Leadership By Numbers

Last week I looked at whether or not SharePoint represents the pinnacle of Microsoft's technology. Over this weekend, I had the opportunity to chat with a friend from Quest Software Inc., and read over Doug Barney's editorial in Redmond, both of whom added a little more to my perspective on Microsoft. My conversation with a Quest associate won't surprise anyone, but Barney's insights are frank and even novel.

Quest is a company that specializes in Microsoft Windows management, as well as providing messaging migration services, usually converting Domino or Groupwise installations into Microsoft Exchange. They are now beginning to provide SharePoint migration and integration. Quest has had a very solid relationship with Microsoft, and they plan on continuing their trajectory of successful migrations. In my conversations, I asked my friend what he thought it meant for SharePoint that Mozilla's FireFox browser continues to grow its market share. At what point, will Outlook Web Access (OWA) expect to be compliant to Mozilla? Right now, reading my OWA mail with Firefox is barely workable. On the other hand, I can't find any browser differences between Domino's Web Access—whether I'm using Microsoft's IE or Mozilla's Firefox.

We chatted a little about what it would mean for SharePoint to work with ODF. Will Microsoft simply walk away from Malaysia, Belgium, a number of city governments and many initiatives from a range of governing bodies like the UN? What will it mean for the cost value of Microsoft solutions if the identical services can be provided through open-source, and open-standard alternatives? Sooner or later, Microsoft is going to have to accommodate the heterogeneous character of IT. Firefox, and the ODF standard are simply two bellwethers for this climate of change.

Doug Barney is the Editor in Chief for Redmond, “The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community.” As he surveys the terrain for the vast Microsoft empire, he starts to ask questions of sustainability for such expansive goals.

Microsoft is prepping a new wave of software that will undoubtedly bring in untold riches and strengthen the company's grip on desktop and server operating systems, productivity suites and messaging.

But this very power means that these products will define all of these categories for a decade or more to come. And these programs are all very, very large. Is that what we want?

Such complexity opens thousands upon thousands of avenues for hackers to cruise, and can make plugging these holes darn near impossible. And then there's this little matter of hardware economics. . . . Who asked for such a gargantuan OS? Most folks I've heard from want the opposite, a lean, mean, personal-computing machine.

Office 2007 . . . is also a whale of a program, one that flies in the face of what users have been begging for -- a simpler, smaller, more stable and usable set of productivity tools.

Microsoft's new mantra is Web services, which to my mind means tight, component-based products that work well over networks with varying bandwidth. I'm not entirely sure how a monolithic e-mail platform that requires a high-end 64-bit server (Exchange 2007) can serve as a tight, component-based product that works well over networks with varying bandwidth.

Hm. I have an answer. Domino today, Hannover tomorrow.