at large to make sure that we're doing the right thing and delivering, that's kind of what was most important to me. Steve: So those discounted skews for ISV's, in order to qualify for that, what do they need to do? They need to join ISV Connect? Toby: Yeah. So the discounted licenses, which are again, just basically at cost for us, are available to anyone who's enrolled in ISV Connect. All you need to do is enroll in the program, but then if you hit the new reduced rev share threshold that sort of unlocks additional benefits, then we'll give those licenses to you for free. And I can't here in the car, remember all the details of the numbers and stuff like that, I think, and you probably have it. I think aka.ms.bizapp.ISV connect, I think that's a link to our website that has all the benefit details and stuff, but that's basically the way it works. Steve: Are those available today? Toby: They are. There's a whole bunch of them available today and there's more coming. I know that the sales service, field service, marketing, I think the customer insights products, maybe commerce, I might be forgetting a few others and then there's more coming down the pike shortly. Steve: All right. So a good reason for people to go back to revisit ISV Connect site if they haven't in a while. Toby: I would love that. Yeah, I think so. If we can get people to go back and like you said, revisit, just get educated, hopefully get re-engaged and then keep the feedback coming. That's a great outcome. Steve: So I've had a few ISV's asking me about what's the future of ISV Embed, and maybe you can speak to that because that one's kind of a little vague, I think, for a lot of folks right now. Toby: Yeah. It's a great question Steve, that's kind of next, next on our list. And again, today I can't share a lot of specifics, but this is a good topic for us to come back to probably in our regular chats. Toby: As you know, Cloud Embed is a model that supports kind of like an OEM like model where a partner's just packaging their IP directly on the underlying license and selling it together through our ISV Cloud Embed program, which leverages our CSP vehicle as a way to transact. And so we've had it out there for a couple of years. And I may have mentioned before that we're sort of modernizing a whole bunch of our commerce capabilities and new business models and so we're working on a few different options still to support that embed scenario where things like co-selling with our field or certain other marketing benefits aren't the most important thing for a particular ISV in a particular scenario, they don't want to have to mess with reselling the underlying dynamics license. They're not resellers. They just want to sell their IP. Steve: Yeah. Toby: So we're working on some stuff there, especially, on both the core dynamics business and the power platform business. So we can stay in touch and I can come back to you for some feedback once we have more to share. Steve: Yeah. That, I mean, that program worked for a particular kind of an ISV. Toby: Yeah. Steve: A lot of the ISV's that have add on solutions that are not SI's, there's a partner already involved with a customer and they just want to sell their add on solution. Steve: Yeah. Licenses have probably already been sold by that partner. They don't want or need to get involved in that management of that sort of stuff. They just want to sell their IP. And then there's some ISV's that the customer is actually buying, which I think we're starting to see now. And I think I told you this before, one of the things that Salesforce had going for them with their ISV's was there were a lot of very robust ISV's that did a lot of direct marketing to customers about their solution and less so about the fact that it ran on Salesforce. Steve: Salesforce is this platform in the background, but this is what we're selling is this ISV solution, and in that scenario they own the customer because the customer wasn't buying Salesforce, they really were buying the solution to their problem for this ISV, and we hadn't seen as much of that on the dynamic side for a long time. It was definitely, you start with dynamics and then you add on ISV features and capabilities. But I think we're starting to see more of that, that holistic ISV solution that a customer is buying the solution that happens to run on the power platform or on dynamics. Toby: Totally. That's the scenario we see mutual opportunity in. That example, you said where the ISV owns the partner or the customer, the relationship with the customer, frankly that helps us reach more customers as Microsoft. And then if we provide that ISV still the underlying technology and the right business model to support their business, then that's goodness on both sides. So, that's exactly [crosstalk 00:29:10]. Steve: So that's the one where ISV Embed probably makes the most sense, , that type of partner. So we're starting to see more of them. Toby: That's great. That's great. Well, I always appreciate the feedback if you have any. So I'd love you to go through these new things in a bit more detail, and then send me your feedback and we can continue to keep the lines of communication open as always. Steve: I'm not letting you off just yet. I'm keeping you for a couple more. Toby: Oh man, I've got my team waiting, I'm hungry Steve. Steve: I just want to ask, "What is the most exciting thing you're seeing in the space coming soon that people should really be paying attention to?" I know we've got some things happening that aren't so much related to ISV, like the power platform pricing coming down, but what are some of the things that you're seeing in your group, or maybe some things that are already out there that you're feeling like ISV's are not understanding what this is obviously or they'd be all over it? Toby: Hmm. That's a great question. I'd say probably two things. One is, again, one of the big announcements we made at Inspire that wasn't necessarily related to ISV's or ISV Connect specifically, but what we announced with Teams where Teams users will now be able to sort of view and collaborate on Dynamics 365 records from directly within Teams. Toby: So this concept of collaborative apps you'll see, and that's at no additional cost. Obviously that concept you'll see us continue to do more around to bring that again, pretty large install base of Teams users that are out there, 250-million now, together with Dynamics, we think is sort of unique to our value proposition. So there was [crosstalk 00:30:58]- Steve: So this is somebody you think ISV's out there should definitely go do a little bit of investigating into the Team story? Toby: Yes, yes. Teams on the front end, it's such a large install base that we can take advantage of as partners. And then on the backend, I mentioned that again, power platform, Dataverse, leveraging our data services like Azure Synapse Analytics, again, stitching that all the way from the front end of the backend. We as Microsoft, we're really focused on that combined Microsoft Cloud story. And I think the partners that are recognizing that and investing in that with their own IP are the ones we're going to engage with and hopefully generate some good opportunity around. Toby: The second one, in that vein Steve, the second one I was going to say is just what we continue to do with our industry clouds. So we have cloud for healthcare out there at the moment, we've got financial services, manufacturing, retail, we announced the cloud for sustainability, we've got not-for-profit. So, these things continue to roll off the conveyor belt, but it's such a great opportunity. I was sort of surprised with how much interest we had from the ISV ecosystem around these industry clouds. Obviously as we build more industry IP, we need to sort of adjust our relationship with our partners who serve those industries, but there's still so much space to add, specific IP to that industry and work with some of those very credible industry partners that we were sort of talking about just a moment ago is a big place that we're going to invest going forward. So, that's an area I'd encourage people to keep a close eye on. Steve: Are you satisfied with the level of ISV engagement with the accelerators? Are they still kind of too many of them on the sidelines kicking or poking it with a stick or have we got enough of them actually coming in now that you're happy with that velocity? Or are you feeling like there's a bunch more that need to get in there? Toby: I think, first of all, we've evolved a bit from that original industry accelerator approach to now just real industry IP that we're building first party in these verticals that I mentioned. Obviously there's great partners out there that can work with us with those solutions to, like I said, have their IP built on that broader Microsoft Cloud. Industry clouds are just a great example of a Microsoft Cloud solution, frankly. And so to your question of, do we have enough partners there? You want to obviously get it right when you launch an offering like that with the right, frankly, small number of partners to complete the solution and have it be good and relevant and useful for customers, but the more the merrier around that investment. Toby: And so it's early days, Steve, we only have one industry cloud in market GA'd at the moment, but as I said, there's a lot more coming. So we want to make sure we're building the ecosystem around it pretty aggressively. Steve: Yeah. I mean, we've got partners of all sizes, so we got some big healthcare ISV's I'm sure engaged in some of the heavy lifting, but healthcare is an awfully big market, awfully big field, and there is spot, point solutions kind of across the healthcare organization that need to be filled by probably a smaller ISV's. So it seems like there's stuff across that whole thing. Toby: Yeah. Totally. There's plenty of opportunity and plenty of space around that. And even from a geographic perspective, I mean, different parts of the world have different regulatory requirements and are different, and so there's yeah, to your point, and that's what I was trying to articulate earlier. I think there's still just a massive opportunity for partners to work with us around those new offerings. Steve: Well, I know you've got to get to your thing. You've told me twice in the call, I appreciate you pulling the car over to chat with me to catch up. I just wanted to get some of this stuff out to the listeners about some of these changes that just occurred. Steve: And I'm definitely going to go through, like you said, and study it a little more closely and I'll reach out to you directly with some feedback and some thoughts and see if we keep this thing moving. Toby: Awesome. Well, Hey, I'm so glad you caught me, Steve. It's always a pleasure to catch up and have a chat, and yeah, please do go through it in some detail. Again, your feedback is important. Whole ecosystems feedback is super important to me, so I appreciate it. And yeah, it was great to catch up. Steve: All right man, talk to you soon. Toby: All right. Take care, Steve.

Thomas Eddie Bullard was born in North Carolina in 1949 and developed an early interest in flying saucers thanks to Friday and Saturday nights at the movies, where he saw such classics as "Earth Versus the Flying Saucers". Sputnik inspired him to begin reading the newspapers and he no sooner started than the Levelland sightings piqued his curiosity. He began to read all the UFO publications he could find--Keyhoe's books, Dick Hall's "The UFO Evidence", Fate, Ray Palmer's Flying Saucers--and he eventually joined NICAP and APRO in the 1960s.After spending his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina, Bullard went to graduate school in Folklore at Indiana University, and wrote his dissertation on UFOs, completing his doctoral degree in 1982.During his research he scanned a great many newspapers for reports of the 1896-97 airship and other pre-1947 sightings. He continued this work by traveling to state archives and began issuing collections of this material as The Airship File in 1982. When the Fund for UFO Research called for someone to catalogue and carry out a comparative study of abduction reports, he took on the job and completed "UFO Abductions--The Measure of a Mystery in 1987." The literature up to that time included some 300 reports, and comparisons demonstrated that reliable reports had many details of sequence and content in common.Following up on this abduction research, Bullard published articles in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of UFO Studies, IUR, the MUFON UFO Journal, and the 2000 MUFON Symposium, arguing that abduction reports maintain a surprising consistency. This sameness contrasts with folk narratives, urban legends, and products of fantasy, where narratorsreadily exploit opportunities for variation in the subject material.Bullard contributed several articles for the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT in 1992. One such article, treating a comparison of abduction investigators' findings, he later expanded into "The Sympathetic Ear", published by the Fund for UFO Research in 1995.His ongoing interest in the historical and cultural aspects of UFOs led to an article in "UFOs and Abductions", edited by David M. Jacobs and published by the University Press of Kansas in 2000. He is currently working on a UFO book for the same press. Over the years he has served on the board of CUFOS and the advisory board of the Fund for UFO Research.Sample of papers published"UFO Abductions--The Measure of a Mystery" (1987)"The Sympathetic Ear", Fund for UFO Research (1995)"UFOs and Abductions", University Press of Kansas (2000)For Your Listening Pleasure all the radio shows available on The 'X' Zone Broadcast Network with our compliments, visit - https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv.Our radio shows archives and programming include: A Different Perspective with Kevin Randle; Alien Cosmic Expo Lecture Series; Alien Worlds Radio Show; America's Soul Doctor with Ken Unger; Back in Control Radio Show with Dr. David Hanscom, MD; Connecting with Coincidence with Dr. Bernard Beitman, MD; Dick Tracy; Dimension X; Exploring Tomorrow Radio Show; Flash Gordon; Imagine More Success Radio Show with Syndee Hendricks and Thomas Hydes; Jet Jungle Radio Show; Journey Into Space; Know the Name with Sharon Lynn Wyeth; Lux Radio Theatre - Classic Old Time Radio; Mission Evolution with Gwilda Wiyaka; Paranormal StakeOut with Larry Lawson; Ray Bradbury - Tales Of The Bizarre; Sci Fi Radio Show; Seek Reality with Roberta Grimes; Space Patrol; Stairway to Heaven with Gwilda Wiyaka; The 'X' Zone Radio Show with Rob McConnell; Two Good To Be True with Justina Marsh and Peter Marsh; and many other!That's The ‘X' Zone Broadcast Network Shows and Archives - https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv*** AND NOW ***The ‘X' Zone TV Channel on SimulTV - www.simultv.comThe ‘X' Chronicles Newspaper - www.xchroniclesnewspaper.com

Thomas Eddie Bullard was born in North Carolina in 1949 and developed an early interest in flying saucers thanks to Friday and Saturday nights at the movies, where he saw such classics as "Earth Versus the Flying Saucers". Sputnik inspired him to begin reading the newspapers and he no sooner started than the Levelland sightings piqued his curiosity. He began to read all the UFO publications he could find--Keyhoe's books, Dick Hall's "The UFO Evidence", Fate, Ray Palmer's Flying Saucers--and he eventually joined NICAP and APRO in the 1960s. After spending his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina, Bullard went to graduate school in Folklore at Indiana University, and wrote his dissertation on UFOs, completing his doctoral degree in 1982. During his research he scanned a great many newspapers for reports of the 1896-97 airship and other pre-1947 sightings. He continued this work by traveling to state archives and began issuing collections of this material as The Airship File in 1982. When the Fund for UFO Research called for someone to catalogue and carry out a comparative study of abduction reports, he took on the job and completed "UFO Abductions--The Measure of a Mystery in 1987." The literature up to that time included some 300 reports, and comparisons demonstrated that reliable reports had many details of sequence and content in common. Following up on this abduction research, Bullard published articles in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of UFO Studies, IUR, the MUFON UFO Journal, and the 2000 MUFON Symposium, arguing that abduction reports maintain a surprising consistency. This sameness contrasts with folk narratives, urban legends, and products of fantasy, where narrators readily exploit opportunities for variation in the subject material. Bullard contributed several articles for the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT in 1992. One such article, treating a comparison of abduction investigators' findings, he later expanded into "The Sympathetic Ear", published by the Fund for UFO Research in 1995. His ongoing interest in the historical and cultural aspects of UFOs led to an article in "UFOs and Abductions", edited by David M. Jacobs and published by the University Press of Kansas in 2000. He is currently working on a UFO book for the same press. Over the years he has served on the board of CUFOS and the advisory board of the Fund for UFO Research. Sample of papers published "UFO Abductions--The Measure of a Mystery" (1987) "The Sympathetic Ear", Fund for UFO Research (1995) "UFOs and Abductions", University Press of Kansas (2000) For Your Listening Pleasure all the radio shows available on The 'X' Zone Broadcast Network with our compliments, visit - https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv. Our radio shows archives and programming include: A Different Perspective with Kevin Randle; Alien Cosmic Expo Lecture Series; Alien Worlds Radio Show; America's Soul Doctor with Ken Unger; Back in Control Radio Show with Dr. David Hanscom, MD; Connecting with Coincidence with Dr. Bernard Beitman, MD; Dick Tracy; Dimension X; Exploring Tomorrow Radio Show; Flash Gordon; Imagine More Success Radio Show with Syndee Hendricks and Thomas Hydes; Jet Jungle Radio Show; Journey Into Space; Know the Name with Sharon Lynn Wyeth; Lux Radio Theatre - Classic Old Time Radio; Mission Evolution with Gwilda Wiyaka; Paranormal StakeOut with Larry Lawson; Ray Bradbury - Tales Of The Bizarre; Sci Fi Radio Show; Seek Reality with Roberta Grimes; Space Patrol; Stairway to Heaven with Gwilda Wiyaka; The 'X' Zone Radio Show with Rob McConnell; Two Good To Be True with Justina Marsh and Peter Marsh; and many other! That's The ‘X' Zone Broadcast Network Shows and Archives - https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv *** AND NOW *** The ‘X' Zone TV Channel on SimulTV - www.simultv.com The ‘X' Chronicles Newspaper - www.xchroniclesnewspaper.com

