Content Log

Reviewing Microsoft 2.0 - Life after Bill

About six months ago, when I saw that ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley was planning on releasing a book titled "Microsoft 2.0 - How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era", I pre-ordered it immediately on Amazon. Mary Jo's blog is one that I have been reading for quite some time and I can't think of anyone who provides better insight on what Microsoft is thinking than she does. I finally received that book a few weeks ago and have been reading it in my spare time. Unfortunately, I am not the world's fastest reader.

I like the way that the book is written. It reads like a CIA brief should be. This is no sexed-up Iraq brief, but a clearly laid out organized analysis of Microsoft, the company, the state unto itself, the empire. The prime thesis is that Microsoft is organizing for life without Bill and beyond. In attempt to make itself relevant in a world that seems to be passing it by, Microsoft is hiring and promoting new people and to challenge its fundamental thinking. Or not. She writes as though she is an insider, or more closely to a spy network watching its every move. HUMINT, ELINT, SIGINT, MASINT, analysis etc. are all at work here to provide a comprehensive picture for anyone ready to wage battle with Microsoft.

The book is organized into the language and buzzwords, the people and the "Baby Bills", near term radar on visible product, big bet or long-term, strategic products, and the business model challenges, both tried/true and untried/unavoidable models. The style of writing is very approachable and conversational and reflects the style of her blog, much of which I assume the material has been culled from. This in no way detracts from the usefulness of the book for someone, like Alfresco and the rest of the ECM industry, who both has to deal with and compete with Microsoft. The summary cut-outs on each page are also very good for just browsing the book and picking up something new. Microsoft's empire is wide and unwieldy, so it is difficult to pay attention to all parts, but the summaries help draw in or back attention. The only thing lacking are some charts and diagrams for all this fits together, particularly an org chart.

For someone in open source, the people section was particularly interesting. My assumption was that Steve Ballmer was the primary antagonist against open source, which was validated. (Something I have experienced first hand!) However, the wan characterization of "Borgized" Ray Ozzie were interesting. Even as Chief Architect, his power is obviously limited by the raft of Microsoft Lifers and Baby Bills. It reminds me of the de-classified intelligence analyses that I used to read on the Soviet Military in the 70s and 80s - who are the apparatchiks and who are the reformers? What Mary Jo clearly states is that although outwardly Microsoft is trying to change its stance toward open source, the company is schizophrenic and confused towards it. Ballmer in the space of 5 minutes can say that open source must pay its way and then say that he wants Windows to be the platform of open source innovation such as evolution of PHP. Mary Jo says. "So, has the 'Open Source = Evil' wall fallen? ... In a word, no." Poor old Bill Hilf.

She also asks if SharePoint is Microsoft's next killer OS. This is a topic that she explored on her blog late last year. She says that in an attempt to avoid blatant violation of US DoJ instructions against baking integration of other Microsoft products into the operating system, Microsoft is taking the route of baking in reliance on SharePoint and charging very pricey CALs to use Microsoft servers. She says, "On the server side of the house, Microsoft slowly but surely has been tying more and more of its products to SharePoint...Microsoft is gunning to make SharePoint Server and Services an inextricable piece of its customers' product fabric." Wake up and smell the coffee EMC and IBM! Microsoft is ready to use the new monopoly, Office, which she says has a 95% market share to beat into a new server lock in.

I really like the following quote in the buzzword section, "What does Microsoft mean by 'interoperable'? Anything that can run on multiple versions of Windows, the old saying goes."

Definitely a recommended read for anyone in the software industry regardless of whether you partner or compete with Microsoft or most like both.

That was FAST!

After the Microsoft / FAST acquisition...

Autonomy sign OEM Agreement with EMC

They must have known it was coming. You just don't do OEM deals that fast. So why didn't they announce it the day before yesterday?

Made the Move to Mac

I have been using Windows now for nearly 20 years and PCs for over 25. This October my Dell refused to come out of standby mode, which forces me to reboot every single time I leave the building with my laptop. After all those years of blue screens, hanging on large PowerPoint presentations, hanging on network connections, waiting for the laptop to come up when I press the On button, I finally gave up. I ordered a Mac.

I would say half of Alfresco now have Macs. Matt Asay must own Apple shares as he has been the key sales person for all those Macs. The sales organization in the US all have Macs and a lot of the developers are now transitioning to Macs. A lot of our customers are also using Macs. When you look at the pain of transitioning to Vista versus just leaving Microsoft behind, it becomes a much easier decision.

