Microsoft is paving the way for a more integrated front and back end system. The company is fast becoming a major contender in the provision of business application solutions such as document management, collaboration, portal, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and time management. Existing software vendors that specialise in DM, collaboration, portal, CRM, ERP and time management should start to worry about their future positioning and market share.
Microsoft’s strategy is not about re-inventing the wheel; it is about observing and learning from the successes and failures of those software vendors already active in a particular market. When Microsoft decides to target a particular market, it offers such a competitive pricing and licensing option that other independent vendors would be hard pushed to compete. These competitive pricing and licensing agreements seem to entitle Microsoft to use us, the customer, as their guinea pigs to test their applications until they are rid of most of the annoying bugs. We certainly do not tolerate the same from other independent vendors; we expect their software to be bug free!
