The Microsoft CRM Live buzz appears to have died down. We started looking at the opportunity to implement an "i-Dialogue for CRM Live" solution back in March, but nothing ever materialized that we could get our hands on.

This delay violates the on-demand credo of "Release early and often". I had really hoped Microsoft would earn their operational stripes by jumping into the market with "good enough" and letting customer and partner feedback dictate the evolution of CRM Live. Now we're left to assume that the project is in a state of "analysis paralysis" with Program Managers bickering with Engineers over how to "get it perfect" for launch (it'll never be "perfect" guys... don't take it personally. It was ready last year).

Dynamics CRM 3.0 is a great CRM solution (see my test drive last year), but I'm beginning to have serious doubts about Microsoft's ability to enter the market behind Salesforce.com. This is not like throwing an XBox up against a PlayStation. There's no Halo 3 equivalent killer app that can make CRM Live an overnight success (or within 5 years) that I can see. But there is one killer infrastructure angle up Microsoft's sleeve that could change how CRM is deployed and hosted in the future.

If Microsoft truly wants to be a CRM contender then, in my opinion, they need to leap frog the whole multi-tenant architecture discussion and focus exclusively on next generation CRM virtualization, which is the ability to pre-configure an entire Windows CRM server with all dependencies, and allow this "image" to be hosted by any 3rd party.

Leverage would then fall back to the consumer who could "shop around" for virtualization hosts and take their entire CRM/Active Directory/SQL Server VM image with them anywhere they want to go. I suppose that would give new meaning to "Where do you want to go today?"