Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Microsoft on Sharepoint, competition, hosted applications, and more

December 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft on Sharepoint, competition, hosted applications, and more

TAGS: Microsoft

The Guardian has a fantastic interview with Jeff Raikes, a senior Microsoft executive. Raikes echoes something I heard from Nick McGrath during our dinner a week ago in London - Microsoft focuses on the customer, not undermining competitors. Take that with a massive Great Salt Lake load of salt, of course, but I do think that when competing with Microsoft (or anyone), it's best to focus on the customer, not the competitor. By focusing on the competitor, you let them define the value proposition (i.e., the battleground).

A few gems from the interview:

On SharePoint...

ow there's Office SharePoint Server, which takes the server side to a new level. Bill and I would draw the analogy to when we put together the Office productivity suite in the late 80s: we think Office SharePoint Server will in a few years be recognised as a similarly important strategic initiative. We're bringing together the collaboration, the document libraries, integrated workflow, electronic forms, business intelligence, content management, the portal capability, and having the opportunity to build on it. Bringing that platform together is important....

...SharePoint is perhaps the fastest growth business in the history of our company: we went from zero to $500 million in three years....

[The Guardian] ...SharePoint is a corporate sale, but it isn't part of it the wider market conversation about blogs and wikis, Apache, MySQL and so on.

JR: Today, not as much as we would like ... and I think that's an opportunity.... We've started with small businesses, but I think that as you recognise -- and the broad market doesn't, yet -- there's certainly the opportunity to open that up to anybody who does information work and anybody who uses Office tools and wants to extend that. So I think that's a great opportunity.

In short, content management/collaboration is one of the biggest opportunities in the enterprise (and on this planet) today. If you're in storage, business intelligence, CRM, or virtually any other enterprise market and aren't actively plotting a content management strategy, you're about to get run over.

On hosted Office clones and competition...

Today, I don't get a lot of interest in running Word over the internet. Bandwidth is precious, and most people have Office. Nobody's crystal ball is perfect, but I think in a few years those who say software is dead will go the way of those people who said PCs were dead and network computing was the thing.

The reason is, people get very focused in on trying to undermine Microsoft and they don't get very focused in on the customer. You have all this horsepower at your fingertips, whether it's your PC or your laptop or your mobile device, and you have all that horsepower in the cloud. Why not use the combination of the horsepower in order to optimise the experience. Do I really want to run the Word bits over my network connection, or do I want to use it to store contents, to have access to them anywhere, to share and collaborate and so on. It's the combination....

On hosted applications/infrastructure like Exchange...

to what extent will businesses want to access these things online? Some of my colleagues think that, in 10 years, no companies will have their own Exchange servers. I'm not quite that aggressive!

I do believe, though, that many companies will look to hosted Exchange, hosted SharePoint.... I think we'll see more and more of those infrastructure elements. And frankly, Jack, I'll make sure that the people who are developing our servers are thinking of hosted services, which means they have to think through the technical issues. We are going to make sure we have service thinking integrated throughout our software.

I remember hearing Greg Gianforte talking about how they architected RightNow from the start for hosting. Seems like smart business. It's tough (and expensive) to architect for an unknown future, but hosting seems to be a good bet.

Microsoft, for its part, continues to be a smart competitor that shouldn't be underestimated. And $500 million in three years? Looks like I picked the right fight to be in. Alfresco is the open source alternative to Sharepoint, and is strong today where Sharepoint is weak. Perhaps because our customers help to build our product, rather than focus groups and our engineers' best guesses.

Posted by Matt Asay on December 14, 2006 01:55 PM

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