For the record, no, I don't work for Covast.
An EDI translator is not a Razor phone.
Let me ask you – why would you move your customers from Covast to R2 and at the same time make an argument that if you just bought Covast, it is still good for three years?
What is your customer who just payed for the implementation of a product going to say when you tell him "we're changing everything we just did"? Is he going to be happy about paying you to do all that work all over again?
If I were your customer, I'd get rid of you and your software, because you have failed. You led me into a product with no shelf life and you are charging me to redo your work all over again. And since you have already proven yourself a failure, why the heck would I use you to do it again? I'd go a different direction with someone new.
I believe it is an improvement for the customers, only in the respect that the product can finally do out of the box what it has been sold as all along. The thing to be noted is that Microsoft has been deceiving customers about the capabilities of this product for an embarrassing amount of time.* That's the real arrogance, not the way they buddied up with Covast and then cannibalized them – it's the fact that they have been deceiving people into a product with inadequate traditional EDI capability all this time. This board is a testament to that. Look at all the people asking about how to hack schemas to do traditional EDI.
* I recall in implementing HIPAA on BT2000, when I looked for 997 functionality there was an asterisk which told the customer to "hire Microsoft Consulting Services to write this piece of functionality." I mean really…