So it looks like Eric Ogren wants to dance a bit, which is fine. If old friends can't give each other a hard time, who can?

In his response to my poke in Tuesday's Daily Incite [0] (http://esgblogs.typepad.com/erics_blog/2006/06/microsoft_foref.html [1]), Eric mentions chapter and verse about how Microsoft typically takes enterprise class products down market (SQL*Server, Exchange, Dynamics), but doesn't go into saturated markets without something new and different.

As Jim Cramer would say, "WRONG!"

EO, remember little products called cc*Mail or QMail? Everyone thinks that Exchange really killed Notes, but that isn't the case. It really killed things like cc*Mail and QMail that pretty much went away. I followed the email market in the mid-90's and Exchange just chewed up these first generation mail servers. Notes grew in lock-step with Exchange for many years, until it got lost in the morass of IBM.

What about Microsoft Money? I seem to recall a product called Quicken that pretty much owned the retail channel and Money added absolutely nothing novel in that business. But Microsoft pressed forward anyway because they wanted a piece of the market. Same deal for Small Business Accounting, that is still trounced in every way by QuickBooks.

Dynamics is another example of this you say? Not even close. Dynamics began life as a product called Great Plains, so Microsoft didn't bring ERP to the mid-market. They just acquired the leading player after the market was well established. 

But the real kicker here is to look back to the biggest Daddy of them all, Microsoft Office. The only innovation that Microsoft brought to office productivity was to bundle it all together and cut the price dramatically. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were much better products. But they weren't bundled and they held onto a premium price point for WAY TOO LONG. You're a Boston guy, you should remember the rise and fall of Lotus.

So in all seriousness Eric, Microsoft's new security offerings (ForeFront and OneCare) are much closer analogies to Office, than to SQL*Server. Microsoft has once again innovated on the packaging and dropped the pricing, and THAT is the "big" idea. And to see Symantec and McAfee fall into line so soon with their own service-based bundles and corrected pricing means maybe they have paid closer attention to what happened to WordPerfect and Lotus than you have.

Make that a Heineken Light buddy! And if we can get Symantec to pay for it before they become WordPerfect 2.0, all the better.