I must say the transition hasn't been too difficult. The first thing you notice is how much faster the Mac is for doing all sorts of things. Coming out of sleep is so instantaneous that it seems like it was on all the time. The user interface takes a little getting use to, but it doesn't look as bad as moving to Vista. Transferring files is much faster. Upgrading to Firefox 3 beta at the same time has made web browsing much faster than before. I am using ChronoSync for synchronizing backups and Vienna for RSS reader. I haven't decided yet between MS Office for Mac, Apple’s iWork or NeoOffice (Open Office). This is my first blog using my new Mac.

During the last 25 odd years, I used Macs and Unix systems in addition to my PCs and laptops. I have been using Unix for over 30 years now and still can use Vi and write amazing shell scripts. When we started Documentum, my desktop machine was a Mac for writing and formatting the business plan and I owned a Mac SE for home use. I have also used Unix systems, mainly Suns and HP, side by side with my PCs and Macs for a very long time. Before that, we all multitasked on Vaxes and even PDP-11s while I was at Berkeley. I still find that I can do more with c-shell, sed, grep and awk for managing and finding information than I ever could with a drag / drop interface. It's nice to get some of that back.

I actually heard the CIO of a major US government agency say they were considering moving to Macs or Linux. The lock-in of new file formats and features in Office Vista were a concern for them. Between that and the user interface and file format issues of the new Microsoft systems, won’t a lot of people be looking back at the last couple of decades and saying "Why?"

Microsoft, Patents and Transparency

As everyone now knows Microsoft has claimed through a Fortune magazine article that open source projects have violated 235 of Microsoft’s patents. That is 235 out of 6723 patents where Microsoft is the assignee according to the US Patent Office and Microsoft is not saying which ones they are. The onus is on open source to figure out which ones Microsoft means and to come clean. Microsoft is not being transparent on what claims they believe they have because they probably feel it is not in their interests to be transparent.The blogosphere has written much about the fear, uncertainty and doubt that Microsoft intends to make with this lack of disclosure. Microsoft’s intention seems to be to create FUD not in open source, but in customers. Recent history suggests this may not be a wise move. Firstly, open source’s customers are Microsoft’s customers and it generally is not good business to scare your customers. Secondly, these days you cannot avoid transparency.

Read the rest of this entry »

What Jeff Teper Said at AIIM

It has been two weeks since AIIM and I promised to write up something on the keynote presentation by Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Sharepoint. However, I have spent a good chunk of time thinking about the presentation so that I could give a more thoughtful commentary. Since Microsoft is out to disrupt the ECM market, all ECM vendors should care what Jeff and others at Microsoft think.

The title of the presentation was From BI to Blogs and Workflow to Wikis - Enabling Governance and Empowerment. I have the presentation from the AIIM website. I suppose if you want a copy you can email Jeff to get it. If you post a comment or send me an email, I will see what I can do. The title indicates that there is a natural tension between traditional enterprise systems such as business intelligence and ECM and the new generation of content tools such as Blogs and Wikis. This is an interesting observation and the two sets of technologies are rarely juxtaposed against each other. Without ever mentioning “Web 2.0”, Jeff was capturing some of the elements of Web 2.0 and their implications on the enterprise.

In my blog on AIIM, I had originally chastised Jeff for taking a very partisan approach to a keynote address. Looking at the slides, at least in the beginning his presentation had a very neutral perspective to the issues facing corporations. Looking at my notes that I took that captured both what he was saying as well as what was on the screen provided a much different outlook. This presentation was clearly about Sharepoint and where Microsoft was aiming Sharepoint. Although it was a sales pitch for Sharepoint, I nonetheless found it interesting and an important introduction to some of the missing concepts in Enterprise Content Management. Russ Stalters said that he found nothing new in this presentation, but I found new insights into Microsoft’s positioning of Sharepoint. Russ probably gets invited to more Sharepoint events than I ever would. However, I found new messages that I had not seen in other Sharepoint literature that is publicly available.

Governance vs. Empowerment

The major premise of the presentation is that enterprises need to balance governance, a control of information, with empowerment, the free flow of ideas and collaboration between employees, teams,  departments, other enterprises and customers. Identifying the regimes of control in execution-driven organizations as being able meet new regulatory and risk control, he contrasts this with innovation-driven organizations (“like Microsoft” as Jeff mentioned) that empower their employees by allowing them to make their own decisions and provide the technology to do so. Islands of information were also preventing cooperation and collaboration. By providing a “Best of Both” approach, enterprises can meet the financial and legal risk associated with information out of control with the need to innovate to meet the new challenges of internet-based competition, closer partnerships in design, and attracting and retaining talent from a new, web-enabled generation of employees. Microsoft served as a good example of what corporations are up against and he used Microsoft as case studies for many of these examples.

