Is Microsoft marketing SharePoint as the “bottom-feeder” alternative?
At Gilbane’s Conference on Content Management, last week, there was a keynote slot reserved for Microsoft, a Platinum Sponsor of the event, titled “The Web platform of the future”. Tricia Bush, a SharePoint Group Product Manager, was the speaker. I expected to get the usual forward-looking, optimistic “we do everything web, content and social better with SharePoint” message that has the norm for Microsoft’s SharePoint message. Instead, I came to hear how SharePoint was presented as the product for mediocrity and low expectations, the FUD product of choice for anybody who has been hiding in a basement for the last ten years, and the way for IT groups to regain a level of omnipotent control that they have spent ten years losing (and justifyably so).
The presentation got me thinking further… Let’s face it, with all its fanfare and massive adoption, SharePoint is still used mostly as a very basic content manager. The reasons behind this massive adoption, and the corresponding adoption pattern, have already been discussed to death, with my favorite interpretation being that Microsoft just leveled a Content Management space that could not bear the weight of heavy, slow but entrenched “enterprise players”, who brought very little innovation or standardization to a mature market, while keeping outrageous licensing margins. Add to that unrealistic market players behavior the reality of corporate IT groups starved for real web talent (easy to generalize to talent in general) and fearing that power will slip out of their hands as the cloud and SaaS makes most of their services equally irrelevant and unsustainable, and a the “bottom-feeding” picture starts to emerge.
The presentation in question was interesting because of some of its key messages, articulated in very clear terms, such as:
- 52% of developers involved with your corporate web sites are millennials (said in the same tone as you would say “terrorists”, or “idiots”). “Do YOU want those guys to ‘control YOUR brand’ and ‘manage YOUR content?” If George Carlin had been in the conference he would probably at that point refloat the idea of massive asilum states where to send all the violent criminals, with the milennials added to the hilarious list;
- “After all, the role of your web sites is not to entertain, it’s just to INFORM your visitors”. Thanks, we can now forget everything we learnt in the years after 1998 and go back to being young and stupid.
At a time when Web 2.0 and wonderful technologies such as Flash, Air, AJAX, social business, innovation hubs, user-centric workspaces, and much, much more, are making the web into the creative fertile ground of a small, but quickly growing garden, with engaging and absorbing delivery strategies combining and evolving, always testing the future, here come the bottom-feeders (?). SharePoint the platform of the future? It surely is being touted as a thing of the past…
It may be a consistent strategy (few people expect Microsoft to innovate these days), but it’s a real pity. Come October 19, at the SharePoint Conference, when Microsoft unleashes yet another bag of glass beads, other valuable categories will probably be fed to the bottom:
- Social – “After all, all you need to be social is to have wikis and blogs that don’t totally suck, unified tagging and a zillion web parts that you can pepper through your pages. Right? If it looks like a Facebook, it doesn’t matter what it smells like: it’s a Facebook!”
- Usability – “Yes, we have a universal delivery client called Flash, and AJAX, and AIR, and soon Waves, and yes, those millennials use them to create things that are fun and engaging, but you know, you need to think, and compete with young talent without the privileges of holding the IT keys in order to develop them! Let’s introduce another bloated and unneeded technology, Silverlight, so that now we can have obnoxious ribbons all over the place, not only in Office bloatware, but now YOU can develop them as well! After a while, you won’t even notice that you see everything as a list! Let’s make every site look like a PowerPoint presentation!”
- Web Branding – “Just make sure you use your logo, which now YOU WILL BE ABLE TO CHANGE YOURSELF on your web sites, and just keep informing the hell out of your visitors. That’s all that branding is, after all…”
I know, the tone is too acidic… But the worry is sincere: Microsoft IS the bull in the china shop; I didn’t care much about seeing the bloated Content Management players be the china that Microsoft threw around, but I really believe that social business and Web 2.0 technologies are a garden, not a stale china shop. I’d hate to see the bull poop all over it…
This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 9:18 am and is filed under social networking, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.