Microsoft

I have to admit that at times I just plain don't understand Microsoft.

In the throes of my last few months at Aderant I saw that Microsoft were releasing an accounting package.

Now my world view of the future of software development is one in which us developers will either be wiring Microsoft components together, or wiring open source components together*.

Given this world view, I reckoned that it would quite a good idea to try and create a legal practise management system based on the Microsoft accounting, work flow and CRM packages. It would a quick and dirty way to knock together a very attractive system. And I had a sneaking suspicion that there might be more than one or two unhappy law firms looking for new practise management software.

But trying to get a copy of the accounting software out of Microsoft, even as a developer, has proved to be harder than my experiences of trying to buy a copy of OS/2 from IBM. After two years of effort I still have had no luck. It would appear that Microsoft deems New Zealand too small a market. I wonder if they have ever heard of (or read?) The Innovator's Dilemma.

So I was very taken aback to see that Microsoft have decided to make a version of the aforesaid software available for free use. Just go to http://www.ideawins.com/ , download, install and use. There are some caveats: It is resource hungry on older hardware, requires an uncompressed folder for SQL Server, and also puts .Net v2 on your machine. And yes, it is still keyed into the United States market.

So although the rest of us outside of the United States can play with it, all we can really do is wonder what might have been, and wonder what the future might hold. Yep. At times I just plain don't understand Microsoft.

*Because I have done a bit of the former in my past I find the latter to be a far more creative and fun space to be in. I also have a dread fear that the Microsoft components will eventually collapse because of their complexity and history, just as Vista seemed to.

11:23:27 AM