Thursday, May 25, 2006

Voices from the Blogosphere about Duet after SAPPHIRE'06

It has been interesting, reading the Blogoshpere post about Duet after the Sapphire. I found some of my observations on Duet shared by other fellow bloggers.

Jason Wood posted this incisive blog on hurdles in the path of Duet adoption, with a critical one being of whether Duet would allow other parties, and data sources to get involved in providing Office connectivity. With only a "duet", when end-users are likely to want a orchestra, this Duet might just sing flat!

Ismael Ghalimi posted about how it could become really important for support for legacy SAP and MS Office to drive adoption of MS-Office connectivity. His excitement about the possibility to extend Duet using web services interfaces may however come a cropper. With the public trouble brewing between Microsoft Snap-ins and Duet, I wonder if SAP and Microsoft would invite other third parties to add to the chaos. Duet is likely to end up being a severely restricted bridge, with only "value packs" travelling on it.

My guess is, Duet is a heavy marketing and sales driven initiative, with each of the parties salivating about the huge upgrade revenues, and the additional user licenses. The fact that the end-user gets value in such a limited way , which I posted about earlier, does not bother any of them.

Hopefully, the customer will know better.

- Sangeeta

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

another hopeless product from sap. sap known for its useless customer Unfriendly is coming out with this useless product which really is to fool customers. Its a known fact that whichever customer has bought SAP has cursed it for life. Oracle, IBM even freeware are much better. By integrating 3-4 technology and running on 100 GB of ram nothing special is going to be achieved. have seen some freelancers develop a better product with MS office. keep away.