Microsoft: Coming from behind

With Microsoft Business Solutions, you are making a big bet that in the midmarket, companies will want different things than they do today. How long do you think it will be before that pays off?
It's a great space for us in terms of the growth opportunity. You know, we are patient people. Everything we get into... even the Office software, took us a long, long time. We introduced a word processor that was not the number one processor for about five years.

For the Macintosh first, if I recall.
We had a DOS word processor that was not a leading product. Mac Word was leading on the Mac. We didn't overpass WordPerfect on the PC for a long time after we'd become Number one on the Mac and a long time after we'd gotten into the word processing space.

There's not, like, some year we have in mind where things just explode. Every year we get more partners, every year we show the technical roadmap of what's common between the products and how it exploits the platform and Office in a better way.

Where should things be in the next couple of years?
Within the next — well, these releases are all pretty much in the next year — the idea of what we are doing with portal, business intelligence, roles and Web services, all that should become very, very clear. Some of the other stuff where we actually enhance the platform in some pretty deep ways... that takes several years after that before we get around to it.

With installed bases growing and testing taking longer, is it harder to do these big upgrades?
You have to be very agile in improving the software. If you look at the number of neat new things in Great Plains, Navision and Axapta... it is way faster than it's ever been. We've brought methodology to it. We are sharing across the three products. We are actually working at a level of the product where it is very easy to innovate. You are not changing the things that are harder to change.

Salesforce.com, which addresses a similar market, has been one of the more successful companies to come at it from the "software as a service" approach. Doug Burgum said earlier this week that Microsoft can solve that question of "How do you deliver software as a service?" Where are you with that?
Software as a service was a theme of a company meeting nine or 10 years ago where we heralded the idea that packaged software was done and now it was just all going to be shipped over the Internet. In fact, like many things around the Internet that were predicted to happen quickly, they are simply things that take more time.

Do you think it's still a couple of years before a lot of Microsoft products are offered in a hosted way?
We actually have people offering Microsoft CRM in a hosted way. There are things we can do to make it even stronger in a hosted environment. We are doing those things. There are a lot of customers who still want on-premise. In terms of on-premise, we're growing faster than anybody and doing quite well. Clearly, we want to accommodate both models and give people even the flexibility if they want to switch from one approach to the other approach. We'll have more to say about that.