Why is the Microsoft Dynamics NAV team hiding from Power BI?

Editor's Note: For a response to this article, see the comment below from Jonathan Davis, BI Program Manager for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

I have recently returned from Convergence 2014 in Atlanta. As anyone that has attended my webinars for this website, for NAVUG, or at various Microsoft Dynamics NAV events knows, I am a big fan of Power BI. With the official release of Power BI for Office 365, I was eager to see how Microsoft would showcase all the new features (Power Query, Power View, etc.) in the context of NAV.

To my disappointment, all Dynamics NAV reporting and BI sessions I attended were more of the same message from the last 2 to 3 years: charting inside the application, RDLC reporting and third party tools. And usually at the end (or somewhere lost among many other slides) they would mention Power BI as "another possibility".

The Dynamics NAV team has been counting on third party tools for several years now. It's time for them to get fully behind Microsoft BI and reporting tools and let the partner channel handle add-on solutions. This article is not a criticism of third party tools or the value of advanced BI and reporting solutions. But since the release of Microsoft Power Pivot and the introduction of ODATA support in NAV 2013, NAV end users, who have already invested into the standard Microsoft stack, should now hear first from Microsoft about the company's own fully functioning self-service reporting tools. Why not Power BI?

This is the question I repeatedly asked of Microsoft employees (those that did not know better than to run away before I got within earshot). And I ...