Overnight Success
It may come as a surprise to many of us, but not Ray Ozzie, that he has won the war. While everyone from Nick Carr to the group of consultants known as the Enterprise Irregulars tilt at the Windmill formerly known as ERP, Microsoft has suddenly emerged …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years ago, Ray Ozzie told readers Microsoft would spend 2006 building rather than announcing — the "Year of Build" Christmas message laid out a slow platform accumulation over splashy launches. Through November 2007 he was conspicuously absent from the stage (analysts were literally asking where he was), even as Microsoft shipped infrastructure: the Hyper-V hypervisor beta in mid-December alongside a Vista SP1 release candidate.
First-order effects
- Microsoft claims the market shift away from traditional ERP systems as its own win, directly contradicting the critique Nick Carr and the Enterprise Irregulars have been making of the category.
- The public Hyper-V beta, bundled into Windows Server 2008, lands in enterprise buyers' hands the same week — virtualization becomes a Windows feature rather than a separate purchase decision.
Second-order effects
- ERP vendors and their consultants lose the framing war if customers accept Microsoft's platform as the default substrate for business applications; Carr and the Enterprise Irregulars must now argue against an incumbent, not just a legacy category.
- Microsoft's bundling pattern draws regulatory attention alongside its commercial gains — the company denies Opera's antitrust claim that Internet Explorer lock-in abuses dominant position, a fight that tests whether bundling tactics extend past the browser.
Third-order effects
- If infrastructure keeps getting absorbed into the operating system vendor's stack — hypervisor, then application platform — the standalone enterprise software layers above it consolidate or commoditize, which is exactly the outcome the workflow-capture dynamic predicts.
- Antitrust enforcement becomes the main external check on this consolidation, with complainants like Opera testing whether EU-style remedies can constrain a vendor whose leverage comes from bundling rather than price.
The trend: Enterprise computing is consolidating around platform owners who bundle infrastructure into the OS, with Microsoft converting a two-year build phase into category leadership and regulators becoming the remaining counterweight.