The Future of Lock-in
If I seem dismissive about ODF and Microsoft Office generally, it's because I am. Over the past 2-3 years I've watched Microsoft build a new, growing bastion of lock-in.
The battle is no longer being fought at the file level. It's being fought at the network level.
The network of files, that is, within an organization. People in the open source world make a fetish out of defeating .doc, .xls, and .ppt with .odf. Fine. But in Microsoft's new world, even ODF documents would be locked into its network. Of which network am I speaking?
SharePoint.
I first encountered SharePoint at Novell, where Microsoft was using it to nudge Linux out of organizations. See, SharePoint is insidious. The basic version of it (Services) comes free with every Windows 2003 server. It costs departments nothing to deploy it. Given a taste (it's a decent, though not great product), a significant number upgrade to SharePoint Portal, start storing their content in this SharePoint repository, and kiss their freedom goodbye.
This is the same for any proprietary content repository. Documentum, Vignette, etc. have been locking in customers for years with their respective repositories. But Microsoft is more dangerous, because SharePoint is integrated with Office, Windows, SQL Server, and every other Microsoft product. Once you get a taste for SharePoint you have to keep buying more and more Microsoft product to leverage it, and the more content you store in the repository, the less likely you will ever get it out.
You're locked in.
This is one reason that companies should be extremely wary about using SharePoint, in particular. It is your content, not Microsoft's. If you want to keep it yours, you need to keep it in a secure but open place.
There are a range of great open source repositories out there (Alfresco (Truth in advertising - I work for Alfresco), Apache's Jackrabbit, Plone, etc.). This is where you want your content stored, because each of these offers easy ways to get the content in and, more importantly, out.
So, yes, I am a bit blase about file formats. That is yesterday's battle - an important one, but an old one. Today's battle is being fought in the network of files. You may not realize it now - though companies like Novell are already waging a fierce battle on this front - but you will. Get your data/content out now.
3 comments:
This is an interesting read. I can't say I knew about sharepoint but it's got me really thinking. Since I see the problem here as being 1)the Windows OS is so prevalent and 2) the Windows OS is marketed as software that does not require a knowledgeable sys admin (who can forsee the problems of lock-in), I think our problem is how to make this knowledge more available. I envision a web site that can illustrate upgrade paths, graphically.Thanks for the ideas.
thanks for this enlightening article
because i'm now implementing a DMS or a EDMS, so you shed some light on this important field.
and now i see my work (i try to put an opensource solution) as a new challenge.
I hope opensource software succeed in this field (and sheers to alfresco team ,you did a good work guys!)
Hi, There are in my view some inaccurate statements with your posting and before I go on, I do work with Microsoft’s products, so a certain degree of bias (like yourself!!) is a given on my statements!
Firstly, “It costs nothing to deploy it”. Well actually SharePoint services you’re referring to, does cost you the price of the server, and potentially SQL database software license costs as well, plus licensing of Windows 2003 for the server/each of your users, but granted if you have this it is a free download.
Plus what about the costs of resource effort to deploy it? This applies to any software application, proprietary or otherwise and will depend available resources/skills to do so - an important issue when comparing proprietary/open source.
When you also say “It integrated... with every product” this simply is not true, several do of course allow you to connect to SharePoint, but they certainly don’t all have this facility or indeed rely on it.
For example, their email product Exchange has no dependency whatsoever on SharePoint. Sure, their desktop Office applications have links/integration built into SharePoint/vice versa, which I am guessing is what you meant, but such broad statements you use are inaccurate at best, misleading at worse.
Furthermore, can you explain how putting content inside SharePoint applications means you're 'locked in' as you put it, especially when its accessed by the (any) browser? Isn't this the same for any application, irrespective of whether its propriety or so called open source?
My view is that whatever application you store it in, if you have deployed it yourself on your own servers, you a) have access to the content to export/extract by several methods usually and b) own the content entirely as you alone have the ability to edit/delete it/consume it....
Now, this isn’t the same as the ‘cloud’ services being promoted by the likes of Microsoft/Google et al. These ARE very worrisome developments in terms of whom actually is owning the rights to your content. A quick read of Google’s T & C’s and its scarey! I am guessing MSFT's are the same for their recently launch Azure services.
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