[March 1, 2005]

Microsoft CRM Customers Turning Blue

By David Sims, TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

“Customer dissatisfaction is growing with Microsoft’s delayed CRM release cycle,” according to eWeek, prompting the company to hire a veteran CRM executive to take charge.

Brad Wilson, a former marketing executive with PeopleSoft Inc. and Epiphany Inc. was summoned to Redmond in February as the company was announcing another delay for its long-promised Microsoft CRM 2.0, over a year behind schedule.

The earliest anyone now expects to see Microsoft CRM 2.0 is the fourth quarter, when –promises, promises – it’ll be released to manufacturing. General availability won’t be any earlier than the second quarter of next year, breaking Microsoft’s word of a month ago that Version 2.0 would be released this quarter.

But hey, don’t sweat the small stuff. And to Microsoft, it’s all small stuff.

To his credit Wilson sounds like he’s trying to do the right thing. “In the last 60 to 90 days, we met with a lot of our partners to decide whether to come out with what we have right now or open the scope more,” eWeek reports him saying. Wilson quickly disavowed any responsibility for the latest decision to delay the product.

Microsoft CRM 2.0 will include marketing and service automation applications and more sales tools, according to Wilson. Microsoft will also add more analytical CRM capability in Version 2.0, mainly in the form of deeper reporting capabilities, what Wilson called “right-size analytics.”

But customers need it yesterday. “Their upgrades need to be more regular and come quicker,” Clark Cox, regional sales manager for Bastian Material Handling Corp., which has about 100 seats of Microsoft CRM told eWeek. “[Version] 1.2 was pretty much a band-aid really. We need the features in 2.0 today,” the same ones Microsoft promised him over a year ago.

Microsoft’s CRM partners aren’t amused either. “Functionality holes and a slow product-upgrade cycle have created headaches and opportunities for Microsoft Corp.'s CRM partners,” reports Dennis Callaghan: “Those partners are looking to the long-awaited Version 2 of Microsoft's customer relationship management suite… to plug the gaps in the product and make it easier to sell to their customers.”

Look, they’re turning blue.

David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.