[CRN] Executive: Microsoft Committed to Visual Studio Partners Despite Increased Competition

CRN has a short, fairly balanced article about Visual Studio Team System's potential impact on Visual Studio Partners:

[CRN] Executive: Microsoft Committed to Visual Studio Partners Despite Increased Competition

Despite a strategy to add more application lifecycle functionality to Visual Studio in its next release, Microsoft's chief tools executive Thursday said the vendor has no plans to abandon its work with third-party development partners.
Microsoft, which is focusing on making Visual Studio 2005 a collaborative development environment, expects to make it available during the first half of next year, said Eric Rudder, senior vice president of Server & Tools.
Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2005 in several SKUs targeted at developers playing different roles in the application lifecycle, he said. The SKUs will include Team Test, Team Developer, Team System, Team Architect and Team Foundations editions.