Beyond The Yellow Bubble

For my last blog entry  I provided a summary of 50 take-away messages from the SharePoint blogging community.  I was so fascinated by what I had been reading  I decided to do even more research on the matter.  I was surprised to find there is a Planet Sharepoint that looks very similar to our own Planet Lotus.  There is so much "SharePoint Sucks" and "I Hate SharePoint" out there I could easily fill this blog entry with another list of 50, 100, 500 quotes.  Instead I would like to make some observations about what I have been reading.  There are in fact a great many threads that are common to both communities.  Some going the same way as ours, but some going completely the other.
.
SharePoint Sucks
I was amazed to find that the SharePoint community are quite sensitive about the constant message they hear that "SharePoint Sucks".  Those in the pro-SharePoint camp feel it is a message being unfairly attached to the product (keep drinking the kool-aid guys).   Hey, they have even started giving User Group presentations with titles such as "SharePoint for Developers Who Hate Sharepoint".  The key difference here is that the "Notes Sucks" mantra was largely a response by users of the Notes client prior to Notes 8.0.  The "SharePoint Sucks" mantra appears to be from a developer community forced to use a product they quickly grow to hate.  Another difference is that Micro$oft has been quite successful in amplifying the "Notes Sucks" message while the "SharePoint Sucks" message has been well muted.  Don't wory Micro$oft, your secret is safe with me.  Lets keep it between you, me.  Oh... and the few people who read my blog...  SHAREPOINT SUCKS!, SHAREPOINT SUCKS!, SHAREPOINT SUCKS!!!!!
.
The SharePoint Product Sucks
A product that that is simply not RAD... The designer client has now been made free but the product itself is too complex, has a long learning curve, is poorly documented, and lacks a proper debugger.  No, I am not talking about XPages, but SharePoint.  It seems there are sections of the SharePoint community constantly complaining about the technical inadequacies of the product and question its strategic direction.   In reading all the blogs I got confused about what SharePoint was actually good at.  I would hear in one blog how it sucked as a wiki.  In another it sucked as a blogging tool.  Then it sucked at ECM.  Many seemed to feel it was OK out of the box but largely impossible to customize.  Some bloggers perhaps put it best as being mediocre at everything but really good at nothing.  Others would say it might be OK if you convince users to accept it for what it does, but hopeless if you tried to engineer it to deliver exacting business requirements.  These comments are often coming from developers who are being FORCED to use SharePoint when they have better solutions, but are not allowed to use them.   The response from the pro-SharePoint community seemed to suggest the problem is not with the product itself but rather with the development process and the users.  The solution was to change the process to make requirements more vague, to make the solutions fit better with what SharePoint could deliver.   Are you guys serious?  Your problem is your customer?  Your customer keeps getting between you and what you want to build?    Whatever happened to the notion that the reason developers exist is the need to solve the business problems of those customers paying you salary with what they do?  Sounds to me like they want the tail to wag the dog.  Our product sucks so lets give business solutions that match!  I bet that wasn't in the demos?
.
SharePoint Sucks As A Development Platform
Much of the criticism of SharePoint is part of a debate about its suitability as an application development platform.    This is not coming from ex-Lotus Notes developers but developers from a wide range of development platforms who largely wish they could be developing solutions using anything else but SharePoint.  I guess developers are rarely consulted by their CIOs about the technical merits of the development platform they are planning to use.  Within the wider Micro$oft development community there seems to be concern that Micro$oft are pushing SharePoint to the expense of ASP.Net.  There are some who even fear Micro$oft plan to ultimately replace .Net with SharePoint.  That's when the knives seem to really come out challenging the inadequacy of SharePoint as any sort of serious application development platform.  SharePoint is seen as targeting power users and yet full time developers with extensive experience in Web development struggle to customize the out-of-the-box templates provided. You are right guys, that doesn't make sense at all!
.
SharePoint Marketing Sucks
Now this one made me laugh given the current discussions in the Lotus Notes community.  Within the SharePoint community the complaint is that Micro$oft are over marketing the product.  Micro$oft and consultants have oversold SharePoint to companies as a universal all in one solution.  That they, as developers, simply cannot deliver on all the SharePoint hype.  Many SharePoint projects start with the hope of being "quick and easy"  but the steep learning curve, complexity, and sheer inadequacy of the product as an application platform lead to massive overruns in both time and cost.  How often do you hear complaints about a Lotus Notes application taking too long to develop or costing too much (... SILENCE...).  I can understand.  Being an unwilling participant in a project that fails must be frustrating. It follows that some of that anger for developers is being directed towards SharePoint.  The salesman made it look so easy in the carefully scripted demo and the developer is then left to look stupid because he/she hasn't been able to perform the same kind of magic.  Of course, by this time executives have now invested a lot of $$$ into these projects and so they aren't exactly going to rush to admit they might have gotten it wrong.  Consultants get brought in and make $$$$$ to get it to work.  Accenture (and others) has a money tree growing in its front yard and its called SharePoint.  There were some suggestions a handful of companies are learning their lesson and have started to migrate away from SharePoint as an application development platform.  But many companies are yet to bleed enough $$$ to force them to admit they might have been wrong.  Many will be too stubborn to ever do that so they are sentenced to a life of hard labor trying to make $$$harePoint work.  Others companies are simply still scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get started.  It seems almost half of SharePoint installations are largely using the product as a Web front-end to a file store.  Hardly Enterprise 2.0 now is it?
