Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer cut the ribbon yesterday on the company's latest effort to pump more of its software estate into the cloud – the launch of its Dynamics CRM Online product. Until Ballmer's relatively recent proclamation that Microsoft was "all-in" on the cloud, the vendor had concentrated much more heavily on its …

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Tuesday 18th January 2011 11:00 GMT magnetik

expensive

$34 per person per month is the introductory discount price? That's pretty expensive IMHO. I'll stick to my open source CRM which, for under a grand per year in hosting fees, supports hundreds of users and hundreds of thousands of customer records.

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1. Tuesday 18th January 2011 13:20 GMT Steve Davies 3
  
  But.... It's from Microsoft
  
  And no one got fired for buying from them now did they?
  
  Hang the £34/month expense. It's from those smart people who brought us Windoze.
  
  Where is the 'tongue in cheek' icon then you need it?
  
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Tuesday 18th January 2011 15:41 GMT Dest

What have they been smoking?

Introductory discount price?

That means it's going to more than double when you go to renew it.

Even at $34 per month it's still too expensive and in addition to that it has the Microsoft name attached to it which doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

I wonder, has anyone there at Microsoft checked the economy lately?

Well I guess when you are a billionaire and someone comes to you and asks how much to charge for this service on an introductory discount price to get people hooked and dependent on it you just pull a figure out of the air and say "$34 a month, yeah, that sounds fair".

But knowing Microsoft like I do the renewal is more than likely going to be more like $80 - $100 per month and they will have some sneaky plan to keep you tied to it.

That's just the way they do things.

Try to trick you into it and make you dependent and paranoid with trumped up statistics instead of providing a better product or service.

It's their old world "Our customers are stupid uninformed idiots and will believe anything we tell them" policy that people like Mr. Ballmer are so fond of.

Good luck, because it's a lot harder to run those scams now than it was before.

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Wednesday 19th January 2011 09:41 GMT Anonymous Coward

I wish

That Microsoft would commit itself entirely to the "Cloud".

Then, maybe it'll get blown away too, when this cloud, like all clouds, passes out of the sky.

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Wednesday 19th January 2011 09:41 GMT Anonymous Coward

Cloudy

There was me thinking that el-reg was a tech news site that understood the difference between a cloud and SaaS ... sigh!

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Wednesday 19th January 2011 09:41 GMT Pirate Dave

so

MS has three users promising to use their Cloud version of CRM, versus only two users who want to run it on their own servers.

Yes, I can see that Microsoft's Cloud Computing is really taking off...

(where IS that tongue-in-cheek icon?)

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Wednesday 19th January 2011 09:41 GMT Anteaus

Costly, yes, but easier

Yes it's a swingeing price when open-source can do this for 'nowt. But, if you simply must have Dynamics it's a darn sight easier than setting-up your own Dynamics server, which must be a contender for the piece of software with the greatest number of costly dependencies, and the most convoluted install process ever written.

People used to criticise open-source for difficult installs, but now the boot is on the other foot - vTiger or Sugar on XAMPP/Windows or Linux is a breeze to setup, and has NO dependencies other than a standard OS. It 'just works' - which the Microsoft product dismally fails to achieve.

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