Great Plains Software

» see greatplains.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Joseph Larson established Great Plains Software in Fargo, North Dakota in 1981 to write accounting packages for small businesses. Doug Burgum joined as a shareholder in March 1983 after mortgaging a section of farmland he had inherited from his father, and by 1984 he had bought out the other investors and was running the place.

What it sold was ledgers. Accounts payable, general ledger, payroll, inventory, the software that decides whether a company knows what it owns. Great Plains Accounting ran on DOS through the eighties, the Windows product called Dynamics arrived in 1993, and the target customer never changed: a firm with a few hundred employees, too large for a shoebox and too small to be interesting to the mainframe vendors. The company went public in 1997 on the Nasdaq as GPSI with sales approaching $300 million.

Microsoft announced the purchase on 21 December 2000 and closed it on 5 April 2001, roughly $1.1 billion in stock. It was the largest number of people Microsoft had ever taken on at once, about 2,200, and most of them stayed in Fargo. Burgum became a Microsoft senior vice president, later governor of North Dakota, and later still a member of the United States cabinet.

This is the layer of software you do not choose. Everything I have ever picked for myself, down to the editor and the operating system on my own machine, sits on top of a stack of things somebody in finance selected before I arrived. You meet a product like this as a PDF of an expense report, or a login you use twice a year, and you never learn its name. Great Plains ran quietly underneath a very large number of mid-sized companies for twenty years and I would not recognize a single screen of it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The Fargo part is not decoration. In 2000 the assumption was that a software company of that size came from Seattle or the Bay Area, and Great Plains was in a town of about ninety thousand people on the northern plains with winters that make the coasts sound theoretical. The company leaned into it. Turnover was low because there was nowhere else to go, the partner conference filled the local hotels, and the whole thing worked as an argument that competent software does not require a specific zip code.

I work in Ankara rather than Istanbul, which is not the same distance but is the same kind of distance. The city everyone assumes the work comes from is somewhere else, and it does not affect the work.

~ the day it died ~

It was not a collapse. Great Plains was profitable, growing, and had just spent about $175 million buying Solomon Software, and Microsoft wanted a business applications division without building one. The price was paid in Microsoft stock in the spring of 2001, which was not a great quarter for anyone holding technology shares, but the sellers were getting the most durable paper in the industry.

The name went into Microsoft Business Solutions, and in 2005 the product was rebranded Microsoft Dynamics GP. The two letters at the end are the entire remaining trace of a company that once put its name on the building.

~ the inheritance ~

Dynamics GP outlived its parent by twenty-four years and is now on a published schedule to die. Microsoft ended sales of new perpetual licenses on 1 April 2025, ended new subscriptions a year later, and support runs out on 31 December 2029 with security patches continuing to 30 April 2031. There is something honest about a product that gets a written expiration date instead of a blog post.

Thousands of companies are still running general ledgers on code with a lineage back to Fargo in the eighties, and their migration consultants are booked out for years. Accounting software is the hardest thing in the world to replace, because unlike a browser or a phone it holds the only record of what actually happened.

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