.
But hey, I'm impressed.  Micro$oft are doing one hell of a sales job to pedal SharePoint Sucks  to businesses.  Somehow they seem to have convinced analysts and business executives alike that they are the only serious player in town.   The Magic Quadrant never lies, right?
.
It also became clear to me in reading about how the SharePoint community viewed their product that I was not seeing the big picture.  SharePoint developers rarely mention Exchange.  This battle is nothing to do with control over e-mail, or even application development.  This is all about a player wanting to totally dominate the Enterprise 2.0 market.  It seems to me Micro$oft are betting heavily on this becoming the next major cash cow for its organization.  It is therefore prepared to position SharePoint as a loss leader in order to gain a monopoly position over this market.  Clearly Micro$oft are attacking Lotus Notes with great force for a reason.  They see the importance of an application development platform within their Enterprise 2.0 offering.  Custom applications are the part that lock customers in for a long stay. They have cleverly bundled their CALs in such a way that getting started with SharePoint often involves no initial expense at all.  If it is an issue then Micro$oft appear quite flexible to do a deal to lock customers into the platform.  Micro$oft are the new Enterprise 2.0 crack dealers hooking their unsuspecting customers on a product they know will become harder and harder to get away from.  The Sharepoint community have gathered outside crack houses around the planet in the belief they will soon be swimming in money (if they aren't already).
.
It does seem to me that at least one weak-point in the SharePoint offering is its use as an application development environment.  Their developers clearly see that SharePoint SUCKS in almost every way possible.  This could be where the battle for Enterprise 2.0 is won or lost.  The more I read the more convinced I am that Lotus Notes is a long way ahead of anything SharePoint has to offer in this area.  But we need to add Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, and LotusLive to make the Enterprise 2.0 offer complete.  Its the Lotus brand versus SharePoint.  It is fortunate for us that IBM also have a vision with Project Vulcan that doesn't involve hooking its customers on crack.  It has a vision of going beyond building silos and actually bringing information together.  A vision of open source and building alliances with other major players in the world of true open Enterprise 2.0. It has a vision for how to build a smarter planet.  Lotus Knows employees work smarter when they are not doped out on crack.
.
Don't get me wrong....  I like SharePoint as the next guy (so it seems)!  So, in closing, let me share some verse I found while doing my research.  It was probably written by that next guy.  A developer who loved what he was doing until he found himself forced to develop with SharePoint.
.
SharePoint How Sad Are We
SharePoint SharePoint, I hate you so
You’re a clown with a funky smile, but do you fool me? hell no
You are a big smelly beast running sweaty into the night
Because your API is so bad, developers constantly put up a fight
.
SharePoint SharePoint what horrible code
Code that must dance around this API that’s just too messy and cold
I love to become a master of all trades
How to debug SharePoint’s bad errors, pile of code, and adding never-ending band-aide
.
SharePoint SharePoint, you’re a big ass joke
You’re page model not even in .NET 3.5 yet, sad, so you leave me in smoke
When the next upgrade comes, developers better run for the hills
And hope you never customized it in the past, else late nights,  & footin the bills
.
Sources Used
Over and above the sources listed in my last blog, the following is a list of some of the additional articles I read during the course of my research.  This is not a complete list as I read so much and I am sure there will be a lot more I continue to read.  Thank you to Planet Sharepoint for the wealth of information you provided.

1. Help Me Plan My Career
2. I Hate SharePoint
3. I Hate SharePoint
4. I know you are, but what am I?
5. Is SharePoint Predominantly Just FileSharePoint?
6. Is there any good replacement for SharePoint Designer?
7. I'm a developer and I hate Sharepoint
8. MS SharePoint as a Wiki: Few Functions, less Compatibility
9. New Microsoft SharePoint 2010 details start to emerge
10. SharePoint Haters This sticker is for you
11. SharePoint is not a good development platform
12. SharePoint is the Future of Microsoft-centric Software Development
13. SharePoint Portal Server is a Pain In the Ass
14. SharePoint User Group UK - I Hate SharePoint
15. SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools
16. SP Designer = sucks at CSS rendering?
17. Thinking Creatively
18. Why do I hate MS SharePoint
19. Why I hate SharePoint as a developer platform
20. Why I hate SharePoint (reason #3)
21. Why Security Pros Hate SharePoint