Microsoft started their annual SharePoint Conference today. (Or sort-of started it – all that went on today was free dinner and the exhibit hall open for 3 hours. So the show really starts tomorrow.)
So what is SharePoint and why should you care? Factual boring answer - SharePoint is a portal and workflow framework product. It gives companies a place to put all of their content and control it. Equally important, it also provides a framework for other products to be part of this system. Just as the power of Windows is all of the applications written for it, the power of SharePoint is all of the AddOns written for it.
General interesting answer - SharePoint is the fastest selling product in the history of Microsoft. This has Microsoft focusing a lot of its attention on SharePoint. And it shows how it has the potential to be as important as Windows –as the base framework on the server side. This will give Microsoft a dominant position on the server (compared to Oracle, IBM, & SUN).
So on to tonight. We have a booth at the show and boy did we luck out on location. We got the booth 2 weeks ago (and the prep in just 2 weeks is a very interesting story). So the exhibit hall opens and… In pour the men. Yes, it's technical, it's software, and it's 99% male. We're talking geek central. And they're excited. The energy & interest among the attendees was gigantic.
What hit me is I haven't seen this since the early 90's when there was heavy competition between Microsoft and other companies for applications, programming languages, etc. Once Microsoft rolled all that up and had a complete monopoly on the desktop, all of this went away. And the high tech community was poorer for it. While the advent of Java, Linux, and Google has meant competition for Microsoft, it has not been evident in trade shows because the shows tended to be for a single well-defined market segment.
But baby, the excitement is back. I talked to lots of people tonight and they are all looking at what SharePoint can be, and where they can take it. Developers see this as a new set of toys they can play with and craft cool things from. Lots of interest, lots of curiosity, lots of potential. No one knows where this will go, and many are putting in a lot of effort with their ideas. We are going to see a lot of innovative products appear in this space.
Traffic in the exhibit hall was moderate. Most attendees were not there tonight, many arrive tomorrow, and many here today did not go. But for the ones that were there, the first hour they were mostly eating and collecting freebies from the booths that had them. The food was pretty good (Microsoft definitely knows how to run a conference) and the first 3 drinks were free. So you had a very happy set of attendees.
And for the remaining 2 hours, we were slammed. These were not attendees asking out of idle curiosity or to kill time. People were talking to us to see if we could solve the problems they face. (Much of the time we could and the remaining cases we could generally tell them who to go talk to.) The beauty of a new platform is people need to bring in new solutions, even if for the same old problems. And this means opportunity for small companies as there is no established player with a dominant market share. You are going to see new software companies appear and grow in this market (hopefully Windward will be one of them).
So there you have it. If I was Oracle or IBM I would be very worried because Microsoft's most powerful weapon has always been when it properly supports the independent software developer community. That's what we have here. And SharePoint could easily end up controlling the server just as Windows does the desktop. If that occurs Microsoft will take over a significant chunk of Oracle's and IBM's business.
Ps – Microsoft, what's with the "laptop bags" you gave everyone? There's inexpensive, there's cheap, and then there's "a plastic grocery bag would have been better." Very weird choice.
Thumbnails of all sessions at Microsoft SharePoint Conference Sessions.
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