Microsoft's announcement that MS CRM Live will be priced at $45 per user has raised some responses from the competition.

You can buy the on-premise version of MS CRM today for about $1,500, which includes a perpetual use license. Spread that cost out over 3 years and you get $41.66 per month. Add a few bucks for hosting and $45 sounds about right.

I have a feeling that there will be more parity between an organization's size and the number of seats licensed at this price point.

For example, an organization with 20 employees may only subscribe to 5 Salesforce seats at $75 per month and limit access to those in Sales or Support. Whereas the same organization may be more inclined to purchase 10-15 seats at $45 per month.

While Salesforce clearly has more cross functional value than MS CRM, customers often do not want to pay for unused functionality in the early stages of adopting CRM when centralized contact management is the primary goal.