I recently wrote a post with suggestions for Toby Bowers, the new Leader of the Microsoft ISV Program. I assumed he had read it, but just to be sure, I ambushed him on the phone. If you are a Microsoft Business Applications ISC, this is the guy who will make or break you. We had a great discussion about his plans for ISVs. We also chatted about my latest undertaking, ISV Connect ED, he acted like it was the first time he heard about it, but I already know that it has been chatted up in the halls in Redmond :). Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 4PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Transcript Below: Toby Bowers: Hello, this is Toby. Steve Mordue: Toby, it's  Steve Mordue. How's it going? Toby Bowers: Steve Mordue. It's going well. How are you? Long time no see. I have a suspicion on why you're calling. I read one of your recent posts, called Suggestions for Toby. Is it to talk through that? Steve Mordue: So, before you talk too much, I got to let you know, the record button is on and I'm going to publish whatever the heck we talk about in the next few days on my podcast, if that's all right. Toby Bowers: Ah, okay. Okay. I've heard about these calls, Steve. Yeah, no. That's fine. That's fine. I've been looking forward to talking to you. Steve Mordue: All right. Cool. So, news. Guggs is headed out the door, and he did the mic drop and you've picked up the mic. Toby Bowers: Yep. Yep. Steve Mordue: Which is a new role for you, but you've been in the periphery of this ISV, but you're now the guy, right? Buck's stopping at your desk, for ISVs and ISV Connect. Toby Bowers: Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm excited with the opportunity. Yeah. Guggs is retiring for the company, and just with the turn of the fiscal year here at Microsoft, we took the opportunity to sort of reorganize a little bit. But as you said, Steve, I'm not new to the ISV strategy or the ISV Connect program. We've been, myself and my team, have been working really closely with Guggs and his team over the past year. Just to sort of explain where my team fits in. So, I work for Alysa Taylor and the product marketing group. We have all of our field sales enablement for all of our sellers and marketing teams around the world. We do our partner strategy all up, not just for ISV. We do customer success. We're focused on usage and adoption and migration. And we also do community work as well, for both first and third party community. So, ISV has always been a part of my core team charter, but as you said, I'm just sort of picking up the mantle with Guggs, and we'll get more actively involved. Steve Mordue: Is it a little intimidating? Toby Bowers: Oh, yeah. No, it is. I mean, obviously this is incredibly critical for us to get right as a company. Such a huge opportunity for us and for this business. I joined the dynamics team about three years ago, and we started talking about this, Steve, because we really didn't have a modern SaaS ISV program, ISV strategy. We were still coming off the old legacy days where, of course, ISVs are critical in this business in driving success with our on-prem business. But we weren't able to sort of effectively translate that into the cloud world. So, really, really important for us to get right. Why it's important for Microsoft is, to be honest, this is just a massive market. I mean, we did some sessions at Inspire recently in fact, this is a $200 billion market. It's a very fragmented market, Steve, as you know, so the better we are in building out an ISV ecosystem and driving those ISV's growth, the more share we can take in this market, and attract ISVs to build on our platform with great solutions that help solidify it in the customer base. Steve Mordue: Was that kind of an eyeopener for you guys a little bit to see the results of that study you commissioned around ISV? I mean, I know you guys had always kind of, in the back of your mind, assumed there was importance in ISVs, but was that an eye opener for you guys as well? Toby Bowers: It was. It was. I mean, the fact that over half that addressable market is going to be driven by ISVs and the cloud in the business applications market was bigger than I thought, to be honest. It's also, Steve, it's interesting. It's split pretty evenly across the sort of the medium business space and the enterprise. So, there's equal opportunity across both customer segments, but for us, the real opportunity, Steve is... And I'd love a chance to talk about the opportunity I see for the ISVs, but for us, the opportunity to take share and reach new audiences through ISVs is something we really talk a lot about in our conversations. Acquiring new cloud customers, the fact that ISVs can build vertical and sub vertical solutions and reach BDM audiences that we're just not that great at it, Microsoft, to be honest. Just represents a huge opportunity for us from a customer acquisition perspective. And then, the last thing I'd say, Steve, is we still sort of have this tactical opportunity to continue to help the remaining customers we have on on-prem dynamics products get to the cloud, and ISVs are obviously critical in doing that, in helping them sort of move their IP from the legacy stuff over to cloud. So, yeah, there's a big opportunity for Microsoft in it, but I also feel like there's a big opportunity for ISVs, just choosing us over someone else in the industry based on just the innovation we're building in and the growth that we're seeing in the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform business, Steve Mordue: Well, they're choosing Microsoft to start or adding Microsoft, if they're already established elsewhere. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: Both of those are good motions. There's a huge ecosystem of ISVs for Salesforce and some of the other applications out there. And I don't expect them to just drop that and come over here. But you reach a point in any business where you're kind of plateauing, right? You've got your market share and you're maintaining and you've got your steady growth, but if you're looking for a new opportunity to create brand new growth, I mean, nothing like jumping into another sandbox. Toby Bowers: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's definitely part of it, and it kind of comes back to where we are in our journey with this strategy and this program [ISV Connect], Steve. I think back with the transition from Guggs, we sort of spent about a year in the design mode, and I know we worked with you to bounce ideas off you as a sounding board during that phase, back in the back of the day. And then last year, our fiscal year '20 was really the launch year. And obviously, we launched it at Inspire in July, but then it really didn't become operational for a couple of months. So, the bulk of last year was really helping our existing ISVs onboard and get enrolled in the program, and really the focus that we had on cleaning up app stores, getting everything all nice and certified and enrolled in the program for our existing ecosystem. And we feel pretty good about the result, that we got over 550 ISVs, 1200 apps. We have a good base now, but to your point, now we can sort of transition into going after recruits, right? And not only making our existing ISVs successful, but continuing to build out that ecosystem with new ISVs who are looking at multiple platforms to your point. Steve Mordue: I've been, I guess, probably the best way to put it would be "optimistically critical". I mean, I am an ISV, so obviously I'm bullish and have high hopes for success of the [ISV Connect] program, but the program has had its challenges. I think it's been passed around a lot. Hopefully, you'll hang around for a while with this thing. That's one of the reasons I was asking about the survey, was that it seemed like for years prior to that, like I say, there's been kind of a, yeah, we know ISVs are important, but it wasn't particularly believable messaging, you know? Because I don't know that a lot of the folks inside Microsoft had a clear picture of what that means. It's was just Salesforce is doing it, so we should be doing it too. But I was thinking that study kind of would have really opened some eyes and poured some gas on this motion. Toby Bowers: Yeah. I mean, it really has, Steve, and you're right. And look, I'll acknowledge we've had fits and starts with ISV strategies across Microsoft for several years, and I've been there to witness it. I'm a 20 plus year vet here at Microsoft, and I've worked in pretty much every side of the company from sales to marketing out in the field in different countries, and now here in product marketing working on BPOS and Office 365 in the early days, and then Azure in the early days, and now Biz Apps. We've gone through several evolutions that are related to our ISV strategy, and we've changed course and made some missteps, to be honest, here and there. I think my whole goal, again, in sort of stepping in and taking a little bit more responsibilities with this program in particular is to deliver on the value, deliver on the promise we made to partners. Last year when we launched, we talked about things like access to our field sellers in the premium tier, access to our partners, access to our customer base through app stores in the marketplace, access to platform capabilities. We've delivered some of that, but we still have a long way to go to deliver on the full promise. And so, I'm a partner guy. I had lots of partner responsibility in my previous roles at Microsoft, and I just think if we deliver on that promise and we support our partners' growth, we're going to grow. So, that's my number one goal. And we can talk about some of the specifics in it, but I hear you. And I think we need to stay the course. Now that we're in market, this is the year to really mainstream the program across the Microsoft machine and really deliver on the value that we've talked to ISVs. Steve Mordue: I think one of the challenges with the ISV Connect... well, any of the programs in there is Microsoft is a huge machine, and you've got to get a lot of parts lined up in order for anything to happen, parts that are within your control, other parts that are not in your control. I mean, it's a challenge to get all those things lined up in a groove. And I know that effort has been ongoing. We talked about AppSource as an example of something that Biz Apps doesn't own AppSource. They kind of own their door to it. And so, some things that are kind of in your control, out of your control, some things you can influence, not influence. I guess a lot of it would probably be driven by such as interest in the success of the Biz App side of the business, which is certainly higher than any of its predecessors, right? Toby Bowers: Yeah, absolutely. We have huge sponsorship, not only in support, not only for business applications like Dynamics and Power Platform from the senior leadership team, Satya and his LT down, but even the ISV strategy within that, Steve. I mean, we get a chance to get in front of that leadership team twice a year. We often talk about this ISV strategy, the ISV Connect program, what we're doing. So, it's well known across the company. And I think to your point around the matrix here at Microsoft, and what I would say is I've been around again for a long time and I've worked in most of these teams that are going to be critical for the success of this program, whether it's Nick Parker coming in on the global partner solution side and Gavriela [Schuster], Casey McGee, or on the engineering side, James Phillips and Charlotte Yarkoni, who actually leads our commerce engineering team, including our marketplaces with Azure marketplace and AppSource. So, we've got high awareness, high prioritization to focus and improve in some of the areas, Steve, that we'll probably talk about, we know we need to focus on and improve. But the last thing I'd say in this vein is when we launched last year... Again, you probably know the way Microsoft works. I mean, we kick off Q1 in July. Everyone goes in a little hole for it for a month, takes a couple of weeks of vacation, comes back out, and we quickly get into planning mode for the fiscal year, to sit down and build the pipeline we need, think about the right plans and investments around the world to be successful. And the difference between this year, this fiscal year and last fiscal year from an ISV Connect perspective is we now have this great stable of ISVs and apps ready to go. So, we had 500 ISVs enrolled in the program on day one, July 1. We have 1200 apps. We've got a great set of premium tier apps that we're now working with our sales teams to align to their account and territory planning process. In fact, just earlier this morning, Steve, I was looking at a spreadsheet and you can imagine not to share sort of all the gory detail, but we have these things called sales plays, which are how we enable and align our sales force to go and talk to customers about our workloads and solutions. And we have six sales plays for business applications. Then, we have an industry focus. We have these industry priority scenarios. We have 13 of those. Then, we have 14 areas, we call them, around the world. These are countries and groups of countries around the world. So, if you think about a big spreadsheet with all of those, what we've done is we've mapped our ISV solutions to each one of those to say, "hey, if you're looking to focus on supply chain in the manufacturing industry in France, here's a set of ISVs that are enrolled in ISV Connect", perhaps have an app in the premium tier that you should align to your account territory planning process, so that you can go and engage with them to build pipeline. Steve Mordue: Wasn't that previously like the... What was it? The catalog? The CSP? No, what was it? Toby Bowers: That, yeah. It was the... Well, the OCP catalog is what we used internally. Steve Mordue: OCP catalog. Toby Bowers: Yep. There's a Co-Sell Solution Finder. That's more reactive, Steve. If you're talking to a customer and say, "Hey, do you know a partner that has a solution on X," you can bring up that tool and find one. What I'm talking about is more proactive, actual territory planning with the sales teams to sit down with ISVs and do that sort of engagement, to build joint pipeline, identify joint accounts. So, I just bring it up because we didn't have the opportunity to do that last year, because we were just launching the program. So, I'm optimistic, as you say, critically optimistic that that'll make a difference for us this year, at least on the Co-Sell side. Steve Mordue: When Guggs came in, I was actually pretty excited, because that's really the first time that someone who had been with Microsoft for a long time, had some clout, knew how to work the machine internally came on board, and he was on board for, what? About a year, and then retired. And I thought, "Uh-oh. Now what?" And so, hearing that you took over, I was once again, very excited. I've known you for a long time now. Obviously a completely different personality than Guggs. You are much less of a risk taker, I would say, and much more of a... You're a much more mellow kind of a guy. You seek consensus. Toby Bowers: Thank you, Steve. Steve Mordue: I've always thought you seek consensus more than... Certainly Guggs wasn't big on seeking consensus. I think that's going to be critical to your ISV success. I think... And I admit, I'm not blowing smoke up your butt. I think you're the right guy at the right time for this now, just knowing you the way I do. And obviously, a lot of ISVs will be listening to this. So, I don't want to... I've kind of gotten caught in the past of sounding overly optimistic, and then things not stepping up. But I'm feeling as optimistic as I ever have about you stepping into role and being able to really make it work for everybody. We've got some very successful ISV stories out there, but there's a lot of them that are struggling to get there. I think democratizing the process a little bit, because we definitely over-index on the big ISVs, which I get. We need to... But big ISVs didn't start as big. We need to have motions that bring all people, raise all boats. Toby Bowers: Yep. Steve Mordue: What are you thinking about, now that you're brand new in role? Although you're not oblivious to what's going on. You've been in the periphery there of this thing fairly deeply for a while. What are you thinking about things you want to try and attack right away that you think you can get some traction on right away? And then, maybe things that you want to focus on a little more long-term, so we can kind of see what we can expect quickly, and then what we can kind of expect down the road? Toby Bowers: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that your sentiment, Steve. We have known each other for a long time, and I know you're a straight shooter, and you're also just a great champion for the broader partner ecosystem. So, I would just say, just to put everyone at ease, I've been around almost as long as Guggs and have been behind the scenes, like we said, on this for a long time. So, I don't want anyone to feel like I'm going to come in and start cracking around and changing things up. I think to your point around risk taking, this whole design launch mainstream phasing that I talked about, the program is sound. I truly believe we have the right program in place for the long game, with the revenue sharing model, the different points of value that we need to provide to our partners. Like I said, we just need to deliver on that promise now. So, I'm not going to come in and change things drastically. I'm going to take what we have, and do my darnedest to make it successful Steve, because I truly believe it is set up for success if we have the right focus and attention. So, that sort of leads me to the way I work. I am a collaborative guy. I've got a lot of good relationships across the organizations that will be required to make this program successful, whether it's the partner team or the sales team or all the folks out in the field who are closer to where the rubber hits the road. So, I feel pretty confident about the amount of focus and energy, and what I can do to really push it forward from here. As far as short term, long term, to answer your question, Steve, and I loved your blog. I read it. In fact, I listened to it. I was out walking the dog, and I listened to it. So, thank you for reading it out loud. I don't know where you found that picture by the way. That's about a decade old, so thank you. That's very flattering. Steve Mordue: Send me a new one. Toby Bowers: Exactly. But there's a couple things. I would say to some of your suggestions around... Let's just take the first one around equalizing. We probably did over-index a bit on the Co-Sell side of things last year with our premium tier, especially, and getting those partners enrolled and engaging with our field around Co-Sell. That's what, to be honest, a lot of the larger partners were most excited about. And there's been a couple of really good examples of success there, Steve, and companies like Seismic. We just had Inspire. We talked about a few different ISVs and sort of success stories, but Seismic is a great example. Sales enablement solution, three clouds, Azure, us, Teams as well. They really got plugged quickly into the Co-Sell motion. And they talked about pipeline growth of 5X in the first 90 days. That's a smaller group of ISVs that are in that premium tier app, and they've just seen a ton of success. Sort of taking a page out of the Azure Co-Sell playbook, and now applying that and extending it to ISV Connect. So, we're going to continue to focus on that. Like I said, we're able to kick off our fiscal year with this set of ISVs. And so, I feel pretty confident about continuing to push on the Co-Sell side. Where we need to focus more, Steve, is to your point on a couple of the other value points that we talked about. First is access to our ecosystem, right? We've got massive partner ecosystem, all shapes and sizes. SIs, local SIs, regional SIs, the big guys, resellers, CSP partners. Today, we've got some partner to partner benefits, kind of matchmaking benefits as part of the program, go to market program. We've got such an opportunity in the future to tap into those channels in a bigger way. You think about incentives or our transacting partners reaching into new markets and geographies around the world. That's going to be an area of focus for me going forward. And then, the other piece around AppSource. You had some great feedback on AppSource, and I know you've been giving us feedback on AppSource, for years. Steve Mordue: Yeah, since it launched. Before it launched, actually. Toby Bowers: Yeah, exactly. This is going to be a real short term focus for me, Steve. The fact is we've been on and are on a little bit of a journey with AppSource, but we've got eyeballs in there. It's got a monthly active usage of 4 million users, right? And growing. So, what we've done in the last quarter with AppSource is really worked on some of the plumbing underneath. It was just not where it needed to be when it came to search, discoverability of apps, just block and tackle, basic stuff. So, we worked with the engineering team to really focus on just fixing up that plumbing underneath. This next few months where we're going to focus is the overall user experience. So, the website itself, focusing much more on the solutions themselves, merchandising the right apps, really helping customers who are going there find what they're looking for quickly, not just from a search perspective, but an overall user experience perspective. And that'll happen literally in the next few months. And then, from there, Steve, you know where we're going to go. We're ultimately going to light up transactability of third party IP through AppSource. That'll come together with the ISV Connect program, so that partners can really choose how they transact. But we do feel like for the right apps and the right partners, that'll really light up this big Microsoft install base of customers as a new way to sell and transact their apps. So, that's where we're going. Steve Mordue: I think that would be particularly critical for the startup ISV, or the one who's coming over from another platform. Toby Bowers: Yep. Steve Mordue: Because it's a big enough challenge to build a worthwhile solution, but that's only the beginning as an ISV of getting where you need to get. you've got to build some sort of a licensing construct to protect it, and you've got to build some sort of a billing platform to get paid for it. So, to the degree that you guys can offer some sort of plugin capabilities on those sorts of things, I think that's going to open up for a lot more ISVs to engage, because you've just lowered the bar of entry to really, if you've got a good solution, if you've got good IP, you can jump in here. We'll take care of more of this plumbing for you, because it's definitely, I think, kept some folks on the sidelines or a lot of people have ended up just making apps free, because they don't have a way to protect or sell them, which isn't what the goal was. Toby Bowers: Yeah, totally, Steve, and look. I'm going to be honest. We got to get better in this space. This is an area that I just see a huge opportunity for us to focus on and improve. We've seen some success there. I talked to Trevor [Nimegeers] at this company called ITRAK 365. It's like a safety management app for waste management. Again, talk about vertical focus. Yeah. But he's getting leads from AppSource. He's going... Canadian based company. He's cracking into New Zealand and winning some deals over there. And just the infrastructure that can enable that geo expansion through a marketplace like that has a lot of promise for a lot of our ISVs. But you mentioned something important as well, which I missed earlier. So, in addition to the marketing benefits, the go to market benefits, the Co-Sell benefits, we're still working really hard with the engineering teams, whether it's Charles [Lamanna] and his team, or the marketplace team on platform capabilities. So, obviously, we've got tools and stuff today with ISV Studio. We've got telemetry. We've got install telemetry today. We'll have usage telemetry tomorrow. We'll have licensed management capabilities tomorrow. That'll flow into transactability. So, a lot of those platform investments that we can make from an engineering perspective ultimately come together to sort of paint a nice picture for ISVs who are looking to tap into that. And again, strong focus and sort of commitment across the engineering teams to do that. Steve Mordue: And when you say tomorrow, so everybody is aware, you don't literally mean tomorrow. Toby Bowers: I do not mean Labor Day. That's a very... No, no, I don't. Yeah. I mean, I don't have, and I can't share specific dates, Steve, but we are on this biannual release cycle with James and his team. Obviously, you know our release cycle there with October and April. The commerce and marketplace team is on a biannual cadence as well. So, we just fit into those engineering cycles to continue to champion for what ISVs need to be successful, in that long list of work that those teams will do to just get it higher and higher on the list. And we're really moving in the right direction. Steve Mordue: And I see a little bit of a parallel with the ISV Connect motion and really the whole Power Platform motion. My last call with Charles Lamanna when I was asking him about what are the big things that they're planning next? He said, "Actually, we're going to focus on making everything we have work better." Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: We have all the parts that we need and they're all out there. They're not necessarily wired up as ideally as we'd like, and you can't just keep launching, launching, launching. At some point, you've got to take a look at the pile you've built and make sure that it's organized and sorted and working, well oiled. And I kind of feel that way about ISV Connect. All the parts are there. We don't need any new, necessarily any brand new things, some add-ons here and there. But it's really just making that whole pile of components work like a well oiled machine. Toby Bowers: Yeah. I think the table's set. We just got to get people eating. Like I said before, I think the program is sound. The elements, the business model. It's a self-fulfilling business model. The more success we have, the more we can invest and grow together. And I do think that we stay the course. It's all about execution and delivering on that promise. Now that said, there are a few things, like we were just talking about that we need to add quickly or fix, to be honest. Things like getting AppSource where it needs to be, some of the benefits. You and I have talked a lot about internal use rights, and that is a benefit. We just need to get that done. I know we've been talking about it for too long. There's a broader Microsoft dialogue going on around ISV and programs and IURs. I'm just going to move forward with the right IUR strategy for ISV Connect, because that's just something we have to deliver on, Steve Mordue: Just put your head down and crash through. Toby Bowers: Exactly. Exactly. So, that's a big one. Steve Mordue: So, I recently started a new venture myself kind of on the side, towards this ISV Connect motion. I don't know if you'd heard anything about it. Toby Bowers: No, I haven't. What are you doing? Steve Mordue: ISV Connect ED. Toby Bowers: Oh, nice. I like the play on words there, my friend. You should be in marketing. Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm adding an ED to the end of it, but essentially, it's... We don't have a good external resource. I mean, you can go to Microsoft, and you can read all about ISV Connect and just read stuff, but there doesn't seem to be a community for ISVs to compare notes and... Not so much, I don't want to create a place for people to go bitch and complain. I want to create a place where people can go and learn what works, what doesn't, how to be successful, and see if we can nurture some stuff around there. So, hopefully you'll be hearing more about that. Toby Bowers: Well, that sounds intriguing to me, Steve, but yeah, I'd love to learn more. I mentioned one of the other things my team is responsible for is our community strategy. And I know you are an active member of our MVP community, our Partner Advisory Councils, our sort of partner community at large. So I'm all for what you do with that initiative, Steve. I think, to me, community, and I know we've caught up at user groups and things like that. It's just such a great listening mechanism for us. We can do all the research we want, and talk to our field and talk to partners, but that partner to partner community engagement to sort of identify common themes, and then have multiple voices bringing that back to us is just so important for us to be focusing on the right areas. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Toby Bowers: And I'm just a huge advocate. I mean, this is... In my career, I spent so much time out in the field with customers and partners, and I just feel it's so important for us to listen at this point. Again, I feel like we've got the right strategy in place, the right program [ISV Connect] in place. We need to listen to what's working and what's not working, and then act quickly that. So, I love it. I love that you're pulling that effort together, and I'd love to stay connected with you on it as far as opportunities to engage or just understand what you're learning. Steve Mordue: Oh, I'm going to lean on you, buddy. I'm going to lean on you. Toby Bowers: You can lean on me anytime. In fact, I was going to say that. Steve Mordue: One of the things that Guggs did, he kind of disbanded the ISV PAC and kind of went to that broader... But I think you definitely lose something when you've got... It's funny. When we go to any of these events, when there's a room with like 20 people in it, everybody's happy to talk. When there's 200 people, nobody says anything. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Steve Mordue: It's like the group gets too big, and then who was it? Tony. You remember Tony de Freitas? Toby Bowers: Yeah, I do. Steve Mordue: He made a comment on one of my more critical posts recently. And he just said, "Feedback is a gift." Coming from someone who used to be on the inside of Microsoft, I know you guys are desperate for the feedback. I mean, it's all... Give me the feedback, tell us what's working, what's not working. And it doesn't help when nobody says anything or they just complain. Getting that feedback is critical, and that's part of what I'm hoping to try and accomplish here is to help you guys get some of that feedback. Toby Bowers: Yeah. Absolutely, Steve. I mean, we can't do this in a vacuum. It's a new program. It's a new model for us. And so, feedback is critical, and there's multiple ways to get that feedback. The good news on the PAC is we're getting the band back together, so we're sort of re-establishing as we move into this next horizon. But yeah, in fact, I was going to offer, Steve. I think me coming in now, I would love to do this connection with you maybe in a few months as we sort of round out the calendar year to see what progress we've made, and you can keep me honest and I'd keep you honest. And I would love to engage with this community that you're thinking about building. Steve Mordue: Well, I hope that... I had Guggs on about once a quarter to just kind of talk about what's up. Toby Bowers: Okay. Steve Mordue: I definitely feel like you are a person who is more amenable to the feedback. Toby Bowers: Yeah, yeah. Steve Mordue: More interested in hearing it, and will definitely act on it. So, anything else you want to say to folks about you coming in here, and taking the role? I mean, I'm feeling very positive. I think everybody should feel very positive. I think everybody needs to give you a fair chance to take some action, but I'm feeling very confident about it. Toby Bowers: Well, I appreciate it, Steve. No, I appreciate the call, although it was a bit unexpected. I'd just wrap up with my number one job is to deliver value to our partners. That value will come in the form of growth, plain and simple, because if our partners are successful, we're going to be successful with this. So, that's what I'm going to be maniacally focused on for this next six months. And yeah, I look forward to catching up again soon and hopefully talking about some of the mutual successes that we've had. Steve Mordue: Sounds good, man. I'll be pinging you soon. Toby Bowers: All right, Steve. Well, thanks again for the call. I appreciate the opportunity to have a chat. Steve Mordue: All right. Bye bye. Toby Bowers: Bye bye.

