I've only encountered SharePoint once, and I must say I hope I never have to again.

The interface was clunky, cluttered, and unintuitive. The server was incredibly crash-prone (though some of that may have been due to an overburdened sysadmin).

I just plain hated using it. Whereas I dug Movable Type from the minute I got it installed, and it's only gotten better since.

I don't think Microsoft has much of a shot at the blogsphere -- or paying clones thereof -- any time soon.

WTF is Six Apart?

After reading my comment, I think I should add a bit more.

Six Apart is the name of our company, so technically, it is Six Apart's Movable Type. I just haven't become accustomed to the name association. And, I figured that most readers would be a bit puzzled and also think "WTF is Six Apart?" So, I was just giving Anil a hard time for actually promoting our business like a real business. Stupid Mena.

Great piece, Anil. Two thoughts I'd offer:

1. Weblogging enjoys much of it's success, in my opinion, due to the openness and hackability of tools like Moveable Type. Perhaps as the core toolset "settles," this will play less of a part. But for now it forcloses most BigCo's from playing a significant role.

2. That said... as the saying goes, it's usually on the third try that Microsoft succeeds, and does so handsomely. So one shouldn't count them out yet -- smart betters never do. Likewise, don't expect anything significant until at least two revs from now.

When I first saw SharePoint, the first thing I thought of was Pyra, the software. I used SharePoint for a week sometime back, and thought that it has the potential of being "Blogspot" for corporate collaboration scene, if only some of the cultural hesitance can be overcome. [Insert applicable citations from: Hartung, Dan. "Collected Essays on Lotus Notes and Outlook." Hartung Press. Chicago. 2002.]

One of the amazing things is that SharePoint did not start out as a "weblog" tool, but a better interface between Outlook, Project and probably Visio. It is the user-friendly version of Digital Dashboard or whatever that Outlook based collaboration, information and knowledge management thing was.

I don't think SharePoint will cut into MT or Blogger's market share. The customer base for both are different from those MS is courting with SharePoint. But I fear that probably someone somewhere along the road will figure out that something like SharePointLite can be a credible alternative to Userland's Radio. How long before we see Slate offering SharePoint "blogs" for its writers/readers like Salon did with Radio? This actually is a doable.

[But of course, Radio is a more versatile tool and has proven itself with various enterprise customers. Bill Gates is smart enough to know not to engage his long time friend and business partner Mr. David M. Winer in a hostile way by offering an (inferior) competing tool.]

Bill Gates is smart enough to know not to engage his long time friend and business partner Mr. David M. Winer in a hostile way by offering an (inferior) competing tool

er, this is humor, right?

I pity the poor sysadmins that have to deal with this product. However much the users like it, Sharepoint's architecture (which grew out of Frontpage) is antithetical and even antagonistic to the rest of Microsoft's server-side products. I can't imagine Sharepoint being used outside a Microsoft shop, but I can tell you from personal experience that even in a Microsoft shop, it's a bad bad thing.

I'll make a caveat by saying that for a small user base, the maintenance probably isn't too painful. But scaling this up to support 20000 users won't happen prettily.

I installed Movable Type in a secure Active Directory authenticated environment, and it was incredibly frustrating. Anyone who wanted to post had to have modify permissions at the server root, which had the potential to be a huge security problem.

While going through that, I thought of how nice it would be to have a product that included individual blogs, team blogs, project blogs, Active Directory integration, RSS aggregation (both internal and external), all completely searchable. And built on existing MSFT products since, unfortunately, that's what I'm stuck with.

Interesting article Anil.

I agree with Shawn and Tamim.
The larger enterprises will look for functionalites, services, org structures which is far easier for companies like MS to provide/demonstrate. Give MS one to two years, it'll be a much better product (ie if its customers show significant interest in this space).

If I can venture a wild guess: I don't think the size of the market for a standalone weblog product (from a revenue realization perspective) is large enough for the smaller companies to take on the incumbents players in the CMS space.

When it is set up correctly and all users are properly educated in how to make the most of it, SharePoint can be a pretty good tool, especially for intranets.

Having said that, I have yet to see a work team be properly educated and/or the server set up correctly. To the best of my recollection, it took well over one month for my team at the b0rg to get even a few meager pieces of content up there and somewhere in the vicinity of 6 months to get all off the (mobile) Devices groups using it and understanding where the benefits to them lie.

The most aggravating thing for me was that I couldn't use my company-approved-and-purchased beloved HomeSite to create my pages. I was stuck in Front Page hell.

Has anyone ever stopped and thought about how bad this would be for the Internet?

As bad as Moveable Type and especially the push-buttoness of Blogger already are in adding swarms of incompetent people (count me in, if you like) to the Internet's gathering cesspool of worthless information, wouldn't putting Microsoft on the stage be even worse in bringing journaling to the masses of people who think they can actually journal anything important to other people--as opposed to pontificating about their pets and their worthless, boring day.

Blogs are cool when people care--when people (like Anil, The Homeless Guy, Zeldman, Winer, Searls and a couple dozen most-notable others) have things to say, blogging is important, fun and a great tool.

But, doesn't it hurt all of those people, who have things to say, if they get placed into a mess of thousands, even millions and potentially billions of people who have so little to say and such a bad way of saying it that your eyes hurt?

Blogs are one of those things that are nice to have around, but when everyone does one and expects you to read it and rank it on the same level as other real bloggers, with real voices, it becomes more of a headache than a help.

A Microsoft weblog tool, other than just being late to the game and out of luck (not to mention buggy, over-rated, and primed to hack) furthers the mistaken impression to its users that weblogging is something everyone should do: it isn't.

I'm not much for flaming people, not anymore at least. Having said that, to insinuate that certain people have the right to maintain a blog where others do not is unbelievably arrogant. Everybody has things to say, Rivard, and have the same rights as others to publish online.

Not everyone is a fabulously entertaining writer; and not everyone had red text on black starry backgrounds with fire animations on their personal web sites. That doesn't mean they shouldn't give it a try and have some fun.