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Microsoft May Be Inflating SharePoint Stats
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."
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.
That's just preposterous! I can tell you for sure that over 5 trillion servers run sharepoint, and not one of them has ever crashed.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
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.
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.
That might be so but that's not what MS is doing. First of it's bundling Sharepoint with other sales and counting that as Sales. "If you buy this Enterprise license, we'll throw in Sharepoint." That inflates the number of sales of companies who are actually buying Sharepoint outright as opposed to getting as part of another sale. Then they are counting all the users of that Enterprise license as Sharepoint users whether or not they actually use it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Sharepoint is a honking great pile of meaningless crap that just creates costs for everyone at every turn. 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. There is also a ton of confusion as to how it should actually be used, and considering that it is sold to enterprises pretty much exclusively then people scratching their heads over how to use it and what it is actually does is not good. What's worse is that people don't want to learn what it is for either. If someone feels they need a CMS or something then they will go out and get one.
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. As a result it has no mindshare whatsoever. I was always suspicious that there was any kind of real momentum behind it.
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.
Microsoft May Be Inflating SharePoint Stats
But some suggest...
A recent survey suggests...
suggest From Meriam Webster: .
synonyms suggest, imply, hint, intimate, insinuate mean to convey an idea indirectly. suggest may stress putting into the mind by association of ideas, awakening of a desire, or initiating a train of thought . imply is close to suggest but may indicate a more definite or logical relation of the unexpressed idea to the expressed . hint implies the use of slight or remote suggestion with a minimum of overt statement . intimate stresses delicacy of suggestion without connoting any lack of candor . insinuate applies to the conveying of a usually unpleasant idea in a sly underhanded manner
I work for a small computer support firm and we have around 400 SBS 2003 and 2008 customers. All of them have Sharepoint installed. None of them know it exists. Exactly one of them uses it for anything (web access to shared calendar).
Hell, I can't even figure out what it's good for.
A good rule of thumb could be to divide any of those numbers at least by 2 to get a better picture of realty.
I applied your correction factor to the number 2 you mentioned and that changed the correction factor to 1. Now that means your correction factor is back to 2. Now I am stuck in endless recursion and am going to run out stack and coredump.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I know a bit about SharePoint (they've inflicted it on us at work) and as far as I can tell, the best alternative to SharePoint is Not Using SharePoint. Everything beyond that is basically gravy.
There's always this: http://www.alfresco.com/ though I haven't looked at it in a few years, so I can't really comment on how good it is.
sic transit gloria mundi
I administer the free version of Sharepoint at work. (sharepoint 3.0)
It's yet another tool from Microsoft where -
All the data is stored in one large impenetrable database blob - most content is stored in two dimensional "lists", which somewhat limits what you can do in terms of building online forms etc. ALL the list data is stored in the one table, which makes it non-intuitive to make that data visible outside of sharepoint.
It's easy for end users to generate lists, calendars, annoucement pages, document stores, surveys etc etc to their hearts content, so you end up with a big sprawling mess if it's poorly administered
it's easy to add canned 'web parts" but impossble to alter the functionality of those parts. eg, try to prevent staff from seeing survey results, for example. (yes, it's possible but it's not exactly intuitive, and extremely hard without the assitance of Sharepoint designer, which was not free until recently)
Microsoft keep changing the search engine strategy for the product; Search has mysteriously failed on our implementation with few error messages to provide clues.
It doesn't really work properly unless you integrate it with Active directory, Microsoft Office, Infopath, and ideally MS Exchange. Vendor lockin for the win!
So why are we using it? Our staff love it, as it's easy for the end user to figure out; but it's an absolute pig to administer.
In terms of usage stats, I note it comes with every copy of Windows small business server. Perhaps they're including that in the usage stats?
I'm working on a project right now for setting up an internal document management system. Ran up a blind alley of learning Drupal (that took a while!) only to discover that it wasn't suitable. Evaluated a few more (including SharePoint) and ended up going with the free and open-source TikiWiki instead. To quote McDonald's, I'm loving it!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
to reduce the unused space on my hard drive
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Unless you need the most simplistic, minimal workflow, 90s table based GUI, and wanna avoid developers like a plague..
