Failure Point: Where innovation meets old habits

As Mick Jagger would say, old habits die hard. Unfortunately for SharePoint, arguably the biggest piece of innovation from Redmond in 5 years, this leads for further commoditisation (it’s a word if I say it is) of the Microsoft value proposition and the premium price it carries.

I love SharePoint. I think it is the most awesome file management and portal software on the market. My customers seem to agree on the surface, but when it comes to actually using it in business… “eh, not so much” would be the positive way of putting it. Not that we haven’t tried to position it, offer it, extend it and mask it into the business process either. People just don’t use it.

The core problem with SharePoint, shockingly, is licensing. You see, people tend to revert to their old ways when they have to fall back on their old ways because the new way doesn’t work 100% of the time. Small and medium sized businesses do as much work internally as they do with agents and customers outside of the company. Now while SharePoint does have ability to create public / external portals with anonymous access, SharePoint lacks that ability to easilly allow selective external/anonymous access to a private document library – the process that people have relied on for over a decade: email attachment. Now, what’s simpler – attaching a file or managing permissions, roles and access rights of the portal? Assume a babysitter turned CIO level of technical expertise. Attachments. So what they end up doing is saving the file on their desktop, forwarding it via email, managing it on their own and when someone else needs the file it gets emailed as well.

Microsoft’s cycle of innovation (core business value) breaks the first time user is forced to fall back on the proven way of doing things – no matter how much better the new one happens to be – all due to the way the product is licensed/restricted.

Don’t expect Microsoft to fix this anytime soon, as far as they are concerned this is not a technology issue, its a user-training issue. Unfortunately for Microsoft, their licensing and restrictions along with feature tiers and editions only seem to restrict the users ability to adopt the new technology, not embrace it.

This impacts us as well, because instead of deploying new technologies that solve problems we are moving to a business of facilitating the processes already in place and finding ways to automate them instead of innovate them.

It has been a big part of OWN in 2007, betting 2008-2012 will be even bigger. Along with that we’ve seen the drop of the traditional desktop and server, in favor of mobile devices, laptops, phones, tablets, Apple’s, hosted servers and even more hosted services. The Microsoft-centric office is disappearing in SMB, in both participation and brand awareness, and Microsoft only has itself to blame.

P.S. We sell more FTP accounts than SharePoint accounts. Considering that SharePoint is half the cost and twice the storage allocation, that’s saying something. Oh, and FTP/SSL runs on Linux so there goes another product line.