I guess it is fairly obvious from my post yesterday, that I am pretty pissed off at Microsoft. I have always been one of those "Don't point out a problem, without suggesting a solution" kind of guys, and I have done my share of pointing out problems with Microsoft's Business Applications ISV efforts. So here are some ideas. Why ISVs? First, why should Microsoft even give a shit about ISVs? Certainly prior to sharing in ISV's revenue there did not appear to be much reason, based on how Microsoft had historically engaged with ISVs. I guess we have to thank Salesforce and their successful AppExchange for Microsoft paying any attention at all. For years I have watched various Microsoft people get up and say "ISVs are critically important to us", followed by very little in the way of tangible actions. Obviously, "We have a marketplace too!" should not be the end goal here. What Salesforce keenly grasped, was that ISVs either generate business they would never have had, or make their platform for the customers they do have, extremely sticky. We know this from our collective efforts to get customers to move away from Salesforce; very often it is some ISV solution they depend on, that is making them stay put. It has gotten easier to be sure, but mostly because of Microsoft's integrations to other Microsoft products being superior. SFDC customers are giving more weight to that now as so many of them have switched to Microsoft 365. On one side of the scale is this fully integrated Microsoft story, and on the other they have the disruption of losing a critical ISV solution for which Microsoft has no ISV comparable. What Microsoft really needs is 10X the number of ISVs they have today! It all costs money I don't recall when Salesforce started AppExchange, but I don't think it was long after they launched the company. I also don't recall whether they took a cut of ISV's revenue when they started, but they clearly do now. It would not have mattered, because at the time, they were essentially the only game in town. 800 lb Gorillas, with triple anyone else's market share, can afford to be demanding of ISVs. I have no doubt that SFDC makes a huge amount of revenue from this motion, not only for licenses that they would not have sold otherwise, but also their ISV vig. I have no idea what they invest in their ISV ecosystem, but I am sure it is not small, because building and maintaining it is not cheap. But SFDC recognizes the value. Up until recently, Microsoft apparently invested the change found in the sofas around campus. I applaud James Phillips and Charles Lamanna for seeing they were not going to win the race with SFDC on Microsoft's trajectory at the time, and pivoting into new ground. The "Citizen Application Platform" is an entirely different approach, but "Citizens" are not going to build robust mission critical applications on Dataflex. Microsoft needs customers on the big money, sticky stuff that ISVs have historically created for SFDC. Cart before the Horse? Guggs apparently realized there was no budget to create this thriving ISV ecosystem that Microsoft would be the primary beneficiary of, and decided ISVs should fund this. Let's think about this for a minute. You have a historically dismal track record for ISVs, you publicly acknowledge that, and step one towards a fix is to ask ISVs for the money to fix it. I had suggested at the PAC meeting where the Revenue Sharing idea was first floated, that maybe they should "prove" success for ISVs first, but I guess they didn't hear me. I am sure that Microsoft has had to spend some of their own money on this effort, as I doubt that the Revenue Sharing income is significant yet, but they need to spend a lot more. And they need to spend it fast and right, otherwise they should suspend the Revenue Sharing for a while until the value for ISVs is there. I can see it! When I throw my head back, and let the possibilities swirl around, I can see success for ISVs, and Microsoft. I know I have been a strong Microsoft advocate in the past, and call me a flip-flopper, but I could easily become one again. Even though SFDC does not have it perfect, I still envy their ISVs today. And, even though he is a egomaniacal as they come, Benioff still let ISVs shine, less concerned about brand positioning, than money rolling in the bank. So, what might I suggest to Toby? Stop Antagonizing Maybe they can't see it. Maybe they don't actually believe that ISVs are critical, or even necessary. Maybe they see us a necessary evil for certain edge case deals. Maybe they see an ISV ecosystem 10X the size it is today as a huge hassle. That would certainly explain things. Or maybe they don't think any of that, and simply don't know what to do to solve the problem. Launching a Revenue Sharing program at this stage, in spite of knowing full well that it was going to piss of the entire ISV ecosystem, does not appear to have been the best first step. If this is going to work, we have to all be smiling the whole way through. No pain, no gain, only works for the gym, Equalize the effort Right now, particularly in Co-Sell, my guess is that 5% of the ISVs are getting 95% of the attention from Microsoft. I understand that's where the quick money is, but that is also short-sighted, scorecard-based thinking. The goal should not make the few large ISVs even larger, it should be to make all ISVs larger. If you want to recruit a lot of ISVs, they need to see that they won't just be given the crumbs left over after the existing large ISVs have had their fill. Kind of like how many organizations and governments have a minority program, where a certain amount of projects must go to a certain population, Microsoft should come up with a similar program for small and start-up ISVs. Engineering I am aware that Toby will not have much influence over what the product teams do, but it impacts ISVs in a big way. The last thing the product teams think about when they create new features is the ISV story... it's more of an afterthought. As a result, many of these features or products are not what I call "ISV Ready" for various reasons. Every product team should have an ISV advocate, from the very first conversation about a new product or feature. I mean there's like 6,000 people in the BAG organization now, surely we can task a few of them with watching out for ISVs. AppSource One of the touchier subjects for ISVs is AppSource. If done right, AppSource could be a primary benefit to ISVs, and draw for new ISVs. I know AppExchange certainly is for SFDC. Unfortunately, AppSource for Bizapps ISVs has become little more than brochure-ware. Poorly built, hard to use, and not promoted nearly enough. I am also aware that AppSource is not "owned" by the Business Applications Group, they only own their own door to it, so again, Toby may have his hands somewhat tied. Supposedly, AppSource has been very effective for Azure, and some of the efforts have been toward trying to copy that success. But the Azure buyer is a completely different person than the BizApps ISV buyer, and AppSource is not giving that buyer what they need. What specifically might I do? First, I would reverse the process. Right now when you enter AppSource, a significant amount of the page is dedicated to showing you a bunch of "Featured" solutions. The problem is, AppSource has no idea what I might be looking for. The odds that I am looking for a solution, that you happen to be "Featuring" are pretty slim. I'm not even sure how these apps got "Featured". I would delete that whole section. The entire focus on the landing page should be helping me find what "I" am looking for. This is an area where Microsoft could actually do something better than AppExchange. Make this landing page into a "Process" that guides me easily to understand what I want and need first. Only then, show me a list of options, limited to that. Once I land on a solution that looks promising, give me the opportunity to book a time on the ISVs calendar for an in-person demo or conversation, not just a generic contact form. Circling back to the "ISV Ready" conversation, AppSource is not ISV Ready. Test Drive is clumsy and largely ineffective. Trials only really make sense for widgets, and there is no way to expire the trial unless the ISV builds that into it. The promised commerce component is nowhere in sight, and even if it was, the churn challenge will be similar for ISVs as it is for Microsoft when customers just try and deploy something on their own, again other than a widget. More important to ISVs than commerce, would be a universal licensing system that we can just plug into. Licensing schemes end up costing ISVs a lot to build and maintain, and customers end up with a different one for each solution they install. Lastly, drop the dime on promoting it. Stop being the marketplace that is down the street around two corners, and be right up on main street. I have more, but that's a good start. Benefits To offset the shock of the Revenue Sharing program there was a promise of benefits. Most of the benefits seem to be targeting new ISVs, and that's fine, but when you look at the costs of an ISV, and particularly those that Microsoft is in the unique position to help offset, there are some obvious opportunities to create value. One of them is IUR. Historically Internal Use Rights have been a benefit of Competencies. But for an ISV, competencies are not nearly as important as they are for SIs. For a short time there was an ISV Competency, that again seemed to have been put together without talking to any ISVs. It was summarily cancelled without any replacement plan. Either this should be reworked and brought back, or IUR should be a benefit of ISV Connect. It is not reasonable to expect ISVs to have to not only pay Microsoft for development platform, but then also ask for a share of the revenue earned as a result of the platform we had to pay Microsoft to use... Pick one! I am aware that IUR is not free to Microsoft, but I did say Microsoft needs to spend some money on this. I think I will leave this here, for now. I am aware that I ruffled a few feathers with my last post, and may with this one also, but to be honest, the survival of my business depends on Microsoft getting this right. I see no upside in keeping quiet.

El Ayuntamiento de Iurña ha convocado para este miércoles, 1 de julio, la Mesa General de los Sanfermines con un único punto en el orden del día: la "reiteración de la cancelación total de los eventos festivos de San Fermín ante la actual situación sanitaria". Ni fiesta de San Fermín ni actos paralelos. Ese es el llamamiento conjunto realizado por el Gobierno Foral y el Ayuntamiento de Pamplona. La Federación de Peñas no convocarán ningún acto durante las fechas de los sanfermines ni participarán en ninguna actividad que pueda provocar aglomeraciones de personas o situaciones de riesgo sanitario. "Queremos sentarnos a pensar, a reflexionar y mejorar, los que sin duda serán los mejores Sanfermines de nuestras vidas. ¡Las peñas de Pamplona empezamos así nuestra desescalera, diciendo bien alto que Ya Falta Menos para los Sanfermines de 2021!". Así lo ha expresado en los micrófonos de Onda Vasca Imanol Azkona, presidente de la Federación. De "valiente y muy responsable" ha definido Azkona la decisión de algunos bares de no abrir los días 6 y 7 de julio, aunque subraya que tampoco hay que "criminalizar" a los que decidan abrir. Entre los que echarán el cierre se encuentra el Club Nicolette, un referente desde hace dos décadas en las noches de Pamplona. También hemos querido conocer la historia de Javier Lorente, pamplonés que esperaba con especial ilusión este San Fermín en que el su hijo Izar, de 4 meses, iba a estrenar las alpargatas que él mismo no pude estrenar y que su madre guardó con mimo tras la suspensión de los sanfermines de 1978.

El Ayuntamiento de Iurña ha convocado para este miércoles, 1 de julio, la Mesa General de los Sanfermines con un único punto en el orden del día: la "reiteración de la cancelación total de los eventos festivos de San Fermín ante la actual situación sanitaria". Ni fiesta de San Fermín ni actos paralelos. Ese es el llamamiento conjunto realizado por el Gobierno Foral y el Ayuntamiento de Pamplona. La Federación de Peñas no convocarán ningún acto durante las fechas de los sanfermines ni participarán en ninguna actividad que pueda provocar aglomeraciones de personas o situaciones de riesgo sanitario. "Queremos sentarnos a pensar, a reflexionar y mejorar, los que sin duda serán los mejores Sanfermines de nuestras vidas. ¡Las peñas de Pamplona empezamos así nuestra desescalera, diciendo bien alto que Ya Falta Menos para los Sanfermines de 2021!". Así lo ha expresado en los micrófonos de Onda Vasca Imanol Azkona, presidente de la Federación. De "valiente y muy responsable" ha definido Azkona la decisión de algunos bares de no abrir los días 6 y 7 de julio, aunque subraya que tampoco hay que "criminalizar" a los que decidan abrir. Entre los que echarán el cierre se encuentra el Club Nicolette, un referente desde hace dos décadas en las noches de Pamplona. También hemos querido conocer la historia de Javier Lorente, pamplonés que esperaba con especial ilusión este San Fermín en que el su hijo Izar, de 4 meses, iba a estrenar las alpargatas que él mismo no pude estrenar y que su madre guardó con mimo tras la suspensión de los sanfermines de 1978.

What are UFOs? Is there more than one answer to this question, and does new information forthcoming on the subject in recent years, which includes videos of unidentified objects or aircraft obtained by the Navy, change the fact that the UFO subject bears qualities of "mythic" proportions?  After news about the exciting achievements of SpaceX and their successful launch of astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station on Saturday, we turn our attention to the "Myth and Mystery of UFOs," which became the title of a book by our guest, Thomas E. Bullard, Ph.D. Bullard's doctoral research included searching numerous newspapers for accounts of the 1896-97 airships and other pre-1947 sightings. In 1987, Bullard completed a study titled, "UFO Abductions-The Measure of a Mystery," a comparative study on UFO abduction claims. Bullard followed this study with articles published in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of UFO Studies, IUR, the MUFON UFO Journal, and the 1999 MUFON UFO Symposium. He contributed several articles to the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT in 1992m and in 2010 authored the book, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, published by the University Press of Kansas. We dig into this weighty topic with Dr. Bullard, and get his perspectives as a folklorist on the enduring mystery of UFOs on this edition of The Micah Hanks Program. Coronavirus Charities: If you are able, please consider supporting the following charities that are offering relief for those affected by the coronavirus pandemic: CDC Foundation Coronavirus Relief No Kid Hungry Responds to Coronavirus Direct Relief: Coronavirus Pandemic American Red Cross: Give Blood Feeding America Meals on Wheels Homeless Shelter Directory Enjoy The Micah Hanks Program? Check out Micah's other podcasts here.  Below are links to stories and other content featured in this episode: Orbital human spaceflight has come back to American soil. Strange, 'Never-Before-Seen' Asteroid Turns Out to Be Something Much More Common Scientists made a mouse embryo that's 4% human The Myth and Mystery of UFOs by Thomas E. Bullard, Ph.D. Thomas Bullard’s page at the Center for UFO Studies BECOME AN X SUBSCRIBER AND GET EVEN MORE GREAT PODCASTS AND MONTHLY SPECIALS FROM MICAH HANKS. Sign up today and get access to the entire back catalog of The Micah Hanks Program, as well as “classic” episodes of The Gralien Report Podcast, weekly “additional editions” of the subscriber-only X Podcast, the monthly Enigmas specials, and much more. Like us on Facebook Follow @MicahHanks on Twitter Follow Micah on Instagram Visit Micah's Website and check out Our Podcast Page Music featured on The Micah Hanks Program includes songs composed by Caleb Hanks (The Clerk Chronicles), Decepticons (Dreamland, Start the Machine) and Micah Hanks. All songs are either in the public domain, Royalty Free, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, or are used with permission of the creators. Please note that some links to books and other items on this page may feature Amazon Associate links.

