The poor little giant had a lot of negative press lately. Gartner announced that Vista operating system is so “overweight” that it threatens to sink the company and technology and stock market pundits continue to speculate whether it can survive without infusion of Yahoo’s creativity.  Yet today the company about to release the quarterly results which likely to exceed analysts expectations.

It takes a distance of five nautical miles for a large cargo ship, moving at a low speed, to stop or to complete a maneuver, and Microsoft is a very large “ship” and there are indicators that it started to turn. There are reports that it’s Dynamics Enterprise Software is met with considerable enthusiasm by resellers and customers as the company entered aggressively in on-demand marketplace to give the pioneers of that business model a run for their money. But even more impotently, the thought leadership in Microsoft started to change noticeably.   

Perhaps the rumors of Microsoft’s imminent demise are a little premature.

  Dennis Howlett, who wrote a number of enthusiastic posts about promise and proliferation of social software in his blogs, Irregular Enterprise and Accman Pro, seem to start loosing his enthusiasm for it’s value for an enterprise. At least it is my understanding of his post.

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Joshua Greenbaum came up with an excellent analysis of the upcoming battle of these CRM giants in his Enterprise Anti-matter blog. A particularly interesting point he makes is

I’ve always contended that CRM on demand in general, with all due respect to all its adherents, is more of a commodity play than a strategic value play, particularly for the vast majority of deployments, which are mostly standalone and largely serving a contact management, sales force automation need.

I couldn’t agree more. I also always felt that the on-demand offering of "so-called" CRM, is short changing true organizational transformation opportunities.  It is a fact that the adoption experience of Salesforce.com is legendary, but it is because it does not challenge any status quo and attempts to promote change in business practices and as such it also does not produce significant ROI.