Forrester colleague Oliver Young has a great post on his blog about the SharePoint "day of reckoning." The quotes around that phrase are important, because, as Oliver discusses, some of the apocalyptic predictions about SharePoint's effect on the collaboration market are a wee bit exaggerated.
I've been hearing how SharePoint will lay waste to all independent collaboration vendors for years. Maybe it will actually happen this time, but I have my doubts.
It's unquestionably risky to fight SharePoint on its home terrain, the collection of intranet collaboration workspaces, closely tied to Microsoft Office and other Microsoft-based applications. However, as Oliver points out, that leaves a significant amount of space in the collaboration ecology for other vendors to play. Plus, as Leslie Owens and Rob Koplowitz point out (Forrester account needed to access the full report), the organization and content of existing intranet sites don't automatically map to SharePoint's way of building an "information architecture."
Certainly, other vendors will need to find a niche that keeps them out of the way of the T. Rex of collaboration. That's not the same thing as saying, however, that the T. Rex will eat everyone--or even if it did, that it had the means to survive on its own. At the very least, other vendors will do things that Microsoft won't, either as part of SharePoint deployments, or somewhere adjacent to them.
Comments