In this episode of "Steve has a Chat", I catch up again with Steven Guggenheimer "Guggs" to get the latest on the ISV Connect program. It seems that the word is out at Microsoft about calls from me... they all seem ready now. But I still had a few surprises for him.  Enjoy! BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 4PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays! Transcript below: Steven Guggenheimer: Hello. This is Guggs. Steve Mordue: Hey, Guggs. Steve Mordue. How you doing? Steven Guggenheimer: Good. How are you doing? Steve Mordue: You know how I'm doing. You know why I'm here. Steven Guggenheimer: I do. I do. I assume we're get to go do a little update session, and so I know or I assume you're recording and- Steve Mordue: You bet I am. Steven Guggenheimer: ... whatever I say is ready to go. Steve Mordue: You got time? Steven Guggenheimer: Sure. Yeah, I got a little time. Steve Mordue: All right. Perfect, perfect. Well, it's been a while since we talked. It's actually been a while since we've heard from you. I was looking, and I think November was the last post, kind of an update to the world of what's going on. I've been hearing the hammers banging back in the background, but lots of folks, lots of ISVs are reaching out to me for some reason or other, saying, "Hey, what's the latest? What's going on? What's happening on that ISV front?" Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Like you said, lots of hammers in the background. Once you get into that middle of the year, you're just mostly heads down trying to do two things, trying to solidify all the work that's going on for this year, so working with the field. The team went out and did a field tour and, on lots of calls, we have our middle of the year checkpoint. You're just grinding away on that, and you start doing the planning for the next fiscal year. It turns out our Q3, which is January, February, March, is kind of double busy. You're working pretty hard to do whatever tweaks you need for this year and you're busy planning for the next year, and so I think everybody's been pretty heads down. Steven Guggenheimer: Then you get into January and February with the virus coming out, I think you're busy trying to figure out, "Are we going to do [MBAS 00:02:13] live?" You plan for one version of it, and then you plan for a different. You're working with customers and partners. I think all of those things combined means everybody's busy. My virtual team gets together on a regular basis, and I've got a couple of calls after this, so that's where we're at. Steve Mordue: The ISVs have definitely had some challenges with Microsoft. Not all of this, of course, is within your area. You're working on the program for ISVs that will link to the products, which you're not related to the products. You're related the program. But on the product side, even, the ISVs are having some challenges. I know that there's been ISVs that... The platform keeps shifting, keeps moving around, new things added, things dropped. I even know some ISVs that have said, "Hey, they just launched something, and it kind of wiped out my whole solution." Steve Mordue: I think there's multiple things going on on the ISV side that's got a lot of them nervous, and I think they're looking for some reassurance that, "We bet on the right platform, and was that a good bet, and when are we going to see a payoff on that bet?" What kinds of things can you say to maybe reassure some of these ISVs that are out there that are scratching their heads saying, "Hmm, what's next? I mean was this a good bet?" Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. I can't think of a better bet right now, but that's me. Of course, I'm on the wrong side of the fence for that. The- Steve Mordue: Well, we're all biased. Even us ISVs are biased. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, we're all biased. Steve Mordue: We're all biased. Steven Guggenheimer: Well, people want a little reassurance that, to your point, that they made good decisions. From a platform and product perspective, there's probably never been more energy in the combination of Power Platform and D365 than we have today. I talked a lot about product truth. I didn't think there was a lot of product truth for an ISV in the platform SaaS offerings if you go back five years when we were in the DPDx days. Steven Guggenheimer: James and [Mohamed 00:04:24] and Charles have just been cranking along, and so from the breadth of the portfolio and the quality in that link to Azure going down the stack and that link to SharePoint and M365 going up the stack and the coherence in the platform. Then we've been cleaning up. I mean God bless the team for all the work they've had to do to clean up just years and years of monolithic offerings that weren't in good shape. That speaks a little bit to the change of the underlying platform. Steven Guggenheimer: We're probably as solid as we've ever been. We've got a twice-a-year release train. The notes come out early. We did an ISV session for the partners to get ahead of it. We'll do that again on an every-six-month basis. Satya is sort of heavily invested. Scott's heavily invested. Amy, our CFO, is heavily invested. I think there's both product or platform truth. There's good energy in the marketplace. I mean we're growing very well. Steven Guggenheimer: Can't say anything. Q3 will be coming up, but you look at Q2 and Q1, you look at just quarter over quarter, now the platform's growing and, if the platform's growing, that's opportunity, in particular, Power Platform, Power BI, some of the D365 services. I think all of that speaks to just incredible momentum. I see a decent number of ISVs coming into the program and the platform unsolicited wanting to take part in that. Steven Guggenheimer: Now, the one place people might feel a little discomfort is, as the platform solidifies and as the services solidify and we add things like AI and mixed reality in there, there might be places where people were making an investment or were looking to extend that we might be extending in that area. I would say, look, if you're an ISV on the Microsoft platform, historically, one of your trademarks is being somewhat nimble. I don't care if it's all the way back to the Windows days and Windows 95 working your way up through the internet era or intelligent cloud, intelligent edge. The value of a platform is that balance between giving developers something to build on and having enough coherence and consistency that both customers and ISVs can count on it. Steven Guggenheimer: There's a fine balance there in terms of where you add features or functionality or new capabilities to keep up with what your competitors are doing, to keep up with what the customers are asking for. It's a balancing act. I think the good thing, at least in the Dynamics side, is that we're always open for conversation. Whether it's myself or Greg or Mohamed or Charles, look, we'll pick up the phone and we'll have the discussion. There'll be places where people might feel uncomfortable that we've gone in that direction. Great. We'll have that conversation, and we'll talk about, roughly, where we're going without breaking NDAs on either side. Steven Guggenheimer: My feedback to ISVs has always been the, "There's always someone at Microsoft who thinks, someday, they're going to build something that competes with you, so let's focus on the 90% where we don't compete and know that there's going to be 10%." I think that's just a truism. Look, energy is really good. I mean product coherence is good. Product truth is good. If you look at what's going on, right now, during the COVID response and the pickup for the Power Platform in terms of helping hospitals and healthcare workers and quick solutions, holy crud. Steven Guggenheimer: Then the new areas are good conversation, so let's have the discussion. I mean I know a lot of the historical ISVs have been around a long time, and some of the work they did that was either custom on the product side or custom in terms of working with our field as we make that available to everybody, that feels a little less comfortable. We do a good amount of handholding for that. Steve Mordue: Yeah. I think one of the things you guys have been telling ISVs, for years, as a way to build a business but also, in a way, to protect your business is to go vertical. The more vertical you can get, the safer you are. You guys are not going to go there. A lot of horizontal ISVs, and they're... If you're horizontal, you're plugging a hole. You're always at risk that Microsoft's going to get around to the time to plug that hole. You're definitely safer going vertical. Steven Guggenheimer: That's for sure, and that's even more true today. As some of our competitors invest in the acquisition of vertical solutions, it opens up that direction more. I would say, as a company, we're making that pivot, albeit slowly but surely, to industry-led versus product-led. We've always had product conversations. We've always had audience conversations, developers or IT pros. We've always had sides of organization enterprise, but industry was always kind of a... not as strong a direction in terms of how we went to market. We pivoted the company pretty heavily, and Azure's doing a lot of this work at M365, and so is Dynamics. In industry-based solutions, those are always the ones that get the best pickup, and now our sales force is pivoting more and more in that direction. That's the way to stay aligned. Steve Mordue: Yeah. You talked about nimble. Frankly, one of the challenges some of these ISVs have is they're not that nimble. They built a bunch of IP on something, and their goal was to just sit back and collect checks, but you can't do that anymore. We're no longer in a space you just build something and sit on it for years. You may not be able to sit on it for months before you've got to go back in, modify, refactor, take advantage of some new technology or... It's a continuous motion now for ISVs. They're in continuous development mode where they didn't use to be. It was like, "We're going to go build something, sit on it, and cash in." Steven Guggenheimer: And particular in this space, and we see it a lot. I use the term, sometimes, there's this notion of lifestyle businesses where you build something and it supports the lifestyle, and there's not a lot of interest or energy in reinvesting to change it or modify it. Truthfully, that doesn't work. There are places where- Steve Mordue: Tell me about it. Steven Guggenheimer: They're- Steve Mordue: That's what I've been trying to do. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, it's not working. Part of the blog series I've been working on, it's called Continuous Transformation, and it's all... If you look at 25 years or the 26 years of Microsoft, all we've ever done is evolved and changed, and it's driven by technology and scale and culture. I can't remember a period of time where something's not upending the conversation. Steve Mordue: Yeah, but the pace is much greater in the past few years. The shift to the cloud and the catch up, really, because we were behind getting in the cloud, the catch up necessitated a pace that we have not ever seen from Microsoft, this kind of a pace. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. I think, in the line of business application space or the Dynamics/Power Platform, we were further behind in that move, as a Microsoft property, than some of the others, be it Office or Azure, and so we're doing a lot of catch up, and that's why think that... I talked a lot about product truth. I think they've done a phenomenal job, but that's like a bit of a whip where we're as close to it as you can be and, the further out you get, the more you're going to have to go and make those changes, and you're playing a lot of catch up. Steven Guggenheimer: The truth is, D365, there were custom deals floating around there and custom support and all kinds of things that, as you modernize and change, that goes away. I think some [crosstalk 00:12:10]- Steve Mordue: It's not scalable, yeah. Steven Guggenheimer: Well, people get frustrated because they had this special deal. Well, look, we don't even build that product anymore or that product's not one we're trying to sell. We're off doing cloud stuff, so no, we're not going to go renew a set of terms or a set of conditions for something that we're not trying to drive anymore. The market's moved on. That's gone, and so you need to go modify and change your solution to meet the current market needs. Yeah. Steven Guggenheimer: On one hand, I get it. On the other hand, look, the time to move is now. The world is moving, and the opportunity is very good. Despite current conditions which are there, look, there's... The world, the first thing they move is their infrastructure as a service. They move the core horizontal infrastructure out, but sooner or later, the next thing they're going to do is they're going to want to go to a set of SaaS applications. They're not going to want to have a cloud-based infrastructure then run some client server on-premises solution. They're going to want to set a SaaS services. Steven Guggenheimer: Even though people may feel like it's a push or it's a hurry, that's where the world's going. We're going to go push on it, and you need to move your solutions there. Steve Mordue: I'll tell you, it's been very acute, these folks that have on-premise solutions, particularly if they're physically on premise, with this virus and the push to send everybody to work from home in organizations that really weren't set up for people to work from home from a technical standpoint. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: I'm sure there are people out there now that are thinking, "Damn, I wish we were in the cloud right now because those guys got it pretty easy working from home if you already made this transition." It's very acute right now. Steve Mordue: I was talking to Charles two weeks ago. I pounced on him, or a week ago, I pounced on him for a call. He was saying one of the things that's a- Steven Guggenheimer: You are getting a bit of a reputation, but keep going. Steve Mordue: Yeah. People are going to be scared and have my number blocked. Steven Guggenheimer: Nobody's going to pick up the phone. Steve Mordue: One of the things he said that was a big focus right now is making everything work better. It's like we were firing off lots of solutions, getting them to like 90%, move on to the next one, fire it off, fire it off. Now there's this effort to kind of go back to this. Let's close these gaps. As he was talking about, there's still some significant gaps in not the product truth. The product truth is there, but there's some gaps that they're now really going to focus on closing. It feels like it's kind of like it's time to do that. We've shot out tons of things. Now let's go back, tighten them all up, and then go back to revisit shooting out more things so- Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, I think that's right. You look for gaps and overlaps. You look for how do we take all the AI scenarios? They're kind of scattered. Can we bring some of them together? Do they make sense together? When they first came into the portfolio, they were sort of all independent, so we ran them uniquely and independently and just kept them going and, excuse me, tried to find alignment with the various SaaS services. Now you go back and you say, okay, where is their consistency? Where is the sum of the parts greater than the individual? Steven Guggenheimer: You go and you look for whether it's process automation and the work we're doing there, whether it's the power of virtual agent. If you look at what they've done in terms of for COVID-19 in terms of using a virtual agent, making it available, how do you turn these into tools that can really scale and operate and work at the levels needed? Steven Guggenheimer: I think Mohamed's got the same thing. There's a bunch of solution areas as we took ERP and CRM and took them into their natural marketing and sales and finance and operations, and we picked up some other areas. He's doing that same work. Now is a beautiful time to not necessarily double the number of offerings or add a whole bunch of new products. It's now is the time to take the momentum we've got and the offerings we've got and fill in the gaps and, where there's overlap, bring things together, make these things really operate at scale. Steven Guggenheimer: When you have the energy and you've got the interest, then what you start to get is feedback on what you're missing or what's not quite right. We want to take advantage of this time to go work on that. Steve Mordue: Let me circle this back to your space, the ISV side specifically. Over the past month, I've had two calls with some folks on your team that were looking for my opinion about some complaints they were getting, because you know I have opinions, about some complaints they were getting from some ISVs that had built their solution depending on this Team Member license and the changes to Team Member. I am actually aware of a couple of these ISVs that actually built their solution on the Team Member license without regard for the restrictions of that license. Certainly pretty easy to make your ISV solution have a lot of appeal if you've put it on a lesser license than it should be on. Steven Guggenheimer: Right. Steve Mordue: They're complaining now about the changes. Both of your folks had asked me my thought about that. I said, basically, "The hell with them." I mean I have no sympathy for somebody who built a solution on top of a license they shouldn't have. If you can't make revenue on the right license, then your solution's not right or you're thing isn't right. I mean do you have similar feelings of lack of sympathy for those folks that did those things? Steven Guggenheimer: I sort of think about it a little bit differently. Yes, look, there's people that take advantage of, it maybe intentionally or unintentionally, of licensing they shouldn't. That just has to get fixed, and we'll go work on that. Steven Guggenheimer: What there is that I think about is there are two scenarios that I think of as light use or light functionality scenarios. If you have something, a very large group of people... Students is a good example. Healthcare workers might be a good example. Pick your scenario where you have lots of people, and you have some people that are heavy users, and you have some people who might touch the solution once or twice a year or who touch the solution quite often, but they need just a very lightweight answer to it. They're not- Steve Mordue: A light touch. Steven Guggenheimer: They're users. They're users versus creators. That lightweight or light touch scenario is one we still are trying to figure out the right scenario for because there's not a great license type for this. By the way, this isn't a Dynamics-type conversation. I can say the same thing for Office for all the years it was there and people would talk about different types of workers. It's one of the- Steve Mordue: Contract workers, things like that. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, yeah. They used to use the term knowledge workers, and there was something else I can't remember. There is a collective challenge, which is how do you build a licensing framework where you can't tell between the two, light touch or light use, or you can tell but there's no consistency. If I ask the question, "What does light touch mean to one ISV or light use?" I'll get a very different answer than what I get from another one, so you can't design a licensing type that works for everyone. Steven Guggenheimer: That's one where I definitely have some empathy. It's not a sympathy term. I get it. I don't know what the answer is. To your point, ultimately, you have to design the solution to work with the licensing types that are out there. There's this funny juxtaposition between everybody wants simplicity but everybody wants all ultimate choice. Well, those two things aren't the same. You either get simple or you have the... and not as much choice or you get all the choice in the world. It's the most complex thing you'll ever seen, and so I don't know the answer to solving for this one. Steven Guggenheimer: I know that the licensing teams are very aware of it. They've had tons of these calls, in a good way, but there's not... I don't know the answer. I haven't seen anybody figure out the answer in 10-plus years of banging heads on this, and so I do think trying to design a solution for the licensing types that are out there is the right thing to do. Team doesn't serve that purpose. It's gone relative to that where people try to use it for something that it wasn't designed for, which in many cases, is that light use, light tough scenario, but it doesn't work. Steven Guggenheimer: We'll keep banging our heads. We'll keep talking to people. People do have to work within the licensing confines that are out there. We're always evolving them. We're always taking feedback. We're always trying to do better. Assuming something's going to come magically, it doesn't happen. Steve Mordue: We're not alone there. I was reading the Forrester Report on low-code solutions. We're obviously up there at the top now with a couple of others. The negative for all of the ones at the top was overly complex licensing. I was just thinking to myself, "You know what? Whoever figures that out is going to win because that's the thing holding all of the low-code platforms back a little bit is people can't figure out how to buy it." They just can't. Partners can't figure out what to sell. Customers can't figure out what to buy, too many moving parts in the licensing. Fortunately, we're not the only ones that have that problem, but whoever could figure that out is really... I'm sure you guys have got some smart people trying to figure that out. Steve Mordue: A couple of other things before I let you go. On- Steven Guggenheimer: Well, just on that one, there's also a difference between the customer angle for that and the ISV angle. Trying to figure out a licensing framework that works well for customers and ISVs, whether it's the low-code scenario or some of these others, it adds to the complexity. I highlight that in the sense that customers are a big chunk of... That's typically where we start first when we're working on a licensing framework because they're the... many times are the purchasers or it ends up as part of a broader agreement set, and so we have to figure that out, and so that- Steve Mordue: Actually, I think it's easier for ISVs because, as an ISV, I can figure out and understand what license would be necessary to run my solution and talk to a customer about, "Here's exactly what you need to run my solution." Bigger challenge, I think, for customers and SIs where a customer's like, "We want to do all these wonderful things," and then for them to try and figure out what kind of licenses they might need to accomplish those things. At least I know what I'm doing with my solution. It's pretty straightforward. I may have to shift it from a license I used to have it on to some different licensing construct as things changes, but it's a little easier for me. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: One of the things that came up in one of my calls with a pretty good size ISV recently was the lack of... I think he told me his costs this year are going to be over $90,000 for Microsoft licensing to be able to actually build and develop their solutions on between their multiple sandboxes, different things like that. It's a frustration for him that, "I'm building an ISV solution, a big one. I have lots of customers that are generating licenses and revenue for Microsoft, but I'm having to spend, as an ISV, a ton of money to even be able to do that." Steve Mordue: We had that ISV competency out for about eight minutes, decided that wasn't a good path. Some of the other paths to get IUR and those sorts of things that you would need to build on aren't always relevant for ISVs. The biggest thing the ISV competency really gave was, "Here. Here's some benefits. Here's some resources for you to go build on." What can we tell those folks that... I mean this guy's literally having to buy retail. You know? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. That's a Microsoft-level challenge in many ways. It's the what's the benefits? It really comes out of the MPN, the Microsoft Partner Network. What's the benefits? That's where that competency came from of being a partner and, if you're an ISV, how can you get access to the software you need to build a solution? Steven Guggenheimer: I know that the team is deeply aware of that. It's from the day the ISV competency went away to through all the conversations. I haven't checked in in a while to see where they are on coming up with an offering. I'll go back and ask. It's a good question. I don't know. Look, I don't know the answer, the how do you provide software? It ends up being, to your point, sandboxes or one-offs or these other things versus what's the programmatic approach that scales across Azure, Dynamics/Power Platform at M365? How do we make it available? What do you need to do to qualify, as a partner, so it's not just out there for everybody? It's an expensive offering [crosstalk 00:25:23]- Steve Mordue: Yeah, so is manning an ISV practice with developers and people to build, so- Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. No, they're both... That's right. Steve Mordue: Yep. Steven Guggenheimer: How do we find that balance? I don't know. Again, it's a little bit like a light-usage, lightweight licensing SKU where I haven't seen the answer to that. This is one of those ones that pops up and down in terms of, sometimes, we seem to give a lot of benefit in that direction, and sometimes we don't. Let me go back. I'll go back. It could be one of the last things I can go poke on a little bit, especially since- Steve Mordue: Yeah. That would be good. Steven Guggenheimer: Especially since I know Nick super well. Nick Parker took over the... He has the ISV remit underneath him now, so I'll go bug him about that. Steve Mordue: Yeah, we kind of kicked the can down the road when the ISV competency went away, kind of grandfathered everybody into business biz apps or some other competency while we figured it out, but now we'll be looking at people coming up on that expiring, and they'll be like, "Okay, now what do I got?" I mean it's obviously a big expense for ISVs when they're looking at partnering with Microsoft. They're thinking, "Here's something you can do for me," but other things- Steven Guggenheimer: No, that's super constant, consistent feedback. That's not a new one. We probably had that conversation the first time we did a call and- Steve Mordue: Every time since. Steven Guggenheimer: Every time since, and I still haven't... It's one I get to poke on. It's not one that I own, but it's one that I'll go poke on again. Steve Mordue: How is ISV Connect? Have you guys collected revenue yet? Are we at the point where we're collecting revenue from ISVs? Steven Guggenheimer: Oh, yeah. Yeah, collecting revenue. We crossed 1,000 ISVs that have signed the agreements. I think we've crossed 1,000 apps in AppSource now. We've done all the work to remove the ones that didn't go through certification that didn't join ISV Connect. Steven Guggenheimer: We're actually in a good in a good spot. We've got a decent number at the 20% level, and we're trying to get the ones that our field is really asking for aligned with more of the 20-percenters because those are the ones that are going to close out with the most. I feel really good about the getting people into the program. We've gotten the time to do the certification down. That's all been cleaned up. I think terms and conditions, we've been through all of that. We're heading into the next year. We won't add a lot, so keep it simple, do more of the same. Steven Guggenheimer: The place we're spending energy now is on the benefits side. We've got almost all the partners activated with their marketing benefits now, and they've had the call, and we're working on that. On the co-selling side, look, we're continuing to do the work with the field to drive that forward. Some people feel pretty good about it and we get really good feedback, and some people don't feel as good quite yet, and so we're working on both of those. Steven Guggenheimer: Now as you head into Q4 with an economic challenge around the world, everybody hunkers down a little bit, so we're going to have to work a little harder. One of my meetings later today is how do we stay focused on the right things and the fewest number of things to keep the momentum going as we head into this year and next? We're doing the planning for what would we tune for next year. Overall, it's going well. Steven Guggenheimer: The operations, a lot of the challenges we had, once you got past the people discomfort with a new program, a lot of challenges we had were operations. We're cleaning those up. We have some marketplace work to do. We've had good calls with that team. When people give us feedback, we understand it. We're doing the engineering work now. I sort of feel like we'll work our way through Q4 this year and then, as we head into the next year, we'll have both an engineering uptick on operations work, on the marketplace, on the back end. There's work going on on Partner Center because it's going to scale to more and more partners across the company. Steven Guggenheimer: I feel pretty good, not perfect. I always say these things are a journey and they take time, that's for sure, and so we'll- Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. It always takes longer than you think, right? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, yeah. I'm scarred enough to know that we still got another year of cranking away, but we're in a good spot given where we were. The energy's in a good place. We just got to keep focused and keep going. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Maybe there's a way to solve both those problems. I seem to recall, at least, the initial benefits that were being, "Here, in exchange for the rev share, we're going to give you guys these benefits." A lot of those benefits were targeting brand-new ISVs. A lot of the benefits on that list for an established ISV, they were like, "Oh, I don't need this. I don't need this. I don't need a bunch of these things as an established ISV." Those are all, certainly, high value to someone brand-new to the platform, which is something we all want is more ISVs. Maybe there's a way to tie in those IURs or the benefits back to, "Okay, you don't want a marketing thing? Fine. How about if we give you some credits that you could use towards the underlying platform stuff you might need that could be a little more value to those folks?" Steven Guggenheimer: That's some of the conversations we're having is which benefits are people finding value in? Where would they like to see other benefits? The IUR is a constant one, so that one I sort of table off on the side because it's a consistent. Steve Mordue: Yeah, yeah. Definitely, benefits will be different for someone brand new to the platform who's never done anything versus someone who's been there for a long time. Let me ask- Steven Guggenheimer: Right. This is one of the trade-offs when you go... A platform is only as strong as its ecosystem. To make the ecosystem stronger, you're going to add more people in, and so you're going to bring people in. Part of what you're trying to do is attract that. Not all of those things feel great for the people that have been there and been working on it. That's where a little bit of the tuning and being agile helps because you're adapting to... Look, the platforms are going to scale and grow. It's in a good spot, so there's going to be more people you know on it, and so we have to find that the tools that work for everyone. Steve Mordue: Yeah. Thanks to your little kick, I got a call next week with about a dozen people on the AppSource team, so they're going to get an earful of all my opinions so they can put that in the mixer. Steven Guggenheimer: No, I think it'll be good because look... and they know. To be honest with you, they know. We told them, "Look, it's better to hear directly. There's a couple of folks, we're having them talk to you. They're sending me the feedback," and then they can tell you where they're at and what they're doing and why it's taking a little longer than maybe people had hoped for. That's the beauty of doing it right and getting it fixed is... not the beauty, the reality. Steve Mordue: Necessity. Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah, the reality or the necessity. It's a little like rebooting this program. Steve Mordue: I want to wrap up here because I don't want to take up too much of your time. Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Yeah, I got somebody- Steve Mordue: You recently announced a retirement. Steven Guggenheimer: Yep. Steve Mordue: Coming soon. Who's going to be stepping into your shoes for this ISV motion? Figured that out yet? Has that been just thought about? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. No, we're going to move the team into another part of the organization. It'll be close to the Accelerator Team, which used to report to me anyway, and the Industry Team and with one of our real good leaders and with DSI. It'll end up in a spot with Greg and Sean still running their teams aligned with the work going on for another key part of the ecosystems, which is SIs, and the industry work, which has a ton of ISV work. It's all the accelerators. Again, that team used to report into my org, so it'll feel like a pretty natural connection into places it would fit and the people we've worked with pretty closely all along. Steve Mordue: You're going to have every single one of these issues fixed, buttoned up, running like a well-oiled machine before you walk out the door, right? Steven Guggenheimer: I'm going to stay committed to doing the best job to make sure we're set up well for our next fiscal year to transitioning well and to being there. Then I'll be around for a little longer to make sure if there's questions or engagements that are needed to done that I do them. Steve Mordue: All right, cool. Well, I'm looking forward to everything that that comes. Thanks for making the time for the call. Steven Guggenheimer: No worries. I always enjoy a surprise call on whatever day it is. Days get lost nowadays, but- Steve Mordue: Yeah. I'll bet you enjoy them, right? Steven Guggenheimer: Yeah. Steve Mordue: All right, man. Have a good one. Steven Guggenheimer: All right. We'll talk you, Steve. Take care. Bye.

