Leadership By Numbers

I'm reading the oddest juxtaposition of winners for the recent issue of VARBusiness's Best MidMarket Products for Application Infrastructure: (1) Microsoft's SharePoint, (2) IBM DB2 UDB Express C, and (3) Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Just what these winners have in common is very difficult to discern, but I do think their diversity reveals a trend, and a division. I think SharePoint represents the pinnacle of success for a closed, proprietary and monolithic IT infrastructure. SharePoint has continued to take market share because its “integration with Office on the front end provides a familiar entry point for users.” With DB2 Express C, IBM is releasing a free relational-database engine that integrates with everything from SAP to Ruby on Rails. And, SuSE's Linux Desktop has been garnering rave reviews as an open-source, open-standards desktop alternative to Microsoft's Windows. Can we have both the Year of the Linux Desktop, and expect to see SharePoint dominate the portal market?

Microsoft's SharePoint, to me, is something like a free-floating iceberg that is slowly melting underneath. If you've read the account of Shackleton's travails in his Endurance, then you might remember the danger of relying on icebergs for stability. In his escape from Antarctica, his crew had the occasional recourse to camp overnight on a drifting iceberg—but always uneasily. These frozen behemoths might look as sturdy as a mountain range, but they would tip end over end when the bottom half melted away and the balance became top-heavy.

SharePoint makes sense when it is combined with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft IE, and, well, Microsoft everything. At some point, though, I have to echo the suspicions of others that it seems as though Microsoft is “so focused on licensing and other issues that it forgot why customers really buy software.” What happens when a SharePoint solution (say, the Project Server 2003) requires integration with Firefox (which continues to grow its installed base), or a different IM platform, or it must store documents in ODF? Is the economic value of SharePoint still compelling, when it must accommodate open-source alternatives which are either free, or sell for a sliver of the Microsoft product price.