Martin Weber feels that microISV’s are not on the radar of development tools companies. He looks primarily at Microsoft’s soon to be released Visual Studio Team System and writes the following:
While enterprise editions are often targeted at (larger) teams of developers they strip off too many features of professional editions to be suitable for a MicroISV.
I agree with that statement if what you’re looking for is an all inclusive solution, but there are plenty of companies out there that provide the microISV with free or inexpensive solutions that are fully integrated into Visual Studio. Eric Sink’s company, SourceGear, is a perfect example with his Vault source control product (free for one user) and Dragnet bug tracking software (ballpark price of $99/$129).
Microsoft is definitely not overlooking the microISV either. Jeff Sandquist recently hired an evangelist who will be working with the microISV community. We should be seeing more microISV related information coming out of Redmond in the near future.