I think your sixth paragraph is the best one I have seen on your site in accurately describing the situation Microsoft is putting partners and customer into. The partners know that the product they have been selling for years is a good one and is genuinely what the customer base wants at the present. Microsoft is playing lip service to the protection of those product lines for the benefit of those customers (although many customers like me see the shallowness of it) while pushing to partners that the only thing going forward will be 365 and its revenue stream and lack of process customizability. The lack of customizability sure makes things easier for Microsoft and the partners not previously in the ERP market (the cloud and Office 365 partners getting some new product lines to sell) but it sure cuts out all those NAV/GP/SL/AX partners who are being asked/cajoled to sell something which will reduce their consulting opportunities and helpfulness as well as talk their current customers into throwing away all their previous investment in licences and implementation. Mark Brummel's published missive about the lack of sensitivity displayed by customers by not upgrading probably felt good for him, but that is not something the customers writing the checks want to hear from someone they have paid large amounts of money to. Especially if the upgrades are held up by the complexity and cost of moving customizations he himself wrote and charged them for. This comes close to being a tantrum about these customers not spending lots more for something they may not even need. I encourage Brummel to fire all customers not currently on or willing to go to 365 since he feels so strongly about supporting creepy, old installations. Surely he can prosper on that new revenue model. Jeff Frye

"We have to get ready for the possibility that D365F will steal the market in the next eighteen months to two years. Customers will want the much lower cost, and they will settle for any technical or even functional compromises there might be between the two because of the size of the cost saving." Really? That's an oxymoron if ever there was one- the Dynamics enterprise license changes means a huge cost increase for customers The 'on premise' offering is the worst of all worlds -complex and lacking features with most of the disadvantages and far less advantages. Retail a core vertical not supported on premise? No Power BI? etc. Did anyone mention unknown annual price increases? And which partners are queuing up to sell at reduced csp margins?