I just sat through a keynote by Rajesh Jha (Corp VP, Office Live) about Microsoft Office Live Small Business and I must admit to being really impressed. They've created a platform for small businesses to get online, manage contacts, market, and offer e-commerce (and more through extensibility). Using Lists for items, people, groups, etc. you build the site as a means to display and interact with the lists. It's really a classic data-driven web site, except that the nitty-gritty details are abstracted away. Really, it's what I hoped for from Google with Page Creator and Google Base. I think that Google really fell flat with both offerings by not joining them. In fact, in general, Page Creator has never become what it could through integration with their other offerings. That's another post though...
No one wants to create a database and associated tables, create a data access layer, bind to data, and still need to create the look and feel of the site for something that should be fairly boilerplate (really, how different do most small business sites need to be at a low level). Microsoft Office Live for Small Business seems to have some great starting points for layout and appearance, but it also supports extensive personalization using CSS. You create a form to insert into a list of people, then use that list later for a newsletter, or to relate to orders. It handles listing to eBay in addition to classic storefront functionality.
I never expected to be very impressed by the Office Live offering, but this is exactly what I've thought was needed for some time. I love the promise of SharePoint, but it's too expensive (in cost and other resources) for most businesses. You could build a site from information, to storefront, to house listings, to whatever you need, then save the whole thing as a template to easily deploy and customize for different companies. They just announced a general developer program to make it easier for more developers to extend it. I'll be checking that out later.