Call it politics, call it religion… I first started my IT career working for a Netscape, Oracle, Sun reseller. This small shop was known for it’s expertise in enterprise Java apps (back when I joined in 1997.) One of the things I did while I was there was get Sun Solaris 2000 Certified. During the course there were a lot of Microsoft jokes and badgering. Lots of jokes about blue screens, shoddy software with security issues and poor designs. A year later, living in Seattle, I was introduced to Microsoft through a recruiter. The barefoot, unshaven Harvard graduate in shorts and t-shirt invited me into his office littered with strange 70’s band posters. This Dev manager sat me down and began drilling me on my background and quickly impressed me with his experience not just in IE, but in Netscape and HTTP protocols as both drilled into the depths of HTML design and regurgitating digested GETs, POSTs, state and session.
First off after having spent a year at Microsoft I quickly found that the bashing that I expected to happen there didn’t happen the same way. It was much more open than I expected. A lot of smart people were around me and I quickly made personal goals to one day become a full time employee, a blue badger.
Fast forward 10 years later, and I had a great career at Microsoft. I feel very fulfilled by my experiences, and continue to keep in contact with hundreds of people that I met through events, various teams, and my internal and external activities.
The real thing I wanted to dig into was the religion. About 3-4 years ago, Ballmer and a few other executives started polling us employees about our searching habits. Many of us weren’t afraid to say we were using Google for search. He knew having been given results from the proxy servers that the percentage of employees using google was a lot higher than he thought it should. From these meetings it was made clear that money due to clicks and impressions was going to google where it could be going to MS, and that at least this should go to research and providing feedback on results. (None of this is private having been disclosed previously.)
Today we have Bing.com, the “Decision Engine.” With a 1% increase in market share, I have high hopes for the scrappy little guy. A lot of money is spent on advertising where I’d prefer to see money spent on online campaigns (not ads). Or if you do want to create ads, why not give us something like google ad sense? I really don’t know why steps haven’t been made to create a similar offering. Part of my frusteration as I troll SharePoint blogs and SharePoint MVP blogs especially are those that literally preach Microsoft 100% day and night and you find Google ads on their sites. Makes me sick.
Let’s analyze this screenshot from a popular SharePoint MVP blog with Ads by Google.
The first advertisement comes from hyperoffice.com and tries to get us to go to some other technology. Great, thanks… That’s the kind of links we want to be promoting.
The second is tame.
The third link looks harmless enough right? WRONG! It’s for a SharePoint alternative. Evil!
Ok, so you’ve heard me harp about SharePointAds.com and how I was glad when that came out as an alternative. As well, I don’t mind seeing books and Amazon ads. At least it is PRO SharePoint. I think that’s the key these days.
I prefer to see people be honest with themselves and say “I use Google as an online search engine because I get better relevancy and it saves me time.” That same person I’d like to hear say… “Yep I gave bing.com a test of 2 weeks of my time, it was not bad, and I’ll give it another 2 weeks in 3-6 months to see how things are improving.”
The first time I went to http://www.topsharepoint.com/ my first reaction was hey this looks like Ian Morrish’s http://www.wssdemo.com Internet SharePoint sites list. Then I saw how Ian’s top 100 was more his list, and this was a list that was community and ratings driven. The google ads that were on the site were a huge turnoff. So happy to see they are using Amazon now. Looks so much better. I still don’t know who runs that site, and why they don’t even list their info on the About page. Would be better if the site was on SharePoint itself, but I maybe that’s something else in their roadmap.
I used a TREO, a windows mobile device for 3 years before I bought my iphone a year ago. I spent a lot of time researching productivity and how I spend my time. While I am a huge Microsoft advocate and evangelist I see groups like MACBU the Macintosh business unit, and I see the great innovation of iPhone making leaps and bounds in real innovation in the space of personal productivity and I don’t want to miss it. As soon as it supported Exchange for mail, I was on board and made the leap. I do have a friend who tried to buck the trend a bought a Google Android. There are a few *very loyal* MSFT types who have said they’ll never buy an iPhone while in the same breath cursing their phones.
Seeing SharePoint people with iPhones doesn’t bother me one bit. In fact I’d love to see Microsoft embrace it to the level where we got a mobile version of Office for iPhone. I think the innovation in SP2 for Office for MAC will open a few eyes in MAC BU and help them realize that SharePoint and MAC is a real scenario and iPhone is the next step. The handful of SharePoint apps in the app store I expect to continue to increase especially as mobile corporate scenarios continue to build.
When Bill showed up at a Apple conference a few years ago during the Gates bailout and major stock purchase things changed between Apple and Microsoft. While the commercials would make it seem like competition is fiercer than ever, there is some healthy competition in the consumer laptop and desktop space, but it is still very minor and a few more MACs in the world really wouldn’t hurt.
It’s actually great to see the browser competition space heat up. I love seeing the SharePoint team more fully embracing standards based browsers and treating FireFox like a first class citizen. Reminds me of the Netscape 4.0 & IE 4.0 days. Those were healthy times. Challenging for a tester and developer, but good times for the consumer.
What was I trying to say in my rant?
Do things because your heart tells you to. Don’t follow a technology religious line, just because. Innovation and money will follow… especially at Microsoft. If we adopt and use what’s best and our money follows, then innovation will follow. Competitors will look at the innovation and decide that loyalty is important, but ultimately the loyalty stops where productivity suffers.
What does this have to do with SharePoint? Not much right now. I can’t be more Jazzed with the innovations coming in SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. I know I’m going to wish I had WinMo to see the Office mobile apps, but I am glad my device supports the new file types and mobile views will get me where I need to and actually the full browser isn’t that bad.
Ironically my Netscape, Oracle, Sun Reseller boss back from ‘97 is working on SharePoint deployments in a large oil and gas place. Guess we can’t let our IT religion cause us to make permanent tattoos. My blood does seem to run blue… especially these days :)