Microsoft Live CRM lashed

IGNORING THE received wisdom against kicking a dog when it's down, Microsoft is on the end of more stick this week. This time the butt of the groundlings' cabbages and turnips is its Live CRM service.

Although a lot of the negative reactions the company has been receiving recently have mostly been the Anybody But Microsoft obsessive types, the announcement of Live CRM arguably merited its mauling.

Microsoft's on-premises CRM has had challenging early years with Redmond forced to pull a release and change management of the group.

A slow-ish start wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for Redmond being on the wrong end of comparisons with the likes of Salesforce.com and others in the on-demand movement that have been growing at high-double-digit and even triple-figure percentage rates not seen in business software since the last century.

After expending lots of wind playing down the importance of the software-as-a-service movement, Microsoft then went on a backtracking expedition insisting it "got it" about online business apps as well as consumer services.

Finally, it came up with something like an announcement this week but, as its rivals gleefully noted, this was FUD that seemed to come from the mainframe age, never mind client/server.

So, what's Microsoft's plan?

Number one: to release something called Live CRM in the second quarter of 2006 in North America only, with other markets to follow at some point.

Number two: to base it on the underlying code for the on-premises version even though it's a struggle to come up with an example of a repurposed application that has successfully transitioned between offline and online access.

Number three: to continue offering the on-premises Dynamics CRM, although hybrid on/off premises offerings are unproven.

Number four: to give resellers vague promises of rewards in the form of referral-based kickbacks.

Number five: there isn't a number five.

This is living with your head in the clouds rather than a real plan for a cloud-based business service.

It's not just snipers that think Microsoft is looking old. The days of on-stage demos of early code at conferences with whooping delegates and whooping Steve Ballmer are going, going, gone.

In the current climate the Live CRM announcement was an act of foolhardy bravura and the results were predictable.

Phil Wainewright noted on his ZDNet blog that Microsoft was playing the fear, uncertainty and doubt hand.

"This is a FUD announcement of a plan to introduce a product this time next year in the hope that it'll persuade customers to postpone buying decisions. It worked when software applications used to take several years to develop and several more to deploy."

And when locked-in IT buyers didn't know any better, he might have added.

Rivals couldn't resist putting in their two cents.

In one of his staff memos that, as ever, was leaked immediately to press, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff reached for his black cap and software-as-a-service Bible and asked, "Is it the end of software as we know it?"

Benioff noted that Ray Ozzie's big power move was no coincidence as Ozzie is Microsoft's biggest booster for change in software delivery.

He perhaps weakened his argument by then suggesting that the huge field of Ajax-based online productivity apps back up his thesis, but that's another story.

Those partners that were offering hosted versions of Microsoft CRM did not appear too happy either.

Others noted that Microsoft was "the new IBM" and not in a positive way either. And, of course, everybody predicted Microsoft would miss its deadline again.

Microsoft might need to change in many ways but for once, even its marketing golden touch seems to have gone AWOL and this was another bad day for Steve Ballmer. µ