Microsoft Will Pay YOU to Use Their ERP

Microsoft has declared that, until 25th June 2010, it will pay small businesses US$850 per licensed user when they switch from rival NetSuite to their own Dynamics ERP package.

This is a perfectly legitimate way to attract punters of course, and the plethora of nice things Microsoft say in their press release about their own product would perhaps be helping to sway you, but why would the world's best-known software company have to pay you to use its software?

NetSuite, whose own ERP software is a web-based offering (so you access it through a web browser but it actually runs on servers looked after by somebody else) and in which Oracle (another software giant) owns a majority stake, recently offered a big incentive to US channel resellers that gave them great leverage in offering bargains to potential new clients, or simply making large amounts of money out of them, so it could be that Microsoft wants to go one better and show itself to be on the side of the small business.

But isn't this what Microsoft does anyway?

I'm not going to get started on the 'browser wars' business, and the EU's ruling that Microsoft has to make rival browsers available with Windows 7 as alternatives to Internet Explorer 8, and we are probably all familiar with the underhand way it installs Office on new home PCs, only to tell the owner many days later that "now you have to pay for it." But, these arguably underhand/ingenious ways of making us use software we might not have picked out of a line-up, is nothing compared to the amazing licensing deals big companies can get in opting (after a suitable period of umming and ahhing) to go with Microsoft.

What makes this seem a little disingenuous though is the quote from one happy Microsoft shopper, who says that

"The interoperability with Microsoft SQL Server means the ease of moving data between our data warehouses is just fantastic..."

The interoperability with what is one of the most widely-installed database platforms, especially in a product that, presumably, relies rather heavily on its database for storage and management of, er, data is as worth commenting on as the interoperability of a door with its handle.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not knocking Microsoft Dynamics ERP any more than I'd knock Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Dynamics CRM, but one thing this bit of generosity has driven me to want to do is learn more about the NetSuite they want to pay me to steer clear of!

The press release is here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/mar10/03-11NetSuitePR.mspx