Mare Nostrum

Storage and collaboration in the sky

The rumble that has started between VMWare and Microsoft is no surprise. What might get missed in the David-versus-Goliath tone of the press coverage, however, is the very different vision that Microsoft has from the rest of the market.

The problem isn't just that Microsoft didn't understand virtualization well enough to get a head start on the competition. It's also that Microsoft doesn't see the world in the same, service-oriented way as people who build and use Web 2.0 applications.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) provides a peek into the Microsoft worldview. In earlier incarnations, SharePoint was a collaboration platform strictly designed for workgroups and departments. It was not designed to be the platform for, say, the document collaboration equivalent of YouTube or Flickr. Collaboration on an enterprise scale was the opposite of what SharePoint's "let a thousand separate sites bloom" philosophy allowed. Internet-scale collaboration wasn't even in the cards.

With the release of MOSS 2007, SharePoint is still a tool designed for organizations that like lots of little, distinct sites. I know that there are departments and virtual teams impatient enough to set up a MOSS site, just to get moving. However, I know almost no IT managers who embrace the notion of an uncountable number of MOSS sites, sprouting up like toadstools after a spring rain. Once MOSS users try collaborating outside a department or virtual team, they too often get disillusioned over Microsoft's Balkanized view of collaboration.

We now live in a world where people expect to be able to share their pictures with anyone on Flickr, chat with anyone via AIM, and post useful information to the world via Wikipedia. Whether or not Microsoft wins this round with VMWare may depend on whether more people in Redmond understand the real value of virtualization as a service. However, that may not change Microsoft's view of what people do with the content stored in the file system, whether the OS is virtualized or not.