I can't resist posting a few quotes from a recent NY Times article about Sharepoint's unyielding success.
“We don’t claim we do everything,” said Chris Capossela, a senior vice president at Microsoft. “If we do 50 percent of the functions that these other companies do, but they’re the ones customers really want, that’s fine. The magic is that end users actually like to use the software."
“SharePoint is saving Microsoft’s Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in,” said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. “It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping.”
Your thoughts?
A couple years back while I was working as an EMC Documentum consultant, I saw Microsoft SharePoint snatched up several of the competitive customers. As a member of Microsoft software family, SharePoint comes with its own benefits and liabilities at the same time; especially, during the recession like this, the benefits outweigh the liabilities for the most customers. To the benefit side, SharePoint is quite attractive because of its intrinsic interface with Office, Outlook, and the rest of the Microsoft applications. As liabilities, I think, SharePoint only works with SQLServer which lacks of flexibility. Also, SharePoint structure tends to become unmanageable and is not scalable as it grows and can result in server sprawl because it is deficient in fundamental architectural integrity. This makes the SharePoint much more expensive down the road. This trait is nothing new in the Microsoft culture because architectural integrity is not their strong suit. (One only has to look as far as its latest Vista, for example, and the newest search engine Bing for evidence of this.) However, as we all know, although we can’t do without it for now, we will eventually be freed from Microsoft’s virtual monopoly for business applications if the cloud computing condensates successfully finally. That said, I totally concur with the article published in the NY Times since customers look to save nickels and dimes without thinking about the real consequences of how their choices now will affect their ability to grow in the future.
As a long time IT professional, I have learned that any software or architecture that hopes to last MUST mimic the nature since nature existed long before humanity and will continue long after we are gone, period. One of the important signatures of nature is simplicity. Software needs to be designed with simplity in mind because it is the key element that makes software resilient and sustainable. A couple days ago, VMWare acquired SpringSource, an excellent enterprise open source company. I love to use Apache Tomcat web application server over other web application servers out there including WebLogic or WebSphere not because I can use it for free, but because it’s real simple and intuitive to use. SpringSource is a major contributor to Apache Tomcat open source community. Since SpringSource runs on a Java platform and .NET framework at the same time, the combination of VMWare and SpringSource have the potential be a real game changer if EMC learns its lesson from Microsoft: It is prudent for EMC take a look at how Microsoft integrates SharePoint content management system into their core enterprise infrastructure. EMC has an opportunity to integrate Documentum, its flagship content management and archive system, into the mix of VMWare/SpringSource to overtake its rivals. Furthermore, the cloud computing combination of VMWare/SpringSource is remarkably superior to any of its competition, including Microsoft’s Azure, because it reflects architectural characteristics of the Mother Nature.
Check here EMC’s Chuck Hollis’ blog:
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2008/09/enterprise-apps.html#more
Posted by: shiningarts | 08/13/2009 at 09:27 PM