For years, the database has been an extremely vigorous competition between DB2 and Oracle database. The heat has gotten more intense because middleware has been added to the mix.

This proves to me that there is still a lot of competition in the marketplace and, particularly, that SAP does not have a lock on the market. What this says is that there's a lot of issues in a competitive deal and that the market system still works for enterprise software.

You can swap, but the better thing to do is use the threat of swapping as leverage for getting a better deal. That's what keeps the vendors honest and competing against one another.

Customers that have been sitting on fence now have a good decision point that is really powerful for them and has full flexibility to grow and change as their business needs change.

The good news is that Microsoft has cracked the nut. The bad news is, the more successful they are with making the story public, the more they show that the SAP product line is a reasonable option as well.

Salesforce.com however owes it to [customers] to explain why this happened. They should be taking active responsibility and refunding costs to customers.