Ep 12. Iur list of best remixes, remix rappers, and light touch on first impressions as far as friends and work. Also. Quick chit chat on the Mandalorian series from Disney plus. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jcamachoAkennedyPod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jcamachoAkennedyPod/support

Gibt es auch den schweizerischen Anwaltstitel Lic.Iur auch in Deutschland? Wenn ich einen Roboter programmiere, der denken kann, Gefühle hat und Schmerz empfinden kann, hat er dann die selben Rechte wie ein Mensch? Kann man für Sachbeschädigung belangt werden, wenn man eine Graffitidose dabei hat, die Polizei einen anhält, diese entdeckt und dich dann wegen Sachbeschädigung anzeigen will, nur weil in der Nähe ein Graffiti in der selben Farbe aufgetaucht ist? Was sind die größten Unterschiede zwischen dem deutschen und dem österreichischen Recht? Kann ich jemanden verklagen, wenn er mir gegen meinen Willen Geld überweist? Wenn Person "A" einen Pfandcoupon im Pfandautomat findet (Flaschen im Supermarkt), den Person "B" verloren hat. Person "B" jedoch dass erst bemerkt, während Person "A" an der Kasse mit jenem Coupon bezahlt. Ist das dann alles rechtens oder ist das schon Diebstahl?

The ground is shifting under Microsoft Business Applications ISVs. Only time will tell if it is shifting forward or backward. Regardless, to continue existing, you will need to sign a new document, so let's take a look at it. A room full of Elephants Microsoft's new "Business Applications ISV Connect Program" hopes to be a comprehensive program for ISV success, yet it's most often referred to by partners as the "Revenue Sharing Program", due to its prickliest aspect. But sharing 10% or 20% of your revenue with Microsoft is not the only thing you need to understand. In fact, that's probably the simplest thing to understand. Reversals I recently wrote a post highlighting Microsoft's plan to eliminate IUR benefits. In that post I said that I did not think they would back down... and they backed down the next day. I have been assured that this was not to make me look like an idiot. When I first wrote about the new ISV program, I also said I did not think Guggs would back down, and it looks like he is going to prove me right. So I have a 50% accuracy rate on back down predictions! The Addendum Between now and October, ISVs will need to agree to the compulsory ISV Addendum in order to continue to offer solutions (apps) that are built on, connected to, or extend Microsoft's Business Applications platform including Dynamics 365 and PowerApps, and where there is a revenue opportunity, Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Business Central and Power BI are exempt, for the time being. The Whole Truth It's not enough to just review the Addendum, as it references other documents, including the ISV Program Policies, as well as the Publisher Agreement.  I am not a fan of spreading terms across multiple documents. The Addendum is 9 pages and the Policies are only another 5 pages, with a lot of duplication between them. Why was this not a single document? This is so they can change the policies whenever they need to, without having to get you to re-sign anything. Classic lawyer games. The Publisher Agreement is an additional 47 pages, but my quick scan of it seems less related to the specifics of the Bizapps ISV Connect Program. So while everyone seems to be focused on a single aspect of this program, let's take a look at some of the other terms of these agreements. I am not a lawyer, but I do know how to read, and I'll share my "Business Owner" interpretation. Tiers Tiers are per app, and while the "Standard Tier" (10%) is compulsory, the "Premium Tier" (20%) is optional... for both sides. While there appear to be some specific requirements, Microsoft has maintained the discretion to accept or deny your Premium Tier request arbitrarily. I expect that this will cause some drama, but I see the rationale. The primary additional benefit of the Premium Tier is the activation of Co-Sell. This means Microsoft's own internal sales teams out there hawking your app, and being spiffed for doing so. Obviously salespeople, and hours in the day are both finite resources that Microsoft would rather not waste on "crappy" apps. But who judges "crapiness"? I would assume that any ISV solution that generates the sale or activation of Microsoft product licenses will pass muster, regardless of its intrinsic value, but what else? What about an app that reduces the need for additional Microsoft licenses? If you determine that you are not getting value for an app from the co-marketing and co-selling motions of the Premium Tier, you can "Down-Tier" that app back to the Standard Tier. It is not clear what percentage you will pay for any deals closed for that app while it was previously in the Premium Tier. Nor is it clear what you will pay for prior deals after you "up-tier" an app. There also does not appear to be any language preventing you from have having two versions of your app, one on each tier, possibly at different prices... I'll let that settle into your brain. What Counts? The definition of a "Business Application", that falls within this agreement is quite comprehensive. It also includes so-called "free" apps, that connect to paid services you offer, so no Trojan Horses. Fees Some math is required to figure out how much you're supposed to pay Microsoft, regardless of the tier. Basically, the total amount of your customer bill, less taxes and "non-recurring" services you perform, and your cost of any CSP licenses you may have included. So this includes your license margin also, if you sell Microsoft licenses as a part of your solution. It really feels and sounds like Microsoft does not think ISVs need to make any margin on Microsoft licenses, and while most don't... some do. It also appears to me to include any and all recurring revenue, like for example monthly or annual support plans, or any sort of managed service type offerings related to your solution. So as an ISV, if I offer a monthly support plan to the customer, I have to pay the fee, but if a reseller of my app offers the same monthly support plan, no fee would apply. The agreement includes this line: "you are solely responsible for End Customer credit decisions and Total Solution Value will not be reduced for uncollectible accounts." So you will still have to pay Microsoft, even if your customer stiffs you. I have no idea how this is supposed to work in the future when a customer purchases directly via Microsoft's AppSource Marketplace with a credit card. The agreement also includes this line: "You will accurately report each Paid Eligible Sale to Microsoft within 30 days of a Paid Eligible Sale occurring". Self-reporting always works! Of course Microsoft has the right to audit you, at their expense, and go back 3 years. Interestingly, their audit not only covers fees that may be due to them, but also appears to include your violation of any applicable laws? If they discover anything, you will foot the audit bill. Connect I think Microsoft is going to lose many Connect ISVs right out of the gate. Remember the "Connect" pattern is the one where you already have your own service, and you offer an app to connect it to D365. For example, let's say you offer some deep industry bench-marking service for the princely sum of $10,000 per month. Users typically gain access to your high-value data directly on your secure web portal. As a convenience, you decide to make a small free app, available to your paying customers, that will push your service's resulting "Account Score" field over to Account records in your customers' D365 instances. Guess what? You owe Microsoft $1,000/month for each customer that uses it. The technical definition of a "Business Application", as I read it, would also include third-party published "Connectors", based on what they do, and I am not seeing an exemption for them. So as soon as I wire up the CDS connector to some third-party's connector, is that third-party on the hook for a fee? Or, will they create an exception for connectors? If so, then won't all savvy Connect pattern ISVs just publish connectors instead? Prior Deals For any customers that you may have invested heavily in marketing and selling your solution to, possibly involving significant costs for travel, wining and dining, and ultimately heavily discounting your product to land their "Logo" account, all without any assistance from Microsoft... there is some good news. You have about a year to either raise your prices or decide to absorb the new fees. I assume many ISVs have some sort of term, and the fee will start being due if your customer has to renew between now and next July also. If you have a month-to-month auto-renewing agreement, it looks like you have until about the first of next July. Hopefully, not many ISVs had multi-year agreements with their customers. On the Ball If you sold 100 licences of your product to a customer, and Microsoft began invoicing you for their fee, and later the customer reduced their license count to 50, you better move fast. Your Microsoft fees will not be reduced for any current invoices, or any invoices that were to be sent to you within 30 days. If you somehow mess up and forget to let Microsoft know about the reduction for a while, no credits will be issued to you. In fact, it appears that no credits will ever be issued to you, regardless of... anything. Benefits I found interesting in Guggs' Inspire session, his referring to "access to Microsoft's platform" as a program "benefit". Guggs says he does not like the term "Tax", and I agree... based on this, "Tariff" seems better. This "benefit" had not come up in my past conversations with them for my post about the various benefits ISVs can expect. It looks like the catch-all for anyone trying to avoid the new program. Basically, part of what you are paying Microsoft for, is their permission to play in their playground, that they built, expand and maintain. Microsoft reserves the right to change any of the rules at anytime. So regardless of how much you may have invested to go "all-in" on D365/Power Platform, if you fail to meet some new or changed future requirement... you're out. Summary While I am optimistic about the concept, some of the execution so far feels ham-fisted. The agreements, as you would expect, are pretty one-sided. Establishing a "here's the rules" approach for new ISVs is one thing, simultaneously enforcing a "take it or leave it" approach with long-standing ISVs feels pretty arrogant, even when wrapped in a "for the good of us all" message. While some ISVs may leave, most probably have too much invested and really can't leave, even if they wanted to. Clearly Microsoft's focus is on large ISVs for enterprise customers, as they were the ISVs that were engaged to help craft this. For all other ISVs, time will tell if this is a shift forward or backward. 07/29/19 Clarifications from Microsoft You asked which revshare rate would apply when apps that change tiers.  The revshare % is “based on the App Tier in effect when the [sale] occurred” (Addendum, Section 5.a.i).  In other words, if an app’s tier changes, the new revshare rate will apply to future sales but not prior sales. You asked whether the same app can have two listings, one in Standard tier and one in Premium tier.  While not discussed explicitly, that isn’t our intent and we wouldn’t expect to approve (in certification) the second listing for the same app. You wondered if credit decisioning works differently when customers transact directly on AppSource.  I believe it works differently on direct AppSource transactions.  With respect to the ISV Connect program, please note that direct AppSource transactions are specifically excluded, since they are subject to different terms and an agency fee under the commercial marketplace agreement.  (The Addendum’s definition of a “Paid Eligible Sale” excludes sales “through a Direct AppSource Sale”). Lastly, I wanted to clarify when fees apply on pre-existing deals. On pre-existing deals (i.e., entered into before 7/1/2019 and registered by 12/1/2019), no revshare is due until 7/1/2020. This waiver period also applies to renewals (before 7/1/2020) of these pre-existing deals.  In addition, on multi-year fixed term pre-existing agreements with a term that extends beyond 7/1/2020 (without renewing), revshare doesn’t begin until it does renew/extend (even if that is after 7/1/2020).  This is the intent of Addendum Section 5.b.

# News * Switch Lite: https://www.nintendo.de/Nintendo-Switch/Nintendo-Switch-Lite/Nintendo-Switch-Lite-1595961.html * Logitech Hardware Security (Tastatur & Maus): https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/c-t-deckt-auf-Tastaturen-und-Maeuse-von-Logitech-weitreichend-angreifbar-4464149.html * IUR für Partner... bleibt wohl doch: https://twitter.com/msPartner/status/1149710222954553346?s=20 * Teams mit @-less Mention... wie Yammer: https://office365itpros.com/2019/07/11/teams-at-less-mentions/ * Teams kann bei uns jetzt Priority Notifications * Enterprise Work Profile für Android bei GK: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/android-enterprise-overview # AAD B2B OTP SPO - MfG? * SharePoint hat seit einiger Zeit das Email PIN verfahren eingeführt * Azure AD hat das nachgebaut und als Azure AD B2B OTP implementiert * Unterschied * SPO PIN Sharing: Identität nur in SharePoint sichtbar * Azure AD B2B OTP: Identität ist im Azure AD sichtbar * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/b2b/one-time-passcode * https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-azureb2b-integration-preview # FIDO2 SignIn to AAD * https://emptydc.com/2019/07/11/passwords-with-or-without-you/ # Feedback, Kritik, Lob, Fragen? * Email: podcast@hairlessinthecloud.com * Twitter: @hairlesscloud * Web: www.hairlessinthecloud.com (Links zu allen Podcast Plattformen) * Coverarts & new Audio Intro by CARO (mit Hilfe von pixabay.com)

I recently tweeted a link to an obscure Microsoft post I found about eliminating IUR. I thought at the time, "this is going to get messy". I followed up with a post on it myself, which promptly blew up, and now there is actually a petition someone started. Just to be clear... I did not sign this petition, and I will not be wielding any pitchforks at Inspire. Why not? It Had to Happen The vaunted "Microsoft Partner Network"! Wow, that sends chills down the spines of all other software companies! "Oh no! Here comes a Microsoft Gold Partner! We might as well just pack it in, we don't stand a chance", said Salesforce or SAP never. The ones who are the most impressed by Microsoft "Gold" partners, have always been Microsoft Silver partners. The Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) is a legacy construct, designed for an era that has passed. In fact, I think the entire MPN today is constipated! Wait, I thought you were with us! It seems that many folks read my post and tweets as a rallying cry, but if you re-read it now, knowing that it was not, it will sound quite different to you. This is not the first time I have landed on the bank opposite of the screaming hordes. The recently introduced ISV revenue-sharing model was another brouhaha that most seemed to have assumed that I, as an ISV, would have had a tantrum over. Instead, I was all for the changes. The fact that I have written some rather scathing reviews of things that I thought were dumb moves by Microsoft, does not mean that I think Microsoft is dumb. I am not "that guy", but I have met "that guy". I run into them at every event, and they frequently comment on my posts. They can clearly see the conspiracies that I am obviously missing. Like, how at every event Microsoft has these kids in purple shirts standing around with tablets... appearing like they are giving you directions... but what are they really doing? Back to MPN Microsoft is not good at giving news that they feel will be poorly received. With the exception of Guggs, who seems eager to stick his face into a fire, the rest would rather hide. But just because Microsoft is staffed by chickens, doesn't mean they're always wrong. In fact, over recent years, it would seem that are right way more often than they are wrong. But even though things are publicly looking great for Microsoft right now, there are leaks in the ship. None that will sink it, but if not addressed, they will cause issues in the near future. MPN is leaking like a sieve. Within MPN are a lot of things, beyond just training and competencies. Your MPN membership controls everything about your relationship with Microsoft, or lack thereof. Competencies As far as partners without a competency are concerned, competencies are a shitty way to grade partners. First of all, they are not required. You could well be a highly capable firm with many professionals, selling a butt-load of licenses, but unless you opted to pay the fee, you are not Microsoft competent. Conversely, up until recently, any firm with a handful of people and few deals, could opt to pay the fee and voilà, they're a Microsoft Gold Partner! So basically competencies as they existed, were pretty much a sham. BTW, I am saying that as a current Gold partner, not one of those petty and envious Silver ones. A lot of noise was made recently about the required increases in certified individuals and revenue to maintain a competency, but in reality Gold didn't mean shit anymore, and Silver never did. Microsoft's entire competencies strategy needs an overhaul, pulling the IUR benefits out of it, just stopped some bleeding from a program that was not working... for anybody. 80:20 We're all familiar with the 80:20 rule; 80% of the value that Microsoft accrues from their Partner Network, probably comes from less than 20% of the Partners in that network. Those who are calling for revolt, creating petitions, and threatening to leave the channel are in the 80%. So, on the unauthorized behalf of Microsoft let me say... "Please Leave!". How much more nimble and focused could Microsoft be, if they lopped off the 80% deadwood in their channel? How much time and money could they save, by instead of catering to partners who ain't doing shit, just hitting the delete button? To put this into context, I thought I had heard recently that there were like 600,000 Microsoft Partners Worldwide. Even if that number is way off, how many partners does Microsoft actually need to accomplish their "new" goals? I mean, 20% is still 120,000 partners! Never say Never Satya Nadella himself proclaimed "Microsoft has always been a partner led company and will always be a partner led company". Hmm... it seems like he should have left some wiggle room there. I can easily see a Microsoft without partners, or at least with a fraction of them. Microsoft itself suffers from Pavlovian conditioning, opening every partner presentation with the obligatory "Thank You Partners!" slide, and then going though a whole deck on how developers are no longer required. Many partners, and all LSPs are basically order takers for Microsoft, while at the same time Microsoft continues to expand it's direct sales capabilities at an unprecedented rate. "Reselling" licenses is a pointless relic in the SaaS world. Lipstick on a Pig I had something great for this heading, but I feel like I am starting to sound like a raving lunatic already, so I will save it for a future post.

