>>>But more importantly how about all the people out there like me who work for HR application providers? What happens to the folks on this forum that work for Abra or PeopleClick (Della Martin) when those companies cannot compete with MS for HR sales?
>>>
>>>Let's imagine for a minute that you own a fairly new company, less than 5 years old, and now you have between 50 - 100 employees. It's time for you to start thinking switching from that excell spreadsheet to a full blown HRIS solution. Do you go with Abra,Peopleclick,PeoeplTrack,!Trak-IT (just to name a few), or do you go with MS. Let's see, I think I'll take..... MS!!!!
>>>
>>>IMO, there should be alot of scared companies out there today.
>>
>>Rip,
>>
>>Great point. I work for a small software company and we compete with Great Plains and Sage. We developed the product using MS VFP and have an MS SQL Server version. Now we are supposed to compete directly with Microsoft? This is definately bad news for the MS developers. Thanks for the heads up.
>>
>>Kind Regards,
>>
>>Mat
>
>mmm... don't know how bad it will get...
>Microsoft is "cutting back" because W2K sales (hence Office 2K, etc...) aren't anywhere near their predictions and are trying to bolster revenue by onerous licensing and training schemes.
>
>I just got a pamplet in the mail today from Borland, announcing Delphi 5.
>They claim it is a VB clone that generates binaries from the same source code for either WinXX or Linux. Write your vertical market app and bundle the OS (infinite WS and server copies) with it free of charge. It's hard to compete against free.
I think that M$ is just trying to get into a head to head with Oracle. They have Financials and M$ didn't. Now M$ might have a similar offering in the future.
Just remember that no system works well for a company out of the box, and who in their right mind would think that one from M$ would be a good fit? This makes it great for developers to compete with Oracle Forms developers who are commanding a hunge chunk of change. I see this as a positve position for both M$ and ourselfs.
__Stephen