He stated that a new set of technology enablers has made it possible to meet the needs of providing a best-of-both solution. Hardware and software are increasing in functionality with 64-bit computing coming on line and multi-core processors in ordinary desktops. Web-based innovation and changes in user experience have brought new forms of collaboration, searching and shopping (although Microsoft hasn’t exactly been one of the leaders in this area.). Interoperability through web services and XML makes it possible to connect disparate systems together.

It is at this point he provides the new playing field in which to position Sharepoint. Two dimensions outline this playing field with Governance on the Y axis and Empowerment on the X axis. High on Governance, but low on Empowerment are the enterprise software technologies of data warehouses, ECM and portals. High on Empowerment, but low on Governance are the desktop applications of spreadsheets, group and personal databases, and intranets. If only someone would provide the best of both these capabilities, that would be the next generation productivity platform. By balancing both, a platform can provide governance through policy controls, rights management, auditing and controlled architecture along with the empowerment of self-service, better UI, role delegation and pervasive collaboration.

This next generation productivity platform, of course in Microsoft’s opinion, would be Sharepoint and “other products that you can find on the show floor.” I buy the distinction between governance and empowerment, but I believe it is more of a single continuum between governance and empowerment in a single dimension. Why this is important is that the reason we have governance and empowerment has a lot to do with what type of content, what application, context and who in the enterprise is being addressed and not simply at technology trade-off. There are times where governance is essential and times where empowerment can only be handled through laissez faire policies, but the overlap is not as big as he suggests. What is more common is that there are clear interfaces between these activities that prevent contamination of the other.

Microsoft’s Sharepoint Strategy?

Once a best of both is achieved, then a strategy of creating a connected organization, building a holistic information management experience, and investing in a strong vendor ecosystem will yield a “Strategy for Success”. Jeff used the example of a consumer products company that went with a best of breed strategy and met issues of interoperability and challenges to make their information infrastructure work. He emphasized the importance of holistic solutions that link everything together. What he implied was that all the important systems were Microsoft systems.

I didn’t quite get this transition and its connection to the best of both other than Microsoft says so. However, this looks like a reasonable strategy for customer, but more importantly for Microsoft. It is probably Microsoft’s strategy for success in competing against two major forces and laying them against this playing field. On the Governance side are the traditional enterprise vendors, in particular the ECM vendors. On the other end is open source who originated the empowerment tools of the wiki and blogs. Microsoft can add 1 plus 1 and yield 3 by combining these capabilities and leverage their strengths of enterprise pervasiveness, a broader platform, and a strong ecosystem to beat the competition.

The Connected Organization plays to Microsoft’s strengths of going where Windows is and to connect islands of information. Because of Sharepoint’s price point relative to the major ECM vendors, it has gone piecemeal into many organizations and with Sharepoint 2007, there is a strong emphasis on search and portals as the means to aggregate and federate the organization. Jeff presented a chart that linked different lines of business and connected them to the people in those organizations, which is a major theme of Sharepoint 2007.

It was at this point that I expected to hear what I hoped I would get out of this presentation - a definition of what is Sharepoint 2007. One of my most Googled blogs is What the Heck is Sharepoint 2007, which goes to show that a lot of other people are wondering the same thing. We even see eWeek’s Mary Jo Foley frustrated in finding a definition for Sharepoint and potentially sees it as the next operating system.

What is Sharepoint 2007?

What came up was a slide titled “Holistic Information Management”. To the left was the familiar wheel of six technologies: Collaboration, Portal, Search, Content Management, Business Process, and Business Intelligence. However, this time the circle included the words “Experience Management Platform” in the center. So is Sharepoint Holistic Information Management or is it an Experience Management Platform? Neither of these terms is in common usage in IT shops nor would I say that IT managers are seeking either. This must be frustrating for Microsoft that they have not been able to articulate what Sharepoint is nor can they associate it with a specific market that the industry can rally around. It’s not quite as simple as addressing the operating system, database or CRM markets as they have in the past.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on both terms Holistic Information Management and Experience Management Platform. When Jeff spoke about the platform being holistic, he mentioned issues around interoperability and security. By thinking holistically and integrating with other systems, the experience can be seamless for the end user. Perhaps I was too busy trying to take in what was being said in this slide, but I don’t recall anything being said about Experience Management. A quick search of all of Microsoft.com doesn’t produce any results either against search.microsoft.com or Google against link:microsoft.com. Maybe I am reading too much into this, but at the core this could one of two things. It could be management of the user experience where new UIs are presented in the six different technologies. Nah! It could be managing experience as a synonym for knowledge. My assumption has been that Sharepoint is a knowledge worker platform for creating applications incorporating all the technologies that would normally get folded into a portal to support knowledge workers.

