Salesforce has launched vertical solutions in healthcare and financial services and I can imagine Microsoft reacting to this by investing further in its existing Industry Templates and upgrading these to full fledged vertical solutions to complete with Salesforce. The article makes it sounds as though the threat is to horizontal ISVs only, but I think vertical ISVs need to be aware too. Salesforce ISVs have similar challenges too. Salesforce acquired RelateIQ whose solution competed with Datahug and Introhive. Even though Datahug was venture funded by Salesforce, it not finds itself competing with SalesforceIQ (Salesforce's branding for RelateIQ). The key difference is that Salesforce offers its ISVs and customers a compelling marketplace, whereas Microsoft does not. So it'll be interesting to see how much longer Microsoft can maintain its ISV relationships without a thriving marketplace.