Practicalmadness

It's about four months old, but Anil Dash's webzine has an interesting article about a little-known Microsoft product (SharePoint) which can be used as server-side blogging software in the vein of Movable Type and Blogger. That's not its intended purpose, but you could do it.

SharePoint Team Services (STS) is a workgroup-based or project-based intranet server, similar to what the original Pyra application was trying to be. Perhaps the best illustration of this similarity is Microsoft's inclusion of Team Services in the current version of Project Server . But even without the project management features, STS distinguishes itself with a focus on document management, contact management, and integration with Office stalwarts such as Outlook. The critical feature of STS, though, is a what's referred to as "lists".

Lists, in a word, are weblogs.

The main interest of this piece is the revelation that yes, Microsoft's server software can be made to blog, even if Microsoft has yet to acknowledge the blogging phenomenon on a consumer level. (This writer finds it funny that Microsoft's latest attempt at expanding their consumer offerings, threedegrees, combines IM and P2P music sharing -- the next big things of 2000 and 2001, respectively.)

Dash concludes that Microsoft is not at all poised to become a player in the weblogging world, and I very much agree -- SharePoint is business-oriented software with one blog-friendly feature, runs only on Windows servers and in recent years Microsoft has been so concerned with milking their enterprise cash cow for all it's worth that their ability to invent and market new consumer products is practically nonexistent.

Hell, even the last consumer version of Windows has failed to make much of an impact due to Great White's insistence on bloating the OS with features that are either unnecessary or unnecessarily complex. (That said, Windows XP is the best version of Windows yet. I just wish I could run it on my three-year-old laptop.)

And Microsoft's first foray into consumer electronics -- the Xbox -- gets mad props for being in many ways technologically superior to the PlayStation2. They said the same thing, however, about Betamax tapes. Business-wise, the Xbox is a failure that only a company as huge as Microsoft would be willing to write off, let alone survive.

Now, how did a piece about SharePoint lead me to the Xbox? My point is that the time is long over when consumers and open-source types have to worry about Microsoft invading their space. It has become clear that Microsoft is losing touch, and apart from their traditional empires (Windows and Internet Explorer), consumers are no longer impressed. This is a good thing.