Microsoft’s Secret Weapon Against Chrome: SharePoint

There’s been much hullabaloo (I always wanted to use that in a sentence) about Chrome being “the next OS” and a challenge to Windows on the desktop. One idea is that it could be the “boot to browser” launching pad into the Google ecosystem of cloud-based applications however, as I noted before I see this being a bit of a niche market and nowhere in the Enterprise. Microsoft needed to respond if for no other reason than to quell the buzz. Matt Asay notes they preempted Chrome with the latest release of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).

From Matt’s “The Open Road”:

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has singled out SharePoint as Microsoft’s next operating system. CMS Watch calls out SharePoint as inseparable from Office in its next iteration. Small wonder, then, that SharePoint renders the traditional content-management vendors comparatively obsolete, as a quick Google Trends review of popular search terms suggests:

SharePoint dwarfs its competitors in ECM, or enterprise content management.

(Credit: Google Trends)

Microsoft’s SharePoint Search Server has even seen huge inroads against Google’s search appliance based on lower cost and ease of deployment. Come on, when was the last time you actually saw and non-demo google search appliance in use?

SharePoint itself is already tightly integrated with Office, Exchange and Office Communications Server. It’s become part of the corporate ecosystem. How did MSFT slide this in there without anyone knowing? Good call Matt! The answer was under our noses all the time.