The news media and investor market is certainly embracing the "Softer" side of Microsoft introduced since the appointment of Satya Nadela as CEO. While the company's stock is at an all-time high, it seems Microsoft's network of Partners are being gradually introduced to a new "Harder" side. Update: You can still read this, but Microsoft reversed this decision. Partners Pummeled In recent months, partners have seen a continuous barrage of changes that are catching most off-guard. Many have described some of these changes as types of "Partner Taxes". For example: Mandatory, but unnecessary, requirements to purchase Advanced Support for Direct CSP Partners (Minimum $15K/yr) 10%-20% of ISV's Revenue to now be shared with Microsoft The elimination of Internal Use Rights licenses (IUR), as I was the first to tweet about last week. Add to these, recent changes to the Competency Requirements, tripling the number of certified individuals. It all has a lot of partners wondering... WTF! Let's break it down. The Purge What most of these things will have as a common result, is a reduction in the number of partners. Fewer Direct CSP Partners, fewer Gold Partners, fewer Silver Partners, fewer ISV Partners... fewer partners across the board. It seems that Microsoft is struggling with how to achieve a new goal: dramatically increase the "Quality" of partners in their channel. One part of reaching that goal, is reducing the "Quantity". Quality Partners Ask 20 partners what defines a "Quality Partner", and you'll get 20 answers. But none of them matter, because the definition of a "Quality Partner" is determined by Microsoft, and always has been. Over the years, Microsoft's own definition has evolved, along with changes in technologies. A "Quality Partner" ten years ago, may well be an irrelevant partner to Microsoft today. Irrelevant partners aren't removed from the program, they're just ignored. This is not on Microsoft, this result sits squarely on the shoulders of the partner who did not evolve. Over the years Microsoft has increased the number of their partners significantly, but today they actually see many of them as irrelevant, serving only to boost numbers on brag slides. So why not just remove them from the program? Re-read the first paragraph if you don't already realize that's what's happening. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder So what is a "Quality Partner" to Microsoft... today anyway. This will vary significantly from one internal group to another, but it does seem that there are some common themes. The first is that they are usually big. Big partners sell big deals, small partners sell small deals, simple. There are exceptions, small partners that somehow sell big deals, or small partners that sell big logos. Microsoft's only interest in small partners is whether they have the potential to become big partners... soon... and most do not. This is not Microsoft's fault, they are not a charity organization. With success on Wall Street, comes extreme pressure to increase that success, this is all new to Microsoft, but clearly small partners won't cut it. Big is not the only metric, in addition to that, the partners have to be selling the right things, like Azure. If you are not selling Azure today, your relevance to Microsoft is significantly diminished. Again, Microsoft's Azure Powered Cloud is the force-multiplier on their stock value, and there will be no re-trenching. Irrelevance? So, if big Azure selling partners are the holy grail, are all others irrelevant? Not "irrelevant", just "less relevant". Out of Microsoft's 120,000+/- employees, a percentage of them do not have Azure as their highest priority. Although, if you followed the string connected to whatever their priority is, it often eventually leads to Azure, down the road or behind the scenes. If you look at the intentional "culling" efforts underway, it is fairly clear that Big Azure partners are immune. Second to the last Partner Standing If you are not a big Azure selling partner, and you are not able to become one, what is your next best option to remaining or becoming relevant to Microsoft today? You better follow the bouncing balls. Today, it is not important "how" good you are, what is important is "what" you are good at. On my side of the Microsoft house (Business Applications), you better be good at verticals, and migrating customers off of competing solutions. And, if you're not racing towards the Power Platform, you're racing towards irrelevancy. Whatever part of Microsoft's business you're in, you better be listening to their signals. Your agreement with the directions they take is not relevant. Effects of Motions Let's look at what I think the effects will be of some of these recent motions: Increasing the number of required Certified individuals for a Competency. This will dramatically reduce the total number of partners with competencies. Many Gold Partners will become Silver Partners, and many Silver Partners will simply fall off. Is it fair that Microsoft has decreed that your "Competency" with a product (which the dictionary defines as "the ability to do something successfully or efficiently"), is specifically proven by the quantity of certified people you have? Advanced Support Requirement for CSP Partners. Clearly this is Microsoft fixing their own mistake. In their zeal to grow this program initially, they lowered the bar to entry for Direct CSP partners. The predictable result was too many partners who were not qualified or capable of managing and supporting the Direct CSP arrangement. Coincidentally, the vast majority of those were small partners, and what's the best way to shake off a bunch of small partners? Add a significant new cost. It has the added benefit of not appearing like Microsoft took anything away... small partners removed themselves! ISV Revenue Sharing. I already wrote at length about both sides of this coin here and here. Elimination of IUR benefits. This will primarily impact smaller partners, who we have already determined are less relevant anyway. I expect there will be a lot of noise from those small partners, but if a tree falls in the woods... Microsoft won't hear it. This one has some fairly clear motivation behind it. Back in the day, IUR meant giving you a license key to on-premise or desktop software. It may have been foregone revenue, but at least there was no cost to Microsoft. Today, most of the IUR benefits are not free to Microsoft... they have a cost. Imagining the number of IUR services activated across their huge network, this cost is significant. Eliminating this benefit will have the dual effect of reducing costs, and increasing revenue... and who doesn't want that? What does it all mean? If you thought, with the dramatic and rapid evolution of Microsoft from near irrelevance, to the most valuable company in the world, that your life as a partner would remain unaffected... well then you're just a moron. Like Microsoft, you also have to let go of the past. All the old "favors" you racked up, have no value today. The cronies that protected you, are all gone. All of your storied history with Microsoft... pfft! What have you done for Microsoft lately? That is all that matters, and frankly, all that should matter. Microsoft is "Culling the Herd", which by definition means "Literally, to separate or remove (and usually kill) inferior animals out of a herd so as to reduce numbers or remove undesirable traits from the group as a whole." To me, this sounds like exactly what's happening...    

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I recently wrote a post about the coming Revenue Sharing model for Microsoft Business Applications ISV's. As expected, there is some screaming going on about forking over some of your revenue to Microsoft. But there is another side of that story... what Microsoft will be doing in return. Recap Starting soon Microsoft will be moving to a pay-to-play model for ISVs. The first reaction I am hearing from many ISVs are various "avoidance" schemes. Remember, this only applies to SaaS products. Since all of these SaaS products are hosted by Microsoft, and they have all the telemetry they want, you really will be challenged to find a way to avoid Revenue Sharing. It is not an "Optional" program. Though for the time being, you can still "side-load" your solutions, Microsoft will easily discover them. When they do, if you are not part of the program, according to Guggs, "If your solution is not on Appsource, we will tell customers not to use it --- we will get very "pointy" with this message over time". I can't think of any intelligent customer who would not heed this warning, so I suggest you drop your "avoidance" plans. Instead, focus on the promised benefits, and maximizing those. Benefits Depending on where you fall, you have several "levels" of benefits across three buckets: Technical, Marketplace and Sales. I'll share the slide first, and then we can unpack these. Understand that these are subject to change, it is a lever Microsoft can use to increase engagement. Starting Level Let's start at left most column, which is the minimum required "non-optional" option. When you publish a Bizapp solution to AppSource, and you commit to 10% as part of that process, this is what you will get, even without selling anything yet: Architectural Consultation. This is a one-on-one consultation with Microsoft. Unfortunately, you don't get this benefit until after you have published, and it probably would have been handy to have beforehand, but I can also see how Microsoft does not want to waste time with tire-kickers either. Training Vouchers. It is not clear how many of these you get, but without a specific ISV Competency anymore, they don't seem like a related benefit, but... they're not worthless. Customer Surfaced Certification. Seems all solutions will have that by default, in order to even be published. Access to ISV Studio. Ok, now we are getting somewhere.. potentially. We are in the Pilot group to help MS figure out what this can/will be. MS mentions Insights and diagnostics, which are important, and we have been missing that, but I think there is more that can be done behind a name like "ISV Studio". Time will tell, but I would keep an eye on this one. The above are all listed as "Technical Benefits", and you may notice that they are the same across all levels. This is where I expect whatever they are planning to do around IUR will probably be differentiated. Today, the differentiations between levels are really around Marketing, (Sales does not kick in until later), so let's take a look at the minimum Marketing Benefits Marketplace Listing Optimization. This is not "prioritization", it is "optimization", but it is important to understand how solutions are surfaced in AppSource so that your wonderful app is not sitting on page 26. This will include a quick consult with the MS Enablement Team, and will become more programmatic down the road. Think, built-in recommendations against what you have done, surfacing Best Practices suggestions. Marketplace Blog/Newsletter/Social. This should not be your entire "Marketing Program". It is a one-time "blast", but can be quite valuable if you time it right, and amplify it yourself through your own social channels. The $50K Club Once your app has generated $50K USD of revenue sharing fees, which is actually $500K of ISV revenue, in a rolling 12 months, you move up the the $50K Club. This is no small feat, if your solution sells for $10/Month/User, you would need to have sold about 4,200 seats. Again the technical benefits, for the moment, are the same. But you do get additional Marketing Benefits, in addition the the entry level benefits, including: Customer Story. This is a basic customer success story that you can create from Microsoft Templates, and submit for publication here. Again, you will want to amplify this with your social channels, but it is a nice "credibility" builder. Sales Enablement. This is a one-on-one workshop with one of the Microsoft vendors who specialize in helping partners build a sales engine. This goes beyond just AppSource and into your entire potential customers' lifecycle. It seems pretty extensive. P2P Consultation. If you are thinking about selling via other partners, this is a roughly 90 minute consultation on how to approach building a channel. Marketplace Category Promo. At the top of each category in AppSource is a rotating gallery of featured apps. Once you join the $50K Club you will be added to this rotation. I would not expect you to show up more than once, and probably for no more than a week. So again, an opportunity to socialize it and direct customers to it, during the time you are sitting at the top of the category page. Social Selling Coaching Program. I have mentioned socializing several of these things so far, to amplify their value. This benefit is a specific, significant one-on-one workshop to show you exactly how to do this whole "socializing" thing. The $250K Club Once your app has generated $250K USD of revenue sharing fees, you have the option to "opt-in" to the 20% revenue sharing model, but you don't have to. Understand that this means you will have sold $1.25 million USD of ISV revenue, which for your $10 solution, means about 10,500 seats. The air is starting to get thinner here, and the numbers of ISVs in this category will be smaller. But if you do get there, you will not only get additional Marketing Benefits, but you will activate the  Sales Benefits. The additional Marketing Benefits include: Co-Sell Ready Content. As part of the Co-Sell on-boarding process, you will have the opportunity to add to your seller catalog listing, Seller-Facing content, including one-pagers on your company and application, as well as a Customer Story. These are useful for MS Sellers to better understand what you are solving for, and when and where to position your solution with one of their customers. Mini-Commercial. This is a 30 video in this format. You can add this video to your AppSource listing, and of course. promote it through your social channels. PR Support. This would be a Microsoft distributed press release, that could include a quote from a key Microsoft person who would be relevant to your application. Here is an example. Again, you would be advised to amplify this release with your own social channels. P2P Readiness Workshop. For those ISVs planning on building a reseller channel, this is a much deeper dive than the previous P2P Consultation. It is an extended one-on one virtual workshop, and includes not only readiness, but also introductions to potential resellers. Marketplace Home Page Promo. As a member of the $250K Club, you will also get a spot in the rotation in the gallery for the entire marketplace, versus just your category at the $50K level. You will want to double-down on the social amplification of this as again, you will only sit there for a limited time. However, if you are blowing the doors off with your solution, you may find yourself regularly appearing here. In addition, this level kicks in the Sales Benefits, which are the same as at the top level, so I will cover those below. The $750K Club Let's say you somehow sold $3.75 Million dollars of ISV revenue, which for a $10 app, would mean that you miraculously sold about 31,250 seats. I think it is clear that there are only a handful of these ISVs, and maybe not even a whole hand. But you three will also get some additional Marketing Benefits, that include: P2P Workshop - in person. At this stage you will have already had a couple of consults and workshops on channel building. This takes that up yet a notch further as an in-person workshop at your office. This is going to get very pointy on your specific goals and requirements. Secret Shopper. A Microsoft vendor, who specializes in sales motions, will anonymously go through your entire sales process, including any sales doorways. They will come back with frank suggestions on where your sales process is either failing, or could be improved. Tele-sales campaign(s). Most of us are familiar with N3, they are one of Microsoft's key vendors for a lot of things. Working with your team, N3 will craft and execute a telesales campaign for your solution. You can target end customers or resellers depending on where you want to create new traction. Telesales campaigns are notoriously hit or miss. It is probably the most overt form of marketing that there is. N3 has been around the block on this, and will no doubt know better than you how to get the most from it. Global Expansion. If you are kicking ass in your region, Microsoft will be eager, possibly even more eager than you are, to spread your ass kicking solution around the globe. Globalization is more than just flipping a switch in AppSource. You will need to deal with the technical side, like localization, but also the introduction to the regional teams in these new geos that may not have any idea what an ass-kicker you are. Microsoft will facilitate this for you. P2P Lead Gen Webinar. Webinars are another tool for building a channel, and Microsoft will facilitate and promote a webinar for you, under their brand targeted at relevant resellers. You will want to drive additional attendance with your social channels. Seller Webinar. These are fun, I have done a couple of them, including one a few weeks ago. This is an Internal-facing webinar that MS Sellers are invited to. This is an excellent opportunity to talk directly to the MS sellers about how your solution will make them more successful. This is less about customer benefits and more about helping the sellers solve their own challenges. So angle it accordingly. These are recorded and added to a library that the sellers can access for on-demand replays. Sales Benefits Once you cross the $250K mark, and you opt-in to the 20% program, you activate the Microsoft Sales Benefits that include: Prioritized Listing. You can be listed of course without being in the $250K Club. But on the MS Internal Sellers view of the catalog, those that opt into the 20% program will be listed at the top. But it's actually more relevant that the sellers will be keenly aware, that if they sell one of these solutions, they will get paid. This is the primary the reason for the additional 10%... to create the incentives to motivate the Sellers to move your product. Think about something like CPQ where there are a few ISV solutions. While the Seller will be able to see all of them, the ones in the 20% category will have a golden glow around them. Obviously, Sellers are going to move forward with one of those first. Co-Selling Support from MS Field Teams. The field teams consist of AEs (Account Executives), SSPs (Solution Sales Professionals) and TSPs (Technical Sales Professionals). An enterprise level customer may have several SSPs assigned to them for different products, like for example, a specific SSP for Business Applications. Tethered to an SSP is a TSP, and together they are the primary force looking to sell Business Applications into their enterprise customer accounts. It is these SSP/TSP combos that you will want to engage with to bring you into these big deals. This is of course assuming that your solution is designed for enterprise customers. Up until now, they received quota reduction for the value of your ISV solution when they brought you in. That was nice, but it's not the same as money in their hands, which they will get from selling the 20% solutions. This is not a guarantee that your solution will be sold in huge numbers... or at all. For many solutions, this path will not actually do anything. In that case you would have to look to the Marketing Benefits to justify your 20%, or maybe you opt back into the 10% tier. Or maybe you did not see enough value, and never opted into the 20% tier in the first place. Regional Account planning with MS field teams. This one is a two-edged sword. You can work directly with the teams to plan how you are going to pursue targeted Enterprise customers together, which is great. But my experience with Account Planning has been that it also creates a reporting burden on your side. Not an issue if it works. A final point on Co-Selling. Microsoft is aligned strategically to industry verticals. SSP/TSP teams are not only targeting particular horizontal solutions like "Business Applications", but they are also segregated vertically along industry lines. For Example, "Business Applications in Healthcare Sector" would be a specific charge of an SSP/TSP team. In addition, depending on the size of the industry, the teams may be geographically bound also, ie. "Business Applications in Healthcare Sector for US East". Basically, there are a lot of people you would ultimately want/need to engage with. Needless to say, horizontal Solutions and "widget" solutions are probably not a good fit for Co-Selling, as should be obvious from what I wrote above. So this was a long post and I am sorry for that. To add to that, everything I wrote above is subject to change as the program rolls out. It may change a little, or it may change a lot, but as I opened with, this side of the program is a lever that Microsoft can easily adjust. For ISVs that are confused, worried, mad or acronym challenged, I am part of another consulting group called PowerISV with four other MVPs who may be able to help.

Rassegna stampa locale e Microfono aperto su quanto leggete, dove comprate i libri, elettronici o di carta, perché Milano è la capitale della lettura e delle vendite anche su Amazon. E poi la prima puntata della rubrica, "Città e beni comuni", curata da Angelo Miotto, con Claudio Calvaresi di Avanzi Sostenibilità per azioni e Ilda Curti dello Iur.

Rassegna stampa locale e Microfono aperto su quanto leggete, dove comprate i libri, elettronici o di carta, perché Milano è la capitale della lettura e delle vendite anche su Amazon. E poi la prima puntata della rubrica, "Città e beni comuni", curata da Angelo Miotto, con Claudio Calvaresi di Avanzi Sostenibilità per azioni e Ilda Curti dello Iur.

Thomas Eddie Bullard was born in North Carolina in 1949 and developed an early interest in flying saucers thanks to Friday and Saturday nights at the movies, where he saw such classics as "Earth Versus the Flying Saucers". Sputnik inspired him to begin reading the newspapers and he no sooner started than the Levelland sightings piqued his curiosity. He began to read all the UFO publications he could find--Keyhoe's books, Dick Hall's "The UFO Evidence", Fate, Ray Palmer's Flying Saucers--and he eventually joined NICAP and APRO in the 1960s.After spending his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina, Bullard went to graduate school in Folklore at Indiana University, and wrote his dissertation on UFOs, completing his doctoral degree in 1982.During his research he scanned a great many newspapers for reports of the 1896-97 airship and other pre-1947 sightings. He continued this work by traveling to state archives and began issuing collections of this material as The Airship File in 1982. When the Fund for UFO Research called for someone to catalogue and carry out a comparative study of abduction reports, he took on the job and completed "UFO Abductions--The Measure of a Mystery in 1987." The literature up to that time included some 300 reports, and comparisons demonstrated that reliable reports had many details of sequence and content in common.Following up on this abduction research, Bullard published articles in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of UFO Studies, IUR, the MUFON UFO Journal, and the 2000 MUFON Symposium, arguing that abduction reports maintain a surprising consistency. This sameness contrasts with folk narratives, urban legends, and products of fantasy, where narratorsreadily exploit opportunities for variation in the subject material.Bullard contributed several articles for the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT in 1992. One such article, treating a comparison of abduction investigators' findings, he later expanded into "The Sympathetic Ear", published by the Fund for UFO Research in 1995.His ongoing interest in the historical and cultural aspects of UFOs led to an article in "UFOs and Abductions", edited by David M. Jacobs and published by the University Press of Kansas in 2000. He is currently working on a UFO book for the same press. Over the years he has served on the board of CUFOS and the advisory board of the Fund for UFO Research.Sample of papers published"UFO Abductions--The Measure of a Mystery" (1987)"The Sympathetic Ear", Fund for UFO Research (1995)"UFOs and Abductions", University Press of Kansas (2000)

Thomas Eddie Bullard was born in North Carolina in 1949 and developed an early interest in flying saucers thanks to Friday and Saturday nights at the movies, where he saw such classics as "Earth Versus the Flying Saucers". Sputnik inspired him to begin reading the newspapers and he no sooner started than the Levelland sightings piqued his curiosity. He began to read all the UFO publications he could find--Keyhoe's books, Dick Hall's "The UFO Evidence", Fate, Ray Palmer's Flying Saucers--and he eventually joined NICAP and APRO in the 1960s.After spending his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina, Bullard went to graduate school in Folklore at Indiana University, and wrote his dissertation on UFOs, completing his doctoral degree in 1982.During his research he scanned a great many newspapers for reports of the 1896-97 airship and other pre-1947 sightings. He continued this work by traveling to state archives and began issuing collections of this material as The Airship File in 1982. When the Fund for UFO Research called for someone to catalogue and carry out a comparative study of abduction reports, he took on the job and completed "UFO Abductions--The Measure of a Mystery in 1987." The literature up to that time included some 300 reports, and comparisons demonstrated that reliable reports had many details of sequence and content in common.Following up on this abduction research, Bullard published articles in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of UFO Studies, IUR, the MUFON UFO Journal, and the 2000 MUFON Symposium, arguing that abduction reports maintain a surprising consistency. This sameness contrasts with folk narratives, urban legends, and products of fantasy, where narratorsreadily exploit opportunities for variation in the subject material.Bullard contributed several articles for the Abduction Study Conference held at MIT in 1992. One such article, treating a comparison of abduction investigators' findings, he later expanded into "The Sympathetic Ear", published by the Fund for UFO Research in 1995.His ongoing interest in the historical and cultural aspects of UFOs led to an article in "UFOs and Abductions", edited by David M. Jacobs and published by the University Press of Kansas in 2000. He is currently working on a UFO book for the same press. Over the years he has served on the board of CUFOS and the advisory board of the Fund for UFO Research.Sample of papers published"UFO Abductions--The Measure of a Mystery" (1987)"The Sympathetic Ear", Fund for UFO Research (1995)"UFOs and Abductions", University Press of Kansas (2000)

Mark Rodeghier has been President and Scientific Director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies since 1986. He earned a B.S. in astrophysics from Indiana University in 1975. After a year of graduate study at the University of Sussex in England, he returned to complete a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in sociology. His dissertation, Factors Influencing Attitudes Toward Controversial Research : Quantitatively Disentangling the Social from the Scientific, explores the attitudes toward the study of extraterrestrial intelligence by the scientific community. Other publications include numerous articles for IUR and the Journal of UFO Studies, and UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference: a Catalog and Data Analysis (Evanston, IL: Center for UFO Studies, 1981). In this interview, we talk to Mark about CUFOS, his interests in UFOs, and an exciting new project he has helped create called UFODATA. Mark, along other scientists and professionals, started UFODATA in order to develop observation stations that will obtain scientific data on UFOs. For more information about CUFOS, visit www.CUFOS.org, and for more information about UFODATA, visit UFODATA.net.

