While you were sleeping... (The Sharepoint Trojan Horse)
The Wall Street Journal has a great article (and scary, too) on the collaboration/content market, and Microsoft's exceptional strategy to control it. Content? Who cares about content? Microsoft. Very much so. Here's why. Microsoft's collaboration story revolves around Sharepoint, a useful product with ambitious designs. The article describes how innocuously, insididiously companies fall into the Sharepoint trap:
Follow @infoworldThe Wall Street Journal has a great article (and scary, too) on the collaboration/content market, and Microsoft's exceptional strategy to control it. Content? Who cares about content?
Microsoft. Very much so. Here's why.
Microsoft's collaboration story revolves around Sharepoint, a useful product with ambitious designs. The article describes how innocuously, insididiously companies fall into the Sharepoint trap:
When the Miami-Dade County Public Schools set out to build a way for its teachers, students and parents to collaborate online, it was surprised to discover it already had Microsoft Corp. software that could help do the job.
Included with software the school district had previously bought was something called SharePoint Services, which Miami-Dade used as the first step in creating a system for planning school programs and classes, posting notices, and handling other tasks that require its teachers and students to collaborate.
"We kind of unintentionally fell into it," says Deborah Karcher, executive officer at Miami-Dade's information-technology group.Next thing you know, it's everywhere, and your content/data is nicely wrapped up and held by Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong: Sharepoint, for what it does, is a good product. The problem is not in its functionality, but for what it means for an enterprise. Sharepoint, to be useful, requires more (and more) Microsoft software. It's a one way road into Microsoft:
For Microsoft, SharePoint is a critical engine to increase sales of a broad array of its other software. In 2003 the company made a basic form of SharePoint available as a free download with Windows Server, a version of Windows for the large corporate computers of customers like Miami-Dade schools. The hope was that the customers would seek -- and pay for -- a newer version of the program with more collaboration features and would then go on to buy other Microsoft software....
