SharePoint and SharePoint Search: End of Life?
June 16, 2013
I had a chat with a former IBM executive. At lunch, an interesting emerged as we talked about the trials and tribulations large enterprise software vendors are facing. In addition to the embarrassing layoffs at IBM, there are signals that the financial screws are being turned at Hewlett Packard, Oracle, SAP and elsewhere. Part of the pressure is normal because the April May June quarter is an important one before the world goes on vacation in July and August. September, obviously, will be another flat out period for sales and marketing professionals. But there was one t hought which we kicked around in a post-prandial stupor.
A dilemma now exists in the enterprise software sector.
Stick with what works and has worked
Go in a new direction and improvise.
What happens if Microsoft does the Adobe thing and forces SharePoint licensees to embrace the cloud? What happens to the resellers? What happens to the integrators? What happens to the in house staff who know the intricacies of on premises installations of SharePoint but not the secrets of Azure?
Microsoft has a significant dependence on on premises sales. This is the client access license, the enterprise license, and the special set ups which make Microsoft the de facto choice for desktop computing workers worldwide.
Is an end of life play for SharePoint possible without making Microsoft even more vulnerable to the enticements of Google and others who want to supplant Microsoft as the “king of the desktop enter” and “baron of the back office”?
On one hand, the idea that SharePoint and its okay search solution, administrator employing mail and database systems, and its quirky collaboration and document management solutions could shift to the cloud is silly. Why give up those license fees? Why alienate service firms dependent on sales and support to hundreds of millions of SharePoint users? Why assume that a cloud business model will work for on site license customers? Organizations are conservative. Change comes slowly or not at all. Stick with the status quo.
On the other hand, Microsoft has been left in the dust in the shift to mobile and tablets. Microsoft dabbled in fancy new interfaces but has licensees who stick with older versions of software to avoid incurring the costs of changing employee habits. Microsoft has struggled with search for decades. Microsoft has struggled with online. One can make a case that Microsoft struggles with most of its new products whether for game players or Windows 8 deployments.
The conclusion from our discussion was:
- The impact of tie ups like Hewlett Packard and Google are one more indication that the old Microsoft models may not work on tomorrow’s information highways
- The continual grousing about Microsoft products missing big paydays are not going away
- The enterprise customers face significant competitive pressures and are actively looking for ways to cut costs. Those IBM layoffs are not a recipe for growth. Layoffs signal some serious number problems in my opinion.
- The Fast Search technology is simply not as good as an alternative like Solr
- The Microsoft database technology is not competitive with the whizzier options from dozens of companies open source centric approaches.
In short, Microsoft may have to make a big change. Think of the end of on premises SharePoint as the Windows 8 duel experience interface. Painful. Yep. Successful? Maybe not yet.
Should SharePoint centric firms start learning some new things? Knowledge often comes in handy.
Stephen E Arnold, June 16, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky, the portal to ArnoldIT
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