November 20, 2001: In this week's commentary on ASP industry news: Microsoft cans bCentral applications — begging this question: Does it know what it's doing?
Last week marked the end of one of the most visible experiments in bringing online applications to the small business masses. With understandably little fanfare, Microsoft's small business portal, bCentral, ceased offering its online financials and Web site building applications, referring existing users to offline alternatives.
Heard Here
"Microsoft's approach is just a more sophisticated version of the old routine where you put a million chimpanzees on a million typewriters, and sooner or later one of them ends up typing out the complete works of Shakespeare."
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In an interview ahead of the changes last month, bCentral's vice president Satya Nadella heralded the move in a classic display of Microsoft doublespeak as an "enhancement" to the existing service. "We're adding even more powerful Web authoring tools to our base service offering — either Microsoft FrontPage or Microsoft Publisher," he revealed.
The doublespeak does little to disguise a quite extraordinary U-turn by Microsoft back towards pre-Internet technologies. These replacements for Site Manager, bCentral's erstwhile online Web site builder, are the same products that normally come quaintly delivered in a shrinkwrapped box containing a CD-ROM for installation on the user's machine. The advantage of reverting to such "on-premise" solutions, said Nadella, is that they provide richer functionality than the online product, and can still be used alongside the remaining rump of hosted bCentral services such as its online product catalogue and email list manager.
Customers stranded by the loss of the Finance Manager online financials app have the opportunity to travel even further back in time, to price deltas long forgotten in the online world. Their recommended upgrade path is to Small Business Manager, the new accounting solution from Microsoft Great Plains, which formally launched last week. So much more richly featured is this alternative that it costs around $5,000 for a license for up to five users.
The package, which includes built-in integration with bCentral's surviving service offerings, aids installation with a selection of wizards and templates, and is available from Great Plains resellers. They naturally are all too happy to offer additional implementation and related services for a suitable fee, which includes presumably supplying a suitable PC server to run the required SQL Server 2000 database. For those customers who thought they were escaping the need to run their own IT systems when they first signed up for Finance Manager, Small Business Manager is also available from the Great Plains channel as a hosted service, delivered with an extra touch of 'so-1999' nostalgia through its use of Windows terminal technology.
Will Anyone Notice
It seems, however, that the online Finance Manager service had few if any customers in the first place. All along, "customers were looking for an on-premise solution," Nadella conceded, "since having all their financial data online wasn't a preferred method of operation." Indeed, what bCentral's claimed 1.6 million customers actually did sign up for is beginning to become something of a mystery.
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Phil Wainewright founded ASPnews.com in 1998 and is the publisher of Loosely Coupled. He can be contacted at
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