Why this is important is it gives us a clue on what Microsoft thinks Sharepoint is, how comprehensive it is, and where it will get targeted. Equally important, it says what Sharepoint is not - you wouldn’t build an ERP system on top of it. (Would you?) This picture of six technologies expands the notion of content applications beyond the vision of the ECM vendors. It is also a platform that provides insights and access to other systems that can affect content. In other words, it is holistic from the users’ perspective in serving up information to knowledge workers. Ironically, nothing is said about the new empowerment technologies here. Sticking to the same picture that is probably about a year old, with new position of wikis and blogs, the thrust of the first half the presentation is lost. However, I would expect to see more of this type of positioning in the near future.

After positioning the technology, Jeff handed over to Arpan Shah, Group Product Manager, for a demo. Probably because this is AIIM, the demo was very document management focused. However, the demo started with Wikis and Blogs to show the empowerment of end users to add content. In my mind Wikis are associated more with simplified link management rather than formatting, but it was the latter that Arpan emphasized. Blogs were straight forward enough and show what that might mean in an enterprise environment. The rest focused on more document oriented activities like the construction of corporate PowerPoint presentations from Sharepoint, linkage from Office, the creation of a team website, and the set up of basic workflows. Arpan showed Outlook as the off line tools for accessing and syncing documents to and from Sharepoint. The core differentiation from the other ECM vendors that Arpan demonstrated was Office integration and the new media types of wikis and blogs.

Microsoft Ecosystem vs. ECM

Jeff then resumed by displaying the Microsoft ecosystem and customer base. There were a couple of advertisements of customer stories at Starbucks and Miami Dade County Schools as well as the logos of every major company in the world. This should obviously make any ECM vendor concerned. It is for that reason that Microsoft showed that it is working with vendors like EMC, OpenText, Vignette and Interwoven, probably to encourage others to hop on the Sharepoint bandwagon. This is otherwise known as embrace and extend.

Jeff very prominently displayed a collaboration between EMC and Sharepoint from October 2006. An agreement to cooperate that allows Documentum to fit within the Sharepoint hooks of Office and Sharepoint portal to access Documentum more easily. He then presented a collaboration with OpenText where OpenText is building solutions on top of Sharepoint combining Sharepoint empowerment with OpenText expertise in regulated documents. Jeff then made a slip of the tongue about how vendors such as Documentum and OpenText can build solutions on Sharepoint. I’m sure that EMC sees the opportunity for Sharepoint to build applications on top of Documentum.

Microsoft’s strategy seems to be still in formulation, but their objectives are not. Jeff Raikes has said that Sharepoint is one of the fastest growing products Microsoft has ever had and expects Sharepoint to do about $1B in revenue in 2008. Much of that revenue comes not from the portal or BI market but from a zero sum game against the ECM market where revenues are richest. They are changing the game by expanding out a platform that encompasses all the technologies that are useful in building solutions for knowledge worker solutions in enterprises. As my colleague Ian Howells pointed out that Microsoft has five main approaches to marketing: a drag race, platform play, stealth play, best-of-both play and a high-low play. In general, Sharepoint seems to be a platform play, but with a best-of-both twist with the both being ECM vendors on one end and open source collaboration tools on the other.

There are many things that I have to admire about Microsoft’s ambition. It is large and grand. Like many other Microsoft products, they have got a lot of things right in version 3 of Sharepoint. However, there are many things of which I don’t think as highly. Sharepoint got here because closed APIs in Microsoft Office allowed them exclusive access to repository functions from Office into Sharepoint. With Office owning 90% of the Office Suite market after shutting out Lotus and WordPerfect with its Windows monopoly, they are now using the Office monopoly to extend control into the repository market. They used the power of the Windows distribution channels to get free Sharepoint Services in more places than it would naturally. Although they imitate a lot of features of ECM vendors, they are unable to articulate what exactly they have created or innovated despite making public their plans for quite some time. Their choice to focus on an entirely Microsoft stack maybe in their interests, but not for those who have invested in Java, LAMP, Unix or other stacks.

We are tracking Microsoft because they are smart people and what they say and do matters in Enterprise Content Management. However, they are asking you to make an investment in a Holistic Information Architecture that covers a wide variety of functionality, including ECM. Yet they have had a difficult time articulating exactly what this platform is and where it might be applied. They don’t even use the term Enterprise Content Management, yet here they were presenting in the largest conference devoted to that topic referring to other ECM vendors building on their repository. Just as they are coming to market with Sharepoint 2007, new Web 2.0 techniques are becoming hot and they need to be seen addressing these. There vision is simultaneously comprehensive and vague in its target. Given that their product lifecycles are measure in many years, it is important know where they are going and they have just not made that clear in this presentation.