I am NOT alone, read this
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/256407/what-are-your-biggest-complaints-about-sharepoint
Licensed copies of the software $100,000
Software and development products $500,000.
Training. $150,000
Hire more people. $1,000,000
New hardware $500,000.
Billions from thousands
Then start developing. 10 times as long to get a product out.
So how much would a GNU project cost now?
Ubuntu server Free :) Free
Web Page Tutuorial for setting up Joomullalalala
Hardware, probably donated junk Free
Cost of operation, Electricity.
Hone those OSS skills boy's. With the Whitehouse bailing out mofo's left and right they'll need to cut costs.
There is no wizard for starting a new sharepoint application in Visual Studio.
There is no deployment wizard for deploying a sharepoint solution.
There is no live debugger for debugging a sharepoint webpart.
You thought Vista liked RAM.
There's your billions.
Sharepoint replaced a wiki we had at work. We had a wiki that people liked that we constantly improved.
The edict was to move all the documents into word format and upload them into sharepoint.
Now no one ever looks at those documents.
So we didn't have a problem which was solved by moving to a solution that no one wanted and no one uses.
There were giant stacks of unsold Xbox 360s sitting in stores for months after the holidays because Microsoft has so overstuffed the retail channel
And your proof for this is to be found - where?
Alone among the three major videogame consoles, sales of the PS3 are down about 19% from November 2007, according to the latest stats from the NPD Group. Sony was only able to sell 378,000 PS3s this November, compared to 466,000 last year.
And the problem for Sony isn't the recession, it's the PS3. Microsoft put up respectable numbers with its Xbox 360, selling 836,000 units vs 777,000 in November 2007. And Nintendo's Wii continues to dominate the market, more than doubling sales from 981,000 to 2.04 million. Sony's PS3 A Sinking Ship: Sales Plummet [Dec 12, 2008]
In a deep recession, retailers keep their inventories of big-ticket items paper-thin.
Every square inch of floor space needs to be generating sales. Product is checked out the front door or it is trucked out the back. I
I know that Law Firms had a conference to use Sharepoint for Legal Practice Management Software. I wrote an original ASP based Docket Calendar, and Law Firms want to move their Docket Calendars to Sharepoint. I can tell you that when you have a law firm and you want reliability, Microsoft isn't always the best choice. Some law firms still use Wordperfect and other non-MS software because they have found MS software to be low quality in performance and reliability. But the majority of big law firms are hooked on Microsoft for everything as Microsoft bundles software into neat packages for them and provides paid support for everything. The big law firms think that putting everything on Microsoft is a safe bet, but the law firm I worked at went millions of dollars over budget because of support calls, replacing hardware, replacing software, and hiring consultants when Microsoft could not give any answers or solutions to our problems. Back then it was Windows 2000, Office 2000, and Visual BASIC 6.0, and ASP 3.0, but the move to Dotnet only made matters worse. Finally Microsoft is working out the bugs in Dotnet, but in doing so they have created new ones. Sharepoint 3.0 was a nifty program until Microsoft filled it with bloated features that it needs Windows 2008 Server because it won't run on older Windows Servers forcing companies to pay for upgrades to Windows 2008 Server and new server hardware, just like the last time I used Windows Server and Microsoft software in a legal environment.
Keep in mind these are "hidden costs" that do not count many wasted work hours trying to work around the MS bugs in programming, or trying to restore a crashed server or workstation. That expenses can reach record amounts as well as have downtime for the entire firm.
There are only two known FOSS alternatives to Sharepoint but Wiki sites are usually better and faster and in most cases free to use. I tried getting Wiki implemented in my former work places only to be laughed at. But a Wiki search is faster than a Sharepoint search, and a Wiki need not use Windows Server and can run on Linux, *BSD Unix, or Mac OSX or some other platform to save money.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
No, Microsoft wouldn't lie about statistics.... Would they?
I'm a consultant for an Microsoft Gold Partner VAR for one of the Microsoft business applications, and a lot of times the talking heads at Microsoft will go on and on about the "Microsoft Stack" and how CRM can integrate with SharePoint and all this kind of stuff, but in all the years that I have been working in this field, I have never once encountered an implementation of SharePoint at a client, nor have I had any requests to do one.
