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Microsoft May Be Inflating SharePoint Stats

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pay-no-attention-to-the-man dept.

ericatcw writes "Taking a page out of McDonalds 'billions and billions served,' Microsoft says it reaps $1.3 billion a year from more than 100 million users of its SharePoint collab app. But some suggest that the figures are consciously inflated by Microsoft sales tactics in order to boost the appearance of momentum for the platform, reports Computerworld. A recent survey suggests that less than a fourth of users licensed for SharePoint actually use it. SharePoint particularly lags as a platform for Web sites, according to the same survey, a situation Microsoft hopes to fix with the upcoming SharePoint 2010."

9 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Well, I guess it's business as usual... by ls671 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't use Share Point and I don't especially like Microsoft but just to put things in perspective:

    We all know (don't we?) that web metrics are inflated by mostly everybody (hits and unique visitors counting search engines as real users, .NET tags added to user agent just because you used windows update to update your computer, etc. etc.)

    A good rule of thumb could be to divide any of those numbers at least by 2 to get a better picture of realty.

    --
    Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    1. Re:Well, I guess it's business as usual... by nxtw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We all know (don't we?) that web metrics are inflated by mostly everybody (hits and unique visitors counting search engines as real users, .NET tags added to user agent just because you used windows update to update your computer, etc. etc.)

      Irrelevant. SharePoint isn't an end-user application; it's a web-based application, and is mostly implemented on intranets. The number of SharePoint users can't be measured by web metrics. SharePoint is occasionally used on internet-facing sites, but it is licensed differently.

      Microsoft is claiming they have sold some amount of SharePoint client licenses and therefore have that many SharePoint users; the argument is the number of actual users is significantly smaller than the number of sold licenses.

    2. Re:Well, I guess it's business as usual... by corbettw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Eh, if that's what they're doing, who cares? They know how many licenses they've sold, and they know how many seats those licenses cover. They can't possibly know how many of those seats are actively used, so of course the only useful data they can share is the first set and ignore the second.

      Saying they have "millions of users" isn't particularly meaningful, but at least in this case it's not really deceptive, either.

      --
      God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  2. Screw Sharepoint by realmolo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously. It's overly complex, and doesn't really make anything easier for the vast majority of users. It's a nice IDEA, but in practice, it just gets in the way. It's one of those things that big companies buy and use thinking that it will solve their communication problems, when in fact all it does is create different and worse problems.

    1. Re:Screw Sharepoint by 1729 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      FWIW ... In my experience SharePoint is a flexible, feature-rich, capable tool. I was skeptical at first, mostly because I just didn't feel like learning it. But as a Project Manager I haven't found a better tool to replace the services you get from SharePoint.

      If you're stuck with it because your company bought it and expects you to use it, then my honest advice is to, man-up, take a training course and learn to use it.

      Gee, you don't by any chance work for Dell, do you?

    2. Re:Screw Sharepoint by DrWho42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree that SharePoint sucks, and I took a training course. I work for a large corp that has migrated all of the intranet to SP and my colleagues and I pretty much universally dislike it. It's slow, bloated, and the access controls are like a Soviet bureaucracy. If the only software that you use is Microsoft, then it can be a useful tool. But if you try to deal with Sharepoint using Firefox or Linux, it is extremely frustrating. If you are accustomed to the openness and speed of mediawiki then SP feels like a dog. I'll be setting up a Wave server as soon as google releases the source.

  3. MS Lies About Their Xbox Sales. No Surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Both Nintendo and Sony report actual 'sold to customer' for their sales numbers.

    Microsoft, however, consistently lies about their sales figures for the Xbox by using 'shipped to retailer' numbers in order to make their worldwide sales numbers look larger than they actually are.

    They even went so far as to flood the retail channel a couple holiday seasons ago with extra Xbox 360 consoles by leveraging their other Microsoft products just so they could put out press releases claiming huge 'sales'. There were giant stacks of unsold Xbox 360s sitting in stores for months after the holidays because Microsoft has so overstuffed the retail channel.

    No surprise that they are doing the same type of installed base/sales inflating. Standard operating procedure for Microsoft.

  4. Yep, SharePoint is a failure.....oh brother...... by LibertineR · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Talk about sour grapes......

    Whether every single SharePoint CAL that was purchased is actually in use, is irrelevant to the point of ridicule.

    Did they sell it? Did someone BUY it? THEN COUNT it, baby!

    Instead of bitching, someone should be crediting Microsoft for how they manage their CALs and bundling.

    This is like arguing over how many copies of MS Paint are used on a daily basis. It hardly matters. Microsoft sold it, and pocketed the income, which is cash that most likely WONT go to a SharePoint competitor, whether SharePoint gets used or not.

  5. Re:Not Surprised by nxtw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The last I looked at it you *have* to run it as a default site, so that means you need yet another server and it's part of the panopoly of ridiculous deployment shite coming from the MSDN lunatics at the company that you can use to blow your foot off with.

    Large organizations that use SharePoint probably already have a large virtual machine farm, and would have used separate VMs in any case.

    Because it only seems to be sold to 'enterprises' that means that the wider world isn't using it at all and many software developers won't be writing for it either.

    People are definitely developing for SharePoint. Most development is oriented for enterprise use, however.

    As a result it has no mindshare whatsoever. I was always suspicious that there was any kind of real momentum behind it.

    SharePoint has mindshare within large organizations.