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Sage Software, Inc.
vs Microsoft®
Sage
MAS 90 and Sage MAS 200 vs Microsoft's Next Generation
New
Generation of MBS products planned (PDF 449 kb)
Read
this before you make the important decision to commit to a Microsoft
accounting software package. What you buy today may not be what
you have tomorrow. Companies running software from Microsoft Business
Solutions can clearly expect a pretty rough future. Changing accounting
software is more painful, than having a root canal without novocain,
and companies implementing a Microsoft accounting system will be
changing twice in the next 7 years.
FACT
ONE:
Microsoft has 5 mid-range accounting software packages that compete
with each other: Great Plains Dynamics, e-Enterprise, Real World,
Solomon, & Navision. Microsoft purchased these 5 packages
to gain market share. (Sage Software is still a larger accounting
software publisher.) Microsoft can not justify maintaining and
marketing 5 packages that address the same market segment (they
only have one spreadsheet and one word processor).
FACT
TWO:
They will be combining these products into a single suite. New
Language, New Interface and New Code. Further confirmation of
Microsoft's "product rewrite" plans appear in recent
articles on ZDnet and Accounting Technology. (See below)
THE
POINT:
-
It will take 3 years to get this product to Beta.
- It
will take 3 more years to get to a stable product you would want
to run your
business on, and it will be different than what you will be buying
today.
- They
will likely not be providing significant feature upgrades on their
existing
product. If they do, it will just push out their existing replacement
schedule.
- Do
you want to purchase a product that will be phased out in 3 years?
- Do
you want your business to be a Beta site user in 3 years?
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NOTE: Recently, an independent analyst group, Directions
on Microsoft, published an article on Microsoft Business
Solutions' offerings, including their analysis of where Microsoft
is headed. The article reflects many of the points Best has made
over the years and provides independent support for our analysis.
Content
for this report has been provided by Directions on Microsoft, an
independent publisher of news and analysis covering Microsoft technology,
strategic, activities, and organization. For more information, please
visit: http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com.
Some
interesting points made in the report include:
"Microsoft
is not making compatibility or a smooth upgrade path between current
MBS products and the future Project Green products a priority and
does not expect current MBS customers to migrate to Project Green.
Rather, Microsoft views the new lineup as a way of attracting mid-size
businesses that don't currently have any business management software
at all, or that have outgrown systems designed for smaller businesses,
such as the popular Intuit QuickBooks application.”
“Microsoft
has pledged to continue updating and supporting the current MBS
product lines until at least 2012. However, given that one goal
of Project Green is to reduce costs and streamline the MBS product
lines, there's a risk that Microsoft will decrease the attention
given to the current MBS products once equivalent functionality
is available from the Project Green products."
"Other MBS resellers, particularly those with a specialty in
one of the four ERP product lines, should be aware that Microsoft
plans to phase these product lines out eventually, and has not made
any promises on compatibility or upgrade paths between today's products
and their Project Green successors."
"Potential
customers for today's MBS products are faced with a difficult decision:
buy a well-known and widely supported solution that Microsoft eventually
intends to phase out, or wait for a new generation of products about
which very little is known. Businesses with pressing problems for
which current MBS products offer effective solutions should consider
the planned end-of-life as one of several factors in their buying
decision. But organizations that are not currently using business
management software and see no urgent need for it, or that are using
competing or internally built solutions, might want to wait for
more details about Project Green to emerge; otherwise, they risk
facing two complex and costly business management software installations
over the next 10 years."
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