They also describe concrete losses, like a “missed downgrade” that cost “$10,000” and note that such hits are devastating given the relatively small margins on Microsoft licences. This was especially concerning for partners who have a customer incident – that is out of the MSPs control, the partner noted. Channel Guru founder Brad Clarke sees this as part of a broader shift in Microsoft’s channel strategy. “The other thing they’ve done is they’ve made changes at a distribution level around change of channel partner. His talk about the importance of partners and partnership, and “Microsoft’s channel is booming.