5. Project Green:

Project Green was one of the most promising projects for Microsoft but failed miserably. The planning for this project took as long as two years. To descend upon 'Project Green', Microsoft Microsoft bought Great Plains and Navision for more than $1 billion apiece in the early 2000s. It later lined up acquisitions and got FOUR lines of ERP software: Great Plains, Solomon (owned by Great Plains), Navision, and Axapta (owned by Navision). '

Since all were ERP based softwares, the idea was to integrate them and make one big product. But integrating them was a real challenge as it was too complicated and seemed to be an expensive affair. The process of integration required one of the partners to be alienated, who had built specialties around one of the four product lines. Project Green made it into the market but withered a death after couple of years. Microsoft still sells ERP products but under the name of Dynamics which is best known for its CRM product, which was an in house product built by Microsoft.