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MICROSOFT OVER FIVE YEARS

What a difference five years makes. Five years ago, New Orleans was high and dry (well, low and dry?), but things were about to get wetter. And five years ago then corporate VP Doug Burgum was a presenter at Microsoft's annual financial analyst day on July 28, 2005. Fortunately, a query brings up the transcript in which Burgum told analysts about GP 9.0.

He also painted a glowing picture of the future. "It's a fabulous release, [GP 9.0] but it's also a proxy for the work that we've done under what we call Project Green in the sense that it shows the innovation by showing you Great Plains. You'll see the innovation that we're also going to be delivering in Navision, Axapta, and Solomon across all our product lines as they all advance toward a common point in the future." Shift forward to 2010 and Burgum is gone. Green lingers in rumors that refuse to die. Hot then and hot now are Sharepoint and what was then called Microsoft CRM. But in this year's presentation there was only one mention of Dynamics and not from CEO Steve Ballmer or COO Kevin Turner. Oddly, it came from investor relations GM, Bill Koefed, who said, "And Microsoft Dynamics fits down below, because, as you know, it's more than a billion-dollar business but also an enabler for the other areas of our core businesses." It elicits a "how odd" reaction from me. The tone of the analyst meeting was less product centric than the 2005 meeting, even if this year a technology showcase that focused on what the emcee called "the coolest technology Microsoft has to offer." Accounting software, I surmise, is not cool. By the way, why do so many Microsoft product demonstrations sound like the speakers are on meth?

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