What the heck is Microsoft Sharepoint 2007?

What is Microsoft(r) Sharepoint(r) 2007? I thought this a very appropriate Halloween query.

You look on the Microsoft web site and it is a very confused picture. You are not told what Sharepoint is; you are told what Sharepoint does. You are told that Sharepoint "improves organizational effectiveness". You are told that you can "turn information into results". Perhaps more informative is that Microsoft(r) Sharepoint(r) Office(r) Server(r) 2007(r) [all copyrights and registered trademarks are the property of Microsoft and all rights reserved] is "one unified suite of enterprise-scale applications that satisfies diverse business critical needs". Hmmm, more informative, but not necessarily clearer.

Sharepoint is first and foremost an exercise by Microsoft to extend their monopoly of Office. Sharepoint is part of the Office group. I spoke to one of Microsoft product managers a couple of years ago who spoke about Filenet and Documentum complaining that they could not get access to the proprietary hooks that Microsoft had put into Office. He was rather dismissive of the claim. I spoke to the head of Microsoft's shared source office (Microsoft's term for open source) about this same issue who said that although they were interested in pursuing the shared source path, some pieces are clearly competitive advantage. I would say that a 90% market share is a very competitive advantage.

Sharepoint is also a platform, but good luck determining what that platform is aimed at based upon Microsoft's web site. If you follow their demo, you probably think that Sharepoint is a CRM system. However, the demo gives you probably the clearest picture yet of what that platform is. At the end of the demo, you get a circular diagram that lists: Collaboration, Portal, Search, Content Management, Business Process Management and Business Intelligence, surrounding a platform core circle. This is to illustrate the very confusing distinction of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS 2007) from the operating system level of Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0. Obviously a Microsoft turf war in the making. Interestingly, you get program managers talking about wikis and blogs, but the MOSS folks, the ones that could actually benefit from these features the most, telling journalists that there is no blog or wiki capability in Sharepoint. I guess the question to really ask is which Sharepoint should you be asking - the MOSS level or the operating system level?

In addition, Sharepoint is not a very good platform. I hear users of ECM of all persuasions say that it is very difficult to program. Currently with Sharepoint 2003 one must use both web services and native APIs to get stuff done. This is part of the server/services split. Just watch the demos to see how hard it is to add web parts and to program new features. I hope you are all certified in Microsoft Studio(r). And for scalability, one only needs to look at a post I made in May. I posted an entry on Sharepoint only being able to scale to 1 million documents where one of their product managers stated that the "'1 million objects limit' is associated with each SharePoint Document Library" and it appears that a highly federated, but not obviously integrated, environment gives them great scalability.. He went on to ask me to spread the word that "spread the word that scalability has been vastly improved in the 2007 versions of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server. After we finish our performance optimizations and testing, we will publish a scalability whitepaper -- sometime in Q3CY2006." We will see what happens in apparently the next month. At Alfresco, I would be quite happy to go head to head on that.

I asked a very, very large bank and a very, very large pharmaceutical company what they thought Sharepoint was. These are people who are responsible for this type of infrastructure. Both more or less agreed that it was three things: a portal, light-weight content management and collaboration with a strong connection to Office. It was the connection to Office that seemed to be the most compelling piece of Sharepoint for both of these companies. The fact that they worked in the environment in which their users worked aided the perceived value of collaboration, access and productivity.

So finally, it should be noted that Sharepoint is an Office Platform. Its purpose is to build upon and expand the Office monopoly and therefore utilize the capabilities of the latest versions of Office. I understand that Sharepoint 2007 can support older versions of Office. However, Office is a $10B+ business, the second largest software business on the planet and larger than even Oracle. Upgrades must feed future revenue and growth. Sharepoint 2007 can be a very compelling reason to upgrade and I have no doubt that it will. Let's hope that the level of compatibility far exceeds the non-compatibility between Sharepoint 2001 and Sharepoint 2003.

So, Happy Halloween. The biggest Halloween surprise will be if Microsoft actually declares that Sharepoint 2007 actually is. It’s probably in their interest to be ambiguous about what it actually is. Perhaps they are gunning for IBM or EMC or they may want the flexibility to go into other markets with it. It should not be a surprise if this drives more billions of Microsoft Office upgrades. As information workers with few competitive options, could this be our worst nightmare?