Portalopolis

Sharepoint and Third Party Stuff

So I saw another blog post today on CMS that made me kind of smile. Generally I dig these guys since they are successfully stay independent and paint the ugly and beautiful equally well. Howeverm this was the 3rd or 4th time this week where I heard about a proliferation of companies building out all of this tooling to make Sharepoint enterprise grade and it got me thinking. Does MS mention these guys when they say how cheap Sharepoint is compared to the competition? Don't know and not accusing, just wondering.

I only have 2 points to make on this

1) I have no issue with companies trying to fill in gaps with a big product. It's a good biz (just ask Henry and Steven at Binary Tree). Also if you get lucky maybe someday the big guy buys you (or they just release a similar feature and crush you). But again at this moment in time spakle for the big guys cracks is good biz.

2) I do have an issue with anyone who compares TCO and only includes licensing costs. If you are an enterprise, and you actually consider this propoganda shame on you and I have a lovely bridge I'd like you to see.

That goes for my open source buddies as well. SW wise TCO is the easy case to make BUT if you need a whole slew of extra SW to run it or people to operate it or HW to support it then you lose all of your credibility.

Where's Jason been?

It's been a couple of weeks and I have been pretty tied up. The little guy busted out a tooth which was joyful yet painful (the kid can scream!). In between sleep I've been busily talking up the JBoss Portal and making our future plans.

Oh and get ready - the plans are looking sweet. More on that later. Anyone who thought our little project was dead will be pleasantly surprised.

Last week I got to talk at an Alfresco roadshow who are a great partner of ours. What was awesome about it was the excitement of a standing room only crowd. After years of doing these types of events at IBM it was refreshing to see these folks who did not wear the technology like a badge. Nobody said I'm a JBoss guy or I'm and Alfresco gal. It was just people who wanted to build great stuff. As Steve Mills himself once said "customers hate buying software, they like doing stuff with it." Sometimes that gets lost in the datasheets and prezzos from all technical vendors which is too bad.

The Alfresco crew gave me some time to rant about Value. From now on I think I will just choose one word to rant about in public presentations. Here are the cliff notes for you about value in the SW business.

1) When your business is a subscription model (Open Source, Netflix, SaaS, Any magazine or newspaper) the only way you can win is with excellent content  and customer service delivered consistently period. If you don't do that all the free stuff in the world doesnt matter.

2) Open Source may be seen as a commoditizer however that is not what defines the best Open Source companies. The best ones are just the same as the other best known commoditizers (Jet Blue, Dell etc) in the fact that we focus on the customer not the commodity.

3) Customers are finally understanding that value is derived from what they want to accomplish not what comes in the box.

4) A healthy dose of respect for the customer's right to choose. In case you have not been watching things there are basically 3 SW titans and everyone else. Sadly, freedom to choose may not be a strong suit of thiers which is too bad since it is really really valuable to their customers.

Super Value Meal Software

I have had the pleasure of speaking to a lot of portal people lately and I am blown away by something that I did not expect. Lets call this the rift of expectations.

People who have portals are saying "Don't turn portal into something else. I dont want a social networking tool, I dont want a document manager". People who sell portals all say "we want to be Sharepoint". You know what? Sharepoint is pretty cool and I can see that if you look at Sharepoint you might want to deploy it. But its not a portal.

What you may not realize is that Sharepoint isn't one product. In fact Sharepoint is a bundle of products one of which is arguably a portal. When you look at all of the would be competitors to Sharepoint (IBM, Oracle, some of the Open Source Portals). You see that they are kind of bundles too.

The huge advantage of bundles is better interoperability between the bundled parts. Which bring about a question do bundles limit choice? Or even better - Are bundles anti Open.

Here is my test case - The Super Value Meal at McDonalds. What I would like to know is has the super value meal hurt other McD's products? For example the milkshake or a sandwich that is not in the Super Value Meal scheme. My gut tells me that people will just go with the bundle since it's easier. And there must be some truth to that since they have been around for a while. Now I will reach out and hypothesize that has  hurt milkshake sales.

My point is that bundles of software are not necessarily bad. But I think they take a level of focus off of what they customer needs to build their solution. I also think that bundles inadvertantly hurt the milshakes.