Another calling for the head of Bill Gates

Add another media outlet to the list of those proclaiming an imminent death to Microsoft software. InformationWeek.com has just put up a piece by CRN’s Barbara Darrow entitled “Businesses Don’t Need Microsoft Software.” An attention grabber? No doubt.

Darrow’s piece profiles solutions in the CRM world and others which find hosted alternatives to the megagiant firm. “Imagine a world without Microsoft software,” beckons Darrow in the lead. Darrow’s premise begins with the recent announcement by the Google brain trust that that firm is testing “Google Apps For Your Domain,” a product that would merge gMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Page Creator (plus possibly a word processor and spreadsheet) for enterprises.

The Google package is a response to Microsoft’s future hosted offering, Office Live Essentials, and the beta test version will reportedly be made available this coming Monday. Darrow sees Google as a “linchpin” in the “anti-Microsoft movement.” Google is now doing what sales-force automation and CRM players are currently plunking lots of marketing money into. Naturally, Darrow makes it only a few paragraphs in without mentioning – go ahead, guess who. I’ll give you one try. – Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

In talking with Benioff for a previous piece, Darrow said that the outrageous CEO had “spent nearly as much time touting Google’s Writely app and spreadsheet offering as he did talking up Salesforce.com’s new Google AdWords integration.” NetSuite has also since tied in Google to CRM modules. Google’s moves are “fantastic news for ISVs, VARs and integrators who want to focus their energy and creativity on customer success, not the drudgery of break-fix-patch-upgrade with client/server.”

Perhaps realizing he had the opportunity to get in another great quote, Benioff went on to say that the Microsoft stack “is stuck. Worst of all, the stack has stuck it to the customer.” Darrow goes on to posit “other solution providers” who find an integrated Microsoft stack attractive but that the “very integration poses problems. For example, the upcoming Windows Vista and Longhorn releases will not support SQL Server 2005 code previous to the upcoming Service Pack 2 release.”

To be fair, Darrow quotes a couple of folks sympathetic to the Microsoft cause. Database Solutions president George Brown sees the anti-Microsoft philosophy as a lot of hot air: “People have to look at cost and functionality and flexibility, and I’m not sure that Salesforce.com and others offer what Microsoft does,” he says in the piece. And BI consultant Dan Linstedt is quoted as saying, “The Microsoft puzzle pieces fit together nicely—usually with a little tweaking. Multivendor stacks [mean that] the vendors will continuously fight over revenue streams.”

A great article from Darrow, to be sure, but in the end it’s some analysis and lots of speculation. The only certainly about the future, Benioff’s near-guarantees aside, is that things are uncertain for Microsoft. Barbara Darrow is the industry editor for CRN magazine.