That does not mean that there isn't interest at a lot of these companies for SharePoint, though. It's just that the total cost after purchasing the licenses and then paying someone to implement it properly is too cost prohibitive for the types of companies that would benefit from using it.
Furthermore, there really are not very many "guru-level" people on SharePoint. There's barely any "adequate" talent for SharePoint... I hear it all the time from a lot of my peers that there's not even anyone out in the field trying to get a practice started up around it in this very large, very wealthy (per captia) city. Excuses range from "lack of demand" to "no one to do the work", to the ever popular "everyone is only seeing the tip of the iceberg" that Microsoft is so apt to spin.
So, that's my perspective as someone in the realm of that field... whatever that is worth.
Every organization I have dealt with since the dawn of SharePoint still has 90% of the sites every created up and 'available' even if they haven't had any content updates in the last 5 years. Counting 'zombie' SharePoint sites is a nice way to pad your deployment stats, IMHO. SharePoint is overkill for dead projects where no one will ever look at anything other than the executive summary of your lessons learned document.
I object. The unlimited seat license I sold implies excellent market penetration.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
So either there's nothing of importance in the documents or the workers aren't doing their job anymore.
Or they've reverted to an ad-hoc system of keeping documents on their local filesystems, and emailing them to each other. It creates problems with versions, and "searching" becomes a social networking exercise (or an email to 'all') -- but if workers find it less painful than Sharepoint, that's what they'll do.
In my workplace there's an official Sharepoint site, and dozens of guerilla wiki servers -- Twiki in some cases, abused Fitnesse servers in others.
Precisely. SharePoint is remarkably difficult to integrate and setup. I blame it on their insistence on using Integrated Security. Anyway, that's just my impression, I'm no SharePoint expert.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
A lot of people bashing Sharepoint, no surprise there, but here's something you need to be aware of. Sharepoint is where projects go to die. Seriously, nothing kills a project faster, and more quietly, than putting it on Sharepoint.
Dead projects may seem like a bad idea, but we all know that not every project deserves life. Take a server, install Sharepoint/Sharepoint Services on it, and wait. When you get "that project", the one no one wants to touch with a 10 foot pole, that's when it's time for Sharepoint. You can make a case for using it for just about anything. Collaboration is a very powerful buzzword.
Setup a bare bones template site to use for anything like this that comes along, customize it for the walking dead project in question, give all the users rights, a brief tutorial on how to login and use it, then wait. If they want more training, say that you will look into off-site or online training options to stall. You'll find that a few eager beavers will upload a few documents, customize a few things, maybe even send out a workflow or something, but all activity on the site should wither and die within two weeks. If you happen to get some savant who just thinks it's great and is trying to spur everyone else into using it, make him and admin of the site. That will sufficiently bog him down. Within 6 months, they'll be back to printing out emails and meeting in person to avoid having to use the site.
We have a corporate sharepoint site that is supposed to help us share documents and collaborate. In reality, it is a confusing maze of pages with way too much embedded functionality.
In summary, I hate it!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
The problem here is that Microsoft includes addons in their mainstream software and expects users and admins to be fully up-to-speed with the implementation/roll-out, training with the expectation that it is a lock-step process without too much regard to why they put it there in the first place.
It's a mind-set game IMHO where you have to closely follow MS thought processes, jargon and developmental time-line to make it work effectively, even though you don't necessarily want it. In other words you have to know what MS is thinking all the time and there is no easy way to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on courses, reading, subscribing, trialing and the whole shebang.
It's a 'top down' implementation. They think of it, program it, sell it or give it away and expect everyone to use it.
I think what would be better would be more emphasis on what the user wants in a 'bottom up' approach.
What's the point in trying to change office practice and procedure when it is either not necessary, too hard to implement and train for? Or is it another waste of certificate paper and gold stars?
How much collaboration do you really need? A lot depends on management practices, when it is rare nowadays to find individuals who can complete a task without sharing or intervention as opposed to unnecessary and pointless team work which may be counter-productive.
My $0.99c worth
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!