Professor Leachman explores the origins of Industrial Engineering Operations Research, his particular interests in the field, and an extensive analysis of supply chains from Asia to California and the dispersal of goods to U.S. markets.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Hmm Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and along with Rick Karnofsky, I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with Professor Robert Leachman of the [00:01:00] industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics, his master's degree in operations research and a phd in operations research all from UC Berkeley. Professor Leachman has been a member of the UC Berkeley Faculty since 1979 professor Leachman, welcome to spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you.Speaker 3: The department [00:01:30] that you're in, industrial engineering and operations research, those two fields, how did they grow together? Speaker 4: Well, if we trace the whole history, industrial engineering started shortly after the turn of the century focused on improving the efficiency of human work and over the years it grew to address improving the efficiency of all production and service systems. Operations. Research started during World War Two focused on [00:02:00] mathematic and scientific analysis of the military strategy, logistics and operations. And it grew to develop that kind of analysis of all production and service systems. So in that sense the fields grew together. But in another sense they're different. Operations research steadily became more focused on the mathematical techniques for analysis of operations, whereas industrial engineering always has been more focused on the operational [00:02:30] problems and the engineering practice of how to address those problems. So in that sense, the two fields are complimentary. So how is it that things have changed over say the past 20 years? Well, I think the domain for ILR has, has changed as the u s s become less a manufacturing based economy and more a service space that has increased the focus and service areas [00:03:00] for applying industrial engineering operations, research type thinking and analysis, be it things like healthcare, financial engineering, energy conservation. And there's certainly been a lot more activity in supply chain analysis, particularly multi-company supply chains and even the contractual relations between those companies. Speaker 5: Okay. Speaker 3: And in your work, which complimentary technologies do you find the most helpful and have the most impact? Speaker 4: Well, I [00:03:30] think certainly the, the progress in computing power or the progress in automated data collection and the data resources we have now makes a lot more things possible now that weren't possible before and certainly changes how I do things. We can do much more analysis than, than we used to be able to do. Speaker 3: The idea of keeping things simple, which is sort of an engineering paradigm of sorts, right? Is that still a virtue or is that given [00:04:00] way to a lot of complexity that all these other capabilities lend themselves to? Speaker 5: Yeah, Speaker 4: I think there's a Dick Dichotomy here in industrial practice. I think simplicity wins out. If you have an elegant, simple solution that will triumph. I think the incentives are a little different in academic research, especially mathematical research from the kind of an elegant theory is one where you start with a [00:04:30] small set of assumptions and you derive a great complexity of results and analysis out of that. And so sometimes I think there's kind of a different direction between what's really successful in practice and what's really successful in academia. Speaker 3: What is the research like in industrial engineering and operations research? In terms of the academic research and theoretical research that happens? Speaker 4: Well those [00:05:00] doing research on the mathematical methodology of operations research considered themselves to be theoreticians and those doing work on advancing the state of the art and engineering and management practice are often labeled as quote applied and quote researchers, but I always flinch a little bit at that term. I think the implication is that those advancing the state of the art of practice are merely applying quote unquote the mathematical methodology [00:05:30] developed by the theoretical researchers, but that's not my experience at all. If and when one is able to advance the state of the art, it comes from conceptualizing the management problem in a new way. That is, it comes from developing the insight to frame in a much better way. The question about how the industrial system should be run at least as much as it comes from applying new mathematical sophistication and moreover available mathematical methodology. Almost always has [00:06:00] to be adapted once the more appropriate assumptions are realized in in the industrial setting. Speaker 4: So in that sense the quote unquote applied IUR researchers actually do research that is basic and theoretical in that scientific sense I talked about and that is its theory about how the industrial systems and organizations should be run. So beside the efficiencies and productivity gains that you're striving for, [00:06:30] are there other benefits to the industrial engineering and operations research? I spend a fair bit of time working on what I call speed and that is speed in the sense of the time to develop new products, the time to ramp up manufacturing and distribution to bring into market. And my experience in a lot of industries, especially high technology, is that the leaders are not necessarily the ones [00:07:00] with the lowest cost or the highest efficiencies, but they're almost always the ones with the greatest speed. And IOR can do a lot for improving the speed of that development and supply chain. Speaker 4: And that's an area I work on. And that has applications across the board taking things to market. Absolutely. And we have expressions like a time is money or the market [00:07:30] window or things like this, but they're often very discrete in nature like you're going to make the market window or you're not the way we describe it, but that's, that's not the reality is that everything is losing value with time. There is a great value on on bringing stuff out earlier. Everything is going obsolete and that is undervalued. In my experience in organizations, most people have job descriptions about cost or perhaps revenue, but a, there's little or nothing [00:08:00] in there about if they do something to change the speed, what is it worth to the company, so we work to try to reframe that and rethink that to quantify what speed is worth and bring that down to a the level of NGO, every engineer so that they can understand what impact their work has on speed and that they can be rewarded when they do things to improve speed. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:08:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's guest is professor Robert Leachman of the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. We are talking about analyzing supply chains. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:09:00] can you give us a, an overview of this kind of mathematical analysis that you use in your work? Speaker 4: Okay, well let me take a recent topic. I've spent a lot of effort on and that is, uh, studying the, the supply chains for containerized imports from Asia to the United States. [00:09:30] Over the years I have been fortunate to have access to the all the u s customs data to see who's bringing in what goods and declared values their pain to bring those in. And I've been fortunate to have access to the transportation rates and handling rates that they're paying. And I can start to lay out the picture of the supply chains for each company and how it can be best managed. And so that involves mathematics [00:10:00] to describe the variability and uncertainties, uh, the variabilities in the shipment times and the chances for mistakes, the uncertainties in sales in various parts of the u s and so on. And then putting together the mathematics to simulate this so that we can now see how alternative supply chains behave. And also the impact of changes in government policy such as fees on the imports or improving the infrastructure [00:10:30] with uh, expanded ports or rail lines or uh, highways and the like. This is kind of a long, large effort to where we've been able to replicate inside the computer the whole trade going on and then inform both policy analysis for the governments and for the importers themselves. Speaker 3: California in particular, it's a real destination for the Asian supply chain. Are there peculiarities about California that you could tell us about? Speaker 4: [00:11:00] Well, close to half of all the waterborne containerized imports from Asia to the u s enter through the California ports. A few include Long Beach Los Angeles in Oakland and there are very good economic reasons why this happens and this has to do primarily with managing the inventory and supply chains. If you think about the alternatives of at the factory door in Asia, we can decide how much is going to go [00:11:30] to various regions of the United States before we book passage on the vessels. Then considering the lead time, you need to book a vessel at least two weeks in advance. And considering the answer it needs and so forth is that you're committing how much is going to go where one to two months before it gets there. Whereas if you simply ship the stuff to California and then after it gets here, now reassess the situation based on how much arrived in California [00:12:00] and what is the updated need in the supply chain in the various regions in the u s then you can make a much more informed allocation, a match the supply to demand much better and you'll reduce the inventory in the system and you'll decrease the time until goods are sold and people will be able to get their goods earlier. Speaker 4: The big nationwide retailers we have in the U S and also the nationwide, uh, original equipment manufacturers that resell the good once they're here in [00:12:30] the u s practice, these kind of supply chains. And so they bring the stuff to California and then reship. So that means that a, we have a critical role in supply chains and more comes here then goes elsewhere. If you were to think about doing what we do at, say, the port of Seattle or, or through the canal to the Gulf or east coast, then you would have to ship into that southern California market, which is the largest local market in North America. And that would be much more expensive [00:13:00] than if you start there and ship out from there. So you don't have to ship that local market stuff. The downside of that is that there's a huge amount of pollution created with all the truck traffic to bring the boxes from the ports to a cross dock or a warehouse and trans ship the goods, reload them and send them back to a rail yard and so on. Speaker 4: And uh, that creates traffic. It creates pollution, creates concern for the governments and rightly so. Uh, and [00:13:30] so there's been a lot of proposals that maybe there should be some sort of special tax on the containers to pay for infrastructure and to pay for environmental mitigation and the like. So I've done some of the studies of that question from the point of view of the importers of what is the best supply chain for them in response to changing infrastructure or changing fees and taxes, changing prices at the California ports. I'd probably some studies that have [00:14:00] been a highly controversial and got a lot of people excited. I did two scenarios. One where there's just taxes placed on the boxes and there's no improvements in infrastructure. And the answer to that scenario is a pretty significant drop, especially the lower value imports where inventory is not so expensive as simply moved to other ports. Speaker 4: But then I also did a scenario where if there was a major improvement in infrastructure of moving [00:14:30] a cross docks and import warehouses closer to the ports and moving the rail yards closer to the ports to eliminate the truck trips and alike, uh, that even as high as $200 a box, this would be a value proposition to the importers of the moderate and expensive imports as they would make California even more attractive than it is now. And so that got picked up by one camp saying, see we can tax them and they will stay and pay. Uh, but they didn't [00:15:00] quite read the fine print in the sense that no, you have to build the infrastructure first and then you can use that money to retire the bonds. But if you tax them first without the infrastructure in place, they will leave. The bill passed the California legislature. Speaker 4: But, uh, fortunately governor Schwartzenegger staff contacted me and talked about it and I think they got the story straight and the governor vetoed the bill. But the challenge remains is that I find it intriguing that generally [00:15:30] the communities near the ports are, are generally hostile to a logistics activities. They don't want warehouses, they don't want truck traffic, they don't want rail yards. Uh, and this tends to mean the development of those kinds of things happens much further out in greenfield spaces, which of course increases the congestion increases and the transportation. And I mean, there's something almost comical about hauling stuff around when we don't know where they should go yet. [00:16:00] But there's an awful lot of that that happens. So there's still a lot of potential to improve the efficiency of the supply chain. Speaker 3: Okay. Would this experience that you've had doing some research and then getting involved a little bit in the public policy side of it, is that something that you could see yourself doing more of? Speaker 4: Well, I guess it is that I was asked by a government agency that the Metropolitan Planning Office for Southern California is, is, [00:16:30] is as the acronym Skag s c a g southern California Association of governments. And they asked me to, to look at the problem and I, and I was happy to do so. I think in one sense it's, it's nice to make a contribution to public policy so that we can have a more informed public management just like it is to help private companies do that. But on the other hand, a political process is pretty messy, pretty frustrating at [00:17:00] times is that usually things are a little more sane inside a company, but it's important and I'm Speaker 2: glad to do it. You are listening to spectrum on k l x Berkeley. Our guest is professor Robert Leachman, the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. We are talking about analyzing supply chains and global trade Speaker 3: to sort of address the idea that [00:17:30] all these efficiencies and productivity gains take jobs out of the economy. Is there some swing back where there are jobs that are created by all these changes? Speaker 7: Yes. Speaker 4: Well, let me divide this into two pieces. First, with regard IOR type work, where we're developing systems to manage supply chains or industries better is that I've been doing this kind of thing [00:18:00] since about 1980 in industrial projects in the U S and abroad. Uh, and I don't ever remember a single project where what we did resulted in a decline in employment. And in fact a lot of those were companies and crises. And if we hadn't been successful, I think a lot of people would have been put out of work. And every one of those projects created new engineering, managerial jobs to manage the information technology that was being used to run the system [00:18:30] better. So kind of on a micro scale of doing projects, it's not my experience that IUR type work reduces in employment. And when I think about the larger scale of all the offshoring of manufacturing from the U S to Asia, the companies doing this are more profitable and the costs of the consumers are much less. Speaker 4: And if you look at the gross national product and the like, these numbers are pretty good and the average [00:19:00] income of Americans is very high compared to the rest of the world. But the distribution to that income bothers me a lot. Increasingly, we're a society of a small number of very wealthy people and a lot of people who were much worse off. And in the era when we manufactured everything that provided a huge amount of middle-class type jobs and we don't have that anymore. We have low paying service jobs and we have a lot of well paying [00:19:30] engineering and management jobs. And that concerns me. I think all the protests we start to see going on even today here on campus, uh, illustrate that. Speaker 3: How do you see the outsourcing of manufactured goods to low wage regions? And supply chain efficiencies playing out over time? Speaker 4: Well, certainly the, the innovations in supply chain management have enabled it, but you know the difference in in salaries between [00:20:00] this part of the world and there has always been there and that wasn't something that was created right and it's not going to go away immediately. Take some time. I think there's, there's little question that Asian goods will cost more. The Asian currencies have been artificially low for a long time, but they are starting to move up as energy gets more deer, transportation costs go up. Our interest rates have been artificially [00:20:30] low since the recession and before. I don't think those low interest rates will last forever and when they go up then inventory gets more expensive and so those supply chains all the way down to Asia will get more expensive. I think we've done a lot of brilliant engineering and other technology improvements that have lowered costs a lot, but I think those costs are going to go up and as they do, then the answer for the [00:21:00] best supply chains is going to bring some stuff back to America. And that's already happening first. The very bulky stuff like furniture and it left North Carolina, but now much of it is come back and I think you'll, you'll see that the, the most expensive items to ship around will be the first to change. Nowadays the big importers have very sophisticated departments studying their supply chains and I truly [00:21:30] believe that they could save a penny per cubic foot of imports. They will change everything to do it Speaker 4: and so things can change very fast. Following the economics Speaker 3: and I understand you're a musician, can you give us some insight into your, a avocation with music? Speaker 4: Well, I'm a jazz pianist. I had come up through classical piano training but then at middle school, high school age, moved to the bay area and [00:22:00] there was lots of jazz happening here and I was excited by that and I actually learned to play jazz on the string bass first. But I had a piano in my room and the dorm I lived at here at Berkeley. And so I was playing a lot and listening to records of people I really enjoyed. And there was lots of jazz happening here and other musicians and we learn from each other and you grow your vocabulary over time and I was gone a couple of years between, Speaker 5: yeah, Speaker 4: Undergrad and Grad school working in industry, but [00:22:30] when I came back here to Grad school then I was playing bars in north beach and the like, but at a certain point you have to decide whether you're going to be a day animal or a night animal. You don't have the hours to do both, but art is very important to me and lyrical jazz piano is very important to me. It's, it's a way to do expression and creativity that I don't think I've found another medium that can match it. Speaker 3: Professor Leishman, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. My pleasure. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:23:00] irregular feature of spectrum is to present the calendar of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Brad Swift joins me for this. Speaker 3: Get up close to a hundreds of wild mushrooms at the 42nd annual fungus [00:23:30] fair being held this year at the Lawrence Hall of science in Berkeley. Eat edible mushrooms, meet vendors and watch culinary demonstrations by mushroom chefs. Get the dirt on poisonous mushrooms and checkout other wild funky from the medicinal to the really, really strange mushroom experts will be on hand to answer all your questions and to identify unknown specimens brought in by the visitors. My cologists will present slideshows and talk about foraging for mushrooms. [00:24:00] Find out how different mushrooms can be used for treating diseases, dyeing cloth or paper and flavoring foods. The fair will be Saturday and Sunday, December 3rd and fourth from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM each day. There is a sliding admission charge to the hall of Science, which includes all the exhibits and the fungus fare. Check their website, Lawrence Hall of Science. Dot Orgy for details. Speaker 8: On Tuesday, December 6th [00:24:30] at 7:00 PM the Jewish community center at 3,200 California street in San Francisco is hosting a panel discussion on digital overload. Debate continues over the extent to which connectivity is changing the QALY of our relationships and reshaping our communities. Now there are major concerns about how it's changing our brains. Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times Tech reporter Matt. Righto wired Steven Levy and rabbi Joshua Trullo. It's joined moderator, Jonathan Rosen, author of the Talmud [00:25:00] and the Internet to address pressing ethical questions of the digital age, including what are the costs of growing up digitally native are our children casualties of the digital revolution. What are the longterm effects of net use? Visit JCC s f.org for tickets which are $20 to the public, $17 for members and $10 for students. Speaker 3: Women's earth alliance presents seeds of resilience, women farmers striving in the face of climate [00:25:30] change Tuesday, December 6th that the David Brower center in Berkeley. The doors will open at 6:00 PM for reception and music program is at 7:30 PM it entails stories from the field by India, program director, RWE, Chad shitness, other special guests and Speakers to be announced. Admissions is $15 in advance and $18 at the door. Speaker 8: December is Leonardo art science evening rendezvous [00:26:00] or laser will take place. Wednesday, December 7th from six 45 to 8:55 PM at Stanford University's Geology Corner Building three 21 zero five in addition to socializing and networking, there will be four talks showing the kitchen of San Jose State University will speak on hyperfunctional landscapes in art and offer a fresh outlook at the technological adaptations and how they can enhance and enrich our surroundings rather than distract us from them. UC Berkeley's Carlo [00:26:30] squint and we'll show how knots can be used as constructivist building blocks for abstract geometrical sculptures. NASA's Margarita Marinova will share how the dry valleys event Arctica are an analog for Mars. These are the coldest and dry rocky place with no plants or animals and site. Studying these dry valleys allows us to understand how the polar regions on earth work, what the limits of life are, and to apply these ideas to the cold and dry environment of Mars. Finally, San Francisco Art Institutes, [00:27:00] Peter Foucault will present on systems and interactivity in drawing where drawings are constructed through mark making systems and how audience participation can influence the outcome of a final composition. Focusing on an interactive robotic trying installation. For more information on this free event, visit leonardo.info. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:27:30] now new stories with Rick Karnofsky Speaker 8: science news reports on research by UC San Diego, experimental psychologist David Brang and vs Ramachandran published in the November 22nd issue of plus biology on the genetic origins of synesthesia. The sense mixing condition where people taste colors or see smells that affects only about 3% of the population, half of those with the condition report that family members also [00:28:00] have the condition, but parents and children will often exhibit it differently. Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist, David Eagleman published in September 30th issue of behavioral brain research that a region on chromosome 16 is responsible for a form of synesthesia where letters and numbers are associated with a color Brang hypothesizes that the gene may help prune connections in the brain and that soon as synesthesiac yaks may suffer a genetic defect that prevents removing some links. [00:28:30] An alternate hypothesis is that synesthesia is caused by neurochemical imbalance. This may explain why the condition intensifies with extreme tiredness or with drug use. Bring in colleagues believe that it is actually a combination of these two that lead to synesthesia. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: spectrum is recorded and edited by me, Rick Klasky, [00:29:00] and by Brad Swift. The music you heard during this show is by David [inaudible] off of his album folk and acoustic. It is released under the creative Commons attribution license. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] our email address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor Leachman explores the origins of Industrial Engineering Operations Research, his particular interests in the field, and an extensive analysis of supply chains from Asia to California and the dispersal of goods to U.S. markets.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Hmm Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and along with Rick Karnofsky, I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with Professor Robert Leachman of the [00:01:00] industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics, his master's degree in operations research and a phd in operations research all from UC Berkeley. Professor Leachman has been a member of the UC Berkeley Faculty since 1979 professor Leachman, welcome to spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you.Speaker 3: The department [00:01:30] that you're in, industrial engineering and operations research, those two fields, how did they grow together? Speaker 4: Well, if we trace the whole history, industrial engineering started shortly after the turn of the century focused on improving the efficiency of human work and over the years it grew to address improving the efficiency of all production and service systems. Operations. Research started during World War Two focused on [00:02:00] mathematic and scientific analysis of the military strategy, logistics and operations. And it grew to develop that kind of analysis of all production and service systems. So in that sense the fields grew together. But in another sense they're different. Operations research steadily became more focused on the mathematical techniques for analysis of operations, whereas industrial engineering always has been more focused on the operational [00:02:30] problems and the engineering practice of how to address those problems. So in that sense, the two fields are complimentary. So how is it that things have changed over say the past 20 years? Well, I think the domain for ILR has, has changed as the u s s become less a manufacturing based economy and more a service space that has increased the focus and service areas [00:03:00] for applying industrial engineering operations, research type thinking and analysis, be it things like healthcare, financial engineering, energy conservation. And there's certainly been a lot more activity in supply chain analysis, particularly multi-company supply chains and even the contractual relations between those companies. Speaker 5: Okay. Speaker 3: And in your work, which complimentary technologies do you find the most helpful and have the most impact? Speaker 4: Well, I [00:03:30] think certainly the, the progress in computing power or the progress in automated data collection and the data resources we have now makes a lot more things possible now that weren't possible before and certainly changes how I do things. We can do much more analysis than, than we used to be able to do. Speaker 3: The idea of keeping things simple, which is sort of an engineering paradigm of sorts, right? Is that still a virtue or is that given [00:04:00] way to a lot of complexity that all these other capabilities lend themselves to? Speaker 5: Yeah, Speaker 4: I think there's a Dick Dichotomy here in industrial practice. I think simplicity wins out. If you have an elegant, simple solution that will triumph. I think the incentives are a little different in academic research, especially mathematical research from the kind of an elegant theory is one where you start with a [00:04:30] small set of assumptions and you derive a great complexity of results and analysis out of that. And so sometimes I think there's kind of a different direction between what's really successful in practice and what's really successful in academia. Speaker 3: What is the research like in industrial engineering and operations research? In terms of the academic research and theoretical research that happens? Speaker 4: Well those [00:05:00] doing research on the mathematical methodology of operations research considered themselves to be theoreticians and those doing work on advancing the state of the art and engineering and management practice are often labeled as quote applied and quote researchers, but I always flinch a little bit at that term. I think the implication is that those advancing the state of the art of practice are merely applying quote unquote the mathematical methodology [00:05:30] developed by the theoretical researchers, but that's not my experience at all. If and when one is able to advance the state of the art, it comes from conceptualizing the management problem in a new way. That is, it comes from developing the insight to frame in a much better way. The question about how the industrial system should be run at least as much as it comes from applying new mathematical sophistication and moreover available mathematical methodology. Almost always has [00:06:00] to be adapted once the more appropriate assumptions are realized in in the industrial setting. Speaker 4: So in that sense the quote unquote applied IUR researchers actually do research that is basic and theoretical in that scientific sense I talked about and that is its theory about how the industrial systems and organizations should be run. So beside the efficiencies and productivity gains that you're striving for, [00:06:30] are there other benefits to the industrial engineering and operations research? I spend a fair bit of time working on what I call speed and that is speed in the sense of the time to develop new products, the time to ramp up manufacturing and distribution to bring into market. And my experience in a lot of industries, especially high technology, is that the leaders are not necessarily the ones [00:07:00] with the lowest cost or the highest efficiencies, but they're almost always the ones with the greatest speed. And IOR can do a lot for improving the speed of that development and supply chain. Speaker 4: And that's an area I work on. And that has applications across the board taking things to market. Absolutely. And we have expressions like a time is money or the market [00:07:30] window or things like this, but they're often very discrete in nature like you're going to make the market window or you're not the way we describe it, but that's, that's not the reality is that everything is losing value with time. There is a great value on on bringing stuff out earlier. Everything is going obsolete and that is undervalued. In my experience in organizations, most people have job descriptions about cost or perhaps revenue, but a, there's little or nothing [00:08:00] in there about if they do something to change the speed, what is it worth to the company, so we work to try to reframe that and rethink that to quantify what speed is worth and bring that down to a the level of NGO, every engineer so that they can understand what impact their work has on speed and that they can be rewarded when they do things to improve speed. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:08:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's guest is professor Robert Leachman of the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. We are talking about analyzing supply chains. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:09:00] can you give us a, an overview of this kind of mathematical analysis that you use in your work? Speaker 4: Okay, well let me take a recent topic. I've spent a lot of effort on and that is, uh, studying the, the supply chains for containerized imports from Asia to the United States. [00:09:30] Over the years I have been fortunate to have access to the all the u s customs data to see who's bringing in what goods and declared values their pain to bring those in. And I've been fortunate to have access to the transportation rates and handling rates that they're paying. And I can start to lay out the picture of the supply chains for each company and how it can be best managed. And so that involves mathematics [00:10:00] to describe the variability and uncertainties, uh, the variabilities in the shipment times and the chances for mistakes, the uncertainties in sales in various parts of the u s and so on. And then putting together the mathematics to simulate this so that we can now see how alternative supply chains behave. And also the impact of changes in government policy such as fees on the imports or improving the infrastructure [00:10:30] with uh, expanded ports or rail lines or uh, highways and the like. This is kind of a long, large effort to where we've been able to replicate inside the computer the whole trade going on and then inform both policy analysis for the governments and for the importers themselves. Speaker 3: California in particular, it's a real destination for the Asian supply chain. Are there peculiarities about California that you could tell us about? Speaker 4: [00:11:00] Well, close to half of all the waterborne containerized imports from Asia to the u s enter through the California ports. A few include Long Beach Los Angeles in Oakland and there are very good economic reasons why this happens and this has to do primarily with managing the inventory and supply chains. If you think about the alternatives of at the factory door in Asia, we can decide how much is going to go [00:11:30] to various regions of the United States before we book passage on the vessels. Then considering the lead time, you need to book a vessel at least two weeks in advance. And considering the answer it needs and so forth is that you're committing how much is going to go where one to two months before it gets there. Whereas if you simply ship the stuff to California and then after it gets here, now reassess the situation based on how much arrived in California [00:12:00] and what is the updated need in the supply chain in the various regions in the u s then you can make a much more informed allocation, a match the supply to demand much better and you'll reduce the inventory in the system and you'll decrease the time until goods are sold and people will be able to get their goods earlier. Speaker 4: The big nationwide retailers we have in the U S and also the nationwide, uh, original equipment manufacturers that resell the good once they're here in [00:12:30] the u s practice, these kind of supply chains. And so they bring the stuff to California and then reship. So that means that a, we have a critical role in supply chains and more comes here then goes elsewhere. If you were to think about doing what we do at, say, the port of Seattle or, or through the canal to the Gulf or east coast, then you would have to ship into that southern California market, which is the largest local market in North America. And that would be much more expensive [00:13:00] than if you start there and ship out from there. So you don't have to ship that local market stuff. The downside of that is that there's a huge amount of pollution created with all the truck traffic to bring the boxes from the ports to a cross dock or a warehouse and trans ship the goods, reload them and send them back to a rail yard and so on. Speaker 4: And uh, that creates traffic. It creates pollution, creates concern for the governments and rightly so. Uh, and [00:13:30] so there's been a lot of proposals that maybe there should be some sort of special tax on the containers to pay for infrastructure and to pay for environmental mitigation and the like. So I've done some of the studies of that question from the point of view of the importers of what is the best supply chain for them in response to changing infrastructure or changing fees and taxes, changing prices at the California ports. I'd probably some studies that have [00:14:00] been a highly controversial and got a lot of people excited. I did two scenarios. One where there's just taxes placed on the boxes and there's no improvements in infrastructure. And the answer to that scenario is a pretty significant drop, especially the lower value imports where inventory is not so expensive as simply moved to other ports. Speaker 4: But then I also did a scenario where if there was a major improvement in infrastructure of moving [00:14:30] a cross docks and import warehouses closer to the ports and moving the rail yards closer to the ports to eliminate the truck trips and alike, uh, that even as high as $200 a box, this would be a value proposition to the importers of the moderate and expensive imports as they would make California even more attractive than it is now. And so that got picked up by one camp saying, see we can tax them and they will stay and pay. Uh, but they didn't [00:15:00] quite read the fine print in the sense that no, you have to build the infrastructure first and then you can use that money to retire the bonds. But if you tax them first without the infrastructure in place, they will leave. The bill passed the California legislature. Speaker 4: But, uh, fortunately governor Schwartzenegger staff contacted me and talked about it and I think they got the story straight and the governor vetoed the bill. But the challenge remains is that I find it intriguing that generally [00:15:30] the communities near the ports are, are generally hostile to a logistics activities. They don't want warehouses, they don't want truck traffic, they don't want rail yards. Uh, and this tends to mean the development of those kinds of things happens much further out in greenfield spaces, which of course increases the congestion increases and the transportation. And I mean, there's something almost comical about hauling stuff around when we don't know where they should go yet. [00:16:00] But there's an awful lot of that that happens. So there's still a lot of potential to improve the efficiency of the supply chain. Speaker 3: Okay. Would this experience that you've had doing some research and then getting involved a little bit in the public policy side of it, is that something that you could see yourself doing more of? Speaker 4: Well, I guess it is that I was asked by a government agency that the Metropolitan Planning Office for Southern California is, is, [00:16:30] is as the acronym Skag s c a g southern California Association of governments. And they asked me to, to look at the problem and I, and I was happy to do so. I think in one sense it's, it's nice to make a contribution to public policy so that we can have a more informed public management just like it is to help private companies do that. But on the other hand, a political process is pretty messy, pretty frustrating at [00:17:00] times is that usually things are a little more sane inside a company, but it's important and I'm Speaker 2: glad to do it. You are listening to spectrum on k l x Berkeley. Our guest is professor Robert Leachman, the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley. We are talking about analyzing supply chains and global trade Speaker 3: to sort of address the idea that [00:17:30] all these efficiencies and productivity gains take jobs out of the economy. Is there some swing back where there are jobs that are created by all these changes? Speaker 7: Yes. Speaker 4: Well, let me divide this into two pieces. First, with regard IOR type work, where we're developing systems to manage supply chains or industries better is that I've been doing this kind of thing [00:18:00] since about 1980 in industrial projects in the U S and abroad. Uh, and I don't ever remember a single project where what we did resulted in a decline in employment. And in fact a lot of those were companies and crises. And if we hadn't been successful, I think a lot of people would have been put out of work. And every one of those projects created new engineering, managerial jobs to manage the information technology that was being used to run the system [00:18:30] better. So kind of on a micro scale of doing projects, it's not my experience that IUR type work reduces in employment. And when I think about the larger scale of all the offshoring of manufacturing from the U S to Asia, the companies doing this are more profitable and the costs of the consumers are much less. Speaker 4: And if you look at the gross national product and the like, these numbers are pretty good and the average [00:19:00] income of Americans is very high compared to the rest of the world. But the distribution to that income bothers me a lot. Increasingly, we're a society of a small number of very wealthy people and a lot of people who were much worse off. And in the era when we manufactured everything that provided a huge amount of middle-class type jobs and we don't have that anymore. We have low paying service jobs and we have a lot of well paying [00:19:30] engineering and management jobs. And that concerns me. I think all the protests we start to see going on even today here on campus, uh, illustrate that. Speaker 3: How do you see the outsourcing of manufactured goods to low wage regions? And supply chain efficiencies playing out over time? Speaker 4: Well, certainly the, the innovations in supply chain management have enabled it, but you know the difference in in salaries between [00:20:00] this part of the world and there has always been there and that wasn't something that was created right and it's not going to go away immediately. Take some time. I think there's, there's little question that Asian goods will cost more. The Asian currencies have been artificially low for a long time, but they are starting to move up as energy gets more deer, transportation costs go up. Our interest rates have been artificially [00:20:30] low since the recession and before. I don't think those low interest rates will last forever and when they go up then inventory gets more expensive and so those supply chains all the way down to Asia will get more expensive. I think we've done a lot of brilliant engineering and other technology improvements that have lowered costs a lot, but I think those costs are going to go up and as they do, then the answer for the [00:21:00] best supply chains is going to bring some stuff back to America. And that's already happening first. The very bulky stuff like furniture and it left North Carolina, but now much of it is come back and I think you'll, you'll see that the, the most expensive items to ship around will be the first to change. Nowadays the big importers have very sophisticated departments studying their supply chains and I truly [00:21:30] believe that they could save a penny per cubic foot of imports. They will change everything to do it Speaker 4: and so things can change very fast. Following the economics Speaker 3: and I understand you're a musician, can you give us some insight into your, a avocation with music? Speaker 4: Well, I'm a jazz pianist. I had come up through classical piano training but then at middle school, high school age, moved to the bay area and [00:22:00] there was lots of jazz happening here and I was excited by that and I actually learned to play jazz on the string bass first. But I had a piano in my room and the dorm I lived at here at Berkeley. And so I was playing a lot and listening to records of people I really enjoyed. And there was lots of jazz happening here and other musicians and we learn from each other and you grow your vocabulary over time and I was gone a couple of years between, Speaker 5: yeah, Speaker 4: Undergrad and Grad school working in industry, but [00:22:30] when I came back here to Grad school then I was playing bars in north beach and the like, but at a certain point you have to decide whether you're going to be a day animal or a night animal. You don't have the hours to do both, but art is very important to me and lyrical jazz piano is very important to me. It's, it's a way to do expression and creativity that I don't think I've found another medium that can match it. Speaker 3: Professor Leishman, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. My pleasure. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:23:00] irregular feature of spectrum is to present the calendar of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Brad Swift joins me for this. Speaker 3: Get up close to a hundreds of wild mushrooms at the 42nd annual fungus [00:23:30] fair being held this year at the Lawrence Hall of science in Berkeley. Eat edible mushrooms, meet vendors and watch culinary demonstrations by mushroom chefs. Get the dirt on poisonous mushrooms and checkout other wild funky from the medicinal to the really, really strange mushroom experts will be on hand to answer all your questions and to identify unknown specimens brought in by the visitors. My cologists will present slideshows and talk about foraging for mushrooms. [00:24:00] Find out how different mushrooms can be used for treating diseases, dyeing cloth or paper and flavoring foods. The fair will be Saturday and Sunday, December 3rd and fourth from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM each day. There is a sliding admission charge to the hall of Science, which includes all the exhibits and the fungus fare. Check their website, Lawrence Hall of Science. Dot Orgy for details. Speaker 8: On Tuesday, December 6th [00:24:30] at 7:00 PM the Jewish community center at 3,200 California street in San Francisco is hosting a panel discussion on digital overload. Debate continues over the extent to which connectivity is changing the QALY of our relationships and reshaping our communities. Now there are major concerns about how it's changing our brains. Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times Tech reporter Matt. Righto wired Steven Levy and rabbi Joshua Trullo. It's joined moderator, Jonathan Rosen, author of the Talmud [00:25:00] and the Internet to address pressing ethical questions of the digital age, including what are the costs of growing up digitally native are our children casualties of the digital revolution. What are the longterm effects of net use? Visit JCC s f.org for tickets which are $20 to the public, $17 for members and $10 for students. Speaker 3: Women's earth alliance presents seeds of resilience, women farmers striving in the face of climate [00:25:30] change Tuesday, December 6th that the David Brower center in Berkeley. The doors will open at 6:00 PM for reception and music program is at 7:30 PM it entails stories from the field by India, program director, RWE, Chad shitness, other special guests and Speakers to be announced. Admissions is $15 in advance and $18 at the door. Speaker 8: December is Leonardo art science evening rendezvous [00:26:00] or laser will take place. Wednesday, December 7th from six 45 to 8:55 PM at Stanford University's Geology Corner Building three 21 zero five in addition to socializing and networking, there will be four talks showing the kitchen of San Jose State University will speak on hyperfunctional landscapes in art and offer a fresh outlook at the technological adaptations and how they can enhance and enrich our surroundings rather than distract us from them. UC Berkeley's Carlo [00:26:30] squint and we'll show how knots can be used as constructivist building blocks for abstract geometrical sculptures. NASA's Margarita Marinova will share how the dry valleys event Arctica are an analog for Mars. These are the coldest and dry rocky place with no plants or animals and site. Studying these dry valleys allows us to understand how the polar regions on earth work, what the limits of life are, and to apply these ideas to the cold and dry environment of Mars. Finally, San Francisco Art Institutes, [00:27:00] Peter Foucault will present on systems and interactivity in drawing where drawings are constructed through mark making systems and how audience participation can influence the outcome of a final composition. Focusing on an interactive robotic trying installation. For more information on this free event, visit leonardo.info. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:27:30] now new stories with Rick Karnofsky Speaker 8: science news reports on research by UC San Diego, experimental psychologist David Brang and vs Ramachandran published in the November 22nd issue of plus biology on the genetic origins of synesthesia. The sense mixing condition where people taste colors or see smells that affects only about 3% of the population, half of those with the condition report that family members also [00:28:00] have the condition, but parents and children will often exhibit it differently. Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist, David Eagleman published in September 30th issue of behavioral brain research that a region on chromosome 16 is responsible for a form of synesthesia where letters and numbers are associated with a color Brang hypothesizes that the gene may help prune connections in the brain and that soon as synesthesiac yaks may suffer a genetic defect that prevents removing some links. [00:28:30] An alternate hypothesis is that synesthesia is caused by neurochemical imbalance. This may explain why the condition intensifies with extreme tiredness or with drug use. Bring in colleagues believe that it is actually a combination of these two that lead to synesthesia. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: spectrum is recorded and edited by me, Rick Klasky, [00:29:00] and by Brad Swift. The music you heard during this show is by David [inaudible] off of his album folk and acoustic. It is released under the creative Commons attribution license. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] our email address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.