When SAP and Intel announced Pandesic at Sapphire in 1997, an SAP executive told me they did it basically because Intel paid them to. There was a certain casualness to the comment and the venture collapsed 3 years later.
I got a similar vibe this week about Duet - the joint offering from SAP and Microsoft. An SAP executive said "give us credit for thinking beyond MS Office" in designing Duet. In the meantime a Microsoft blogger points out "And for some ERP vendors, the ones who have been shipping incomprehensible software for 20 years, well, making the transition to this new world of work will be a challenge similar to the one faced by the guy who decides he wants to lose 40 pounds the night before his high school reunion.”
Charlie Wood summarizes it best "Ultimately I think Duet is a fantastic prototype of what's to come: solutions for exposing enterprise applications within familiar desktop tools. But where Duet is a proprietary, one-off integration, we will soon see generalized integration capabilities built on the lightweight, open standards of RSS and Microsoft's own RSS extensions, which add support for structured data and synchronization."
5-6 years ago, Duet would have been innovative. Now with a variety of mobile and SaaS applications and interfaces, MS Office integration is a nice-to-have. If SAP and Microsoft put their hearts into it.
