I had the chance recently to attend a session where MicroStrategy representatives discussed the new features implemented in the new MicroStrategy 8.

There were basically two improvements over the prior version:
1. MicroStrategy 8 added plenty of features for users to generate nice-looking reports.
2. MicroStrategy 8 added additional data source connectivity capabitilies.

That was pretty much it. When I first saw MicroStrategy 7, I was very impressed as it represented a big step forward from their earlier versions. With 8, I was not as impressed. One thing that was interesting was the absence of any new, more power OLAP features. I am wondering if this means that the OLAP tool vendors have pretty much included all the features that can be added, and now can only improve their product by expanding into other areas of data warehousing such as reporting, data mining, and ETL?