The folks over at Microsoft CRM have been making some announcements this week. And most of the stuff, in my opinion, is a step in the right direction. The free add-ons are a handful of strong features that I can see a lot of people using. The notion of creating a value-based ecosystem is not lost on me, as SugarCRM’s SugarForge is a treasure trove of more than 600 extensions, all for free.

But, I also noticed that this week an MS partner released a new add-on for MS Dynamics CRM that is essentially a web-to-lead form tool called Internet Gateway.

Now, some might argue that web forms and web-to-lead capture capability should be an out of the box feature. This is not my point. I was more surprised by the license fee for the technology. Not only is it set at per-server pricing, but the cost to deploy just this web-to-lead capability is more than it would cost a company to get up and running with all of SugarCRM’s capabilities for 5 users.

I just think we need to get away from this old licensing model. Now, this partner KwizCom, in my opinion, would do better for itself offering this at a small, per-user subscription fee. That way they can more easily seed the market and prove value – creating a longer, more profitable relationship with their customers in the long run.

But